The Pittsburgh Press (March 5, 1942)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. – Carl Spitz, the dog man, is an amazing person in his relations with dogs. He handles dogs wholesale, hundreds of them a year, and yet he knows every individual dog as well as he’d know a man. There are more than 150 dogs in his kennels right now, left there by owners for boarding or training. Some have been there for months, some only a few days.
But there isn’t one of those 150 dogs that Spitz doesn’t know personally, by name and by some little trait he’ll tell you about. And there isn’t a dog that doesn’t know him and doesn’t come bounding to the wire gate to lick his hand.
I asked him if he’d ever seen a dog that didn’t like him immediately. “Let’s put it the other way around,” he said. “Have I ever seen a dog I didn’t like?”
He answered it himself: “Well, actually, yes. I don’t like some dogs on sight. But if I take a job training such a dog, I never let the dog know I don’t like it.”
Trains 300 dogs a year
Spitz trains around 300 dogs a year for private owners – just schooling them in good house manners, and obedience, and maybe a few little tricks. This is the bulk of his training work, and what he likes best.
Then in his movie work he trains anywhere from 5 to 50 dogs a year. He finds the movie work fluctuating and undependable.
Spitz’s kennels are around three sides of his house. He has a loud-speaker system, and you’d never guess what it’s for. It’s that if Spitz hears a disturbance in the kennels at night, he can stay right in bed and talk the dogs into quietness again!
Spitz recently built a nice new house for himself, about 50 yards from his old home. But he doesn’t live in it. Instead, he put his head trainer in it. When the time came for him to move, he just couldn’t go. He’d be too far away from his dogs!
There’s some more I want to tell about his training of Army dogs. The best breeds are Doberman, German shepherd and boxer, because they’re intelligent and fast on their feet.
He has had one Airedale, and wishes he could get more. Males predominate slightly in the sentry dogs under training. But female dogs make by far the best Red Cross dogs. I asked why, “The mother instinct, I guess,” Spitz said. “I don’t know what else.”
Spitz says the old-fashioned sheep collie would be wonderful guard work, but good ones are rare now. He says many a fine breed of dog has been spoiled by too little work. He says work – genuine, necessary work – is what keeps a breed of dogs high in character and intelligence.
Spitz is delighted with the way Army enlisted men handled the dogs he has already delivered. Of the 25 Army men assigned for him to train in handling the dogs, he says there were four he’d even pick as potential trainers for his own school.
Another thing about training Army dogs is the heartbreak when one of them fails at the last minute, after weeks of toil and training.
The best example of this is a lovable Doberman they have at the school now. It stood practically at the top of its class clear up to the last stages. And then at the end they found that once the dog attacked, he could not let loose at the command “Let loose.” You couldn’t pry his mouth open with a shotgun barrel. He was simply too tense.
Learns dog was drunkard once
And you’d never suspect why. It’s because the dog had been a drunkard! He came from a home where he’d been given a bottle of beer every day. It affected his nervous system.
Spitz won’t take any dog you bring to him for private training. There is many a “psychopathic” dog, he says, that simply can’t be trained any further by him than by its owner.
While I was there a man came with a black cocker spaniel, begging Spitz to take it on for a while. The dog was sweet and intelligent, but so jumpy it had to leap around five or six times after every command, before it would comply.
Spitz declined to take the dog. He told the fellow he couldn’t help enough to justify the expense. The man was disappointed. Later Spitz explained to me that the dog was a nervous type and could never be any different.
“Can you tell that quickly, just by looking at it?” I asked.
“Easily,” he said. “I always try not to hurt the owner’s feelings when I tell them.”
In addition to all the dogs he boards and trains for other people, Spitz has 25 dogs of his own. Some are his movie dogs, others are just pets. He has three great Danes. He doesn’t care much for wire-haireds. He loves the dog of his own name (the Spitz), his last one of which has just died. He’ll soon get another.
He owns several bird dogs, fully trained, but never gets time to hunt.
In the big back lot Spitz has all kinds of apparatus for training. An old broken-down auto is used for training dogs to go in auto doors. There are pools and bridges and hurdles and high jumps. There is even a playground slide.
“Is that for your children or the dogs?” I asked.
“Both,” said Spitz. “One of my Danes will climb up on that thing and slide down it belly-fashion by the hour.”
Oh to be a dog, now that spring is almost here.