Before class that day, some friends and I were watching the morning news about the woman up north who was hauled off by the cops for trying to raise her children in a house with no power or running water.  The main thing that had us hitting the floor was when the police couldn’t collect the kids because there were twenty dogs or more in the yard, all of them keeping the officers out.  I was debating with Ernie, our resident news junkie, about the finer points of what we were seeing while the rest of the breakfast crew was fighting over his Pokemon cereal.

 “Technically, Jim, this shouldn’t even be a national story,” Ernie told me.   “I mean, where’s the national hook?”

 I wiped the sleep out of my eyes and stretched my arms.  “Dude, the dogs are the hook.  They don’t even know if the kids have guns or anything.  The standoff is with the dogs.”

 Ernie rapped my knuckles with his cereal spoon.  “If you’re not going to play this game right, then just knock it off.  How the hell are you going to have a standoff with dogs?”

 I thought about this for a while, and then opened my eyes again.  “Maybe they have a good agent?”  Although it was a stupid line, we had a good laugh.

 After that, we split up for the day and forgot all about the conversation…that is, until the Friday news.

 Ernie was the first to call me.  “Jimmy! Turn on CNN right now!”

 I looked into the telephone like somebody had handed me a used chicken bone.  “This better not be another stupid Bush daughter story.”

 “Trust me, this is huge.”  So I promised to call him back and clicked on CNN in time for the end of the bombshell.

The dogs had issued a statement to the press.

To all interested parties:

Here are our demands—
1) a guaranteed scratch behind the ears nightly,
2) a lifetime supply of kibble for each of  us,
3) a fully fueled jet which will deposit us safely in Bolivia, and
4) the full prosecution of Dr. James Lowell for neutering three of our number without prior consultation.
5) $50,000 in unmarked bills
Once these conditions are met to our satisfaction, the occupants of the house will be allowed to leave the house without let or hindrance.

The document was signed with a paw print, which was apparently enough to prove validity.

The news that night was filled with pundits debating what all this meant.  Bob Barker and Johnny Cochran spent a whole hour arguing with Geraldo Rivera about how these weren’t bad dogs, but just good dogs with bad ideas.  The police held a press conference to state that “we do not negotiate with rogue mongrels.”

The lunch tables at my community college were buzzing the next day.  There were so many things that just didn’t track with the story.  Why a jet?  Why not a big bag of rawhide chews?  Were these dogs too sophisticated for squeaky toys?  And how long did it take to type that note with those clumsy paws?

There were tapes of the children, too, stories about how conditions had improved now that the dogs had let them back on the furniture again, but sobbing that they weren’t allowed near the toilet.  All of this dominated the news for days; twenty-four hour speculation on the dogs pushed everything else out of the news.

Eventually, the truth came out; the dogs had a human spokesman prepare the statement.   Ernie was particularly disappointed.  “I could’ve sworn it would’ve been the Doberman.  Smart dog, and they can be mean if they have to.”

 As it turned out, the police had a plan.  On the eighth day of the standoff, a K-9 patrol van pulled up to the scene.  The dogs’ “representative” sat quietly on the porch, his troops patrolling the yard.  He smiled at the police; they smiled back and opened the back of the van.

Almost immediately, the dogs started moving towards the van, and as the van began to pull away the dogs ran after it.  The man on the porch stared dumbfounded as the police told him what was happening.

There was a female dog in the van, and she was in heat.

As the dogs rounded the corner, and the spokesman was dragged off in cuffs, a nation of news anchors couldn’t resist mentioning that a bitch in heat had destroyed many a criminal enterprise.

Now that the distraction was out of the way, we were able to find out what had news had been pushed back all this time.  An entire Israeli neighborhood had been leveled in a fight over a place in line at a West Bank McDonald’s.  The president had quarantined the city of Berkley, California, when somebody flipped him off during a whistle stop tour.  A toxic chemical spill melted an entire Oregon town, leaving nothing but the Jell-o molds in the town hall.  Osama Bin Laden had shown up in Dayton, Ohio, ostensibly to start a pottery barn.

All of this went on while the nation was watching dogs on a porch in New England.

“If I was a bit more cynically minded,” I told Ernie about a week after all this was over, “I’d say somebody in the newsroom thought the country can’t focus on more than one thing at a time.”  Ernie nodded, but was a bit preoccupied at the time.

“I’ve been taking notes on my cat,” he said.  “It’s been acting kind of funny lately, and I think it’s rounding up a gang to overrun the house, just like that story last week.  Cats are way smarter than dogs, y’know.”

Then I turned the channel to cartoons, and that kept him quiet for awhile.