RITA KASPEREK / NIGHT OF THE DEAD POODLES
Research grant summary, “Night of the Dead Poodles: 10 Years Later,” contributed by Luna deGirza, MD, PhD, Wildlife Biology; Center for Biological Diversity, received July 3, 2084.
By midnight, September 1, 2074, the world population of poodles (breed of domestic dog species Canis lupus familiaris), were, for all intents and purposes, extinct.
Data suggests that evening was not an unusual night anywhere in the world (vis a vis: catastrophic events, such as major conflicts, civic unrest, climate incidents, etc.), with the exception of a large forest fire in the Northern California region of the United States and rainfall in the Sahara.[1] Nothing significant took place two weeks prior or after the event.
The first recorded poodle death related to aberrant behavior was noted as early as 9:30 p.m. (GMT), with the so-called Kikipoo Incident. According to reports, a toy poodle on a personal jet flight from Miami, Florida, to Atlanta, Georgia, became quite agitated. The owner, a middle-aged American woman, is quoted as saying: “Kikipoo spilled my martini, lapped it up and began running in circles.”[2] Kikipoo’s frenetic barking (described by the sole crew member working in the cabin as “loathsome, something between a growl and a prolonged bark”) led the pilot to make an emergency landing in Tallahassee, where, witnesses say, the poodle escaped the confines of her owner’s arms and ran on the tarmac directly under the wheels of a luggage carrier. The event concluded by 10:30 p.m. (GMT), when the worldwide poodle decimation is generally acknowledged to have begun.
Poodles of all breeds, including mixed (Aussiedoodles, Bernedoodles, French poodles, Shih-Poos, etc.), began displaying violent and reckless behavior leading directly to their deaths. According to reports, poodles escaped and jumped down wells, into rivers, or off cliffs. Confined animals bashed themselves against walls, threw themselves down household stairs, or chewed on active electric wires, among other types of recorded animal suicide.
No owners were able to subdue their animals, with a few noted attempts. A man in Rome, Italy, was hospitalized from severe bites when he attempted to restrain his poodle from leaping off his apartment’s tenth-floor balcony. According to the hospital report, a substantial flesh wound on his arm almost led to an amputation. The three-year-old dog, described by the man’s wife as a “rare apricot standard of the most exceptional temperament,” had never bitten or attacked a human, and had coexisted in the apartment peacefully, “for the most part,” with a 12-year-old Siamese cat. The animal was caged, where it successfully bit off its front paws and died from exsanguination. A household in Los Angeles, California, habitually chained its dog, a mutt with poodle strains, in a small unattached garage. This animal was discovered, asphyxiated, with its chain wound around its throat.
Witnesses in densely populated areas reported dodging bodies of animals falling from buildings, with as many as ninety injuries and two deaths related to concussive hits. “The sky was literally raining dogs,” said one witness in Shanghai, China. “I heard all of this barking and yiping, it sounded like about a thousand fox hunts. When I looked outside, I saw all of these lumps of fur just dropping out of the sky.”
A deli owner in New York City reported: “It was night out, so I had a hard time seeing where they were all coming from. It was a god-awful mess, poodles everywhere. Lots of car alarms went off, cars were just smashed. And of course all the owners were just screaming bloody murder. I never saw anything like it.”[3]
Outcomes & Methodologies
In January 2075, an international commission of scientists, animal behavior specialists, and ecologists was formed, headed by China and South Africa, to investigate the incident. Said the director of South Africa’s newly restructured Center for Disease Control Oswald Pinkerton: “Fortunately, poodles are deemed by many reputable people as the second most useless form of life recorded; however, we don’t want this to happen to a perhaps more critical species, including, of course, humans.”[4]
Pinkerton went on to say that the true significance of the event was the wholesale suicidal behavior among a non-human species. “Outside of humans, very few species have been recorded to commit murder, much less suicide. We need to determine its cause, even more than its effect. We don’t want to sound unsympathetic to those pet owners who are suffering a loss, but the fact is, we need to ensure a more valuable life form isn’t affected in this way, rather than focus on how the world will be without poodles.”
Only 13 poodles around the globe survived, all of which were pets drugged asleep. Most of them, including the only surviving female, were recovering from neutering operations and thus were rendered incapable of reproducing to save the species. One had a leg amputated from an accident; a few more were riddled with disease.
Formation of organizations directly addressing the event in the United States include Night of the Dead Poodles (NoDP) and the People for Poodles (PFP). Veterinarians globally performed autopsies on, according to official reports, 342 poodle corpses within a week of the incident. No underlying natural cause was discovered.
Research Summary
More research in ecology, biology, and epidemiology is needed to determine if such a sudden mass extinction of a species, without any apparent relation to habitat loss, was a unique event or if it could happen again. This research project will investigate human behavior as a possible cause and determine the efficacy of behavior modification.
My methodology to prove this will include cohort studies, following a controlled subgroup of dog owners (Bedlington terriers, which are similar in size to poodles) to monitor feeding, watering, exercise, play, and grooming habits.
There remains the possibility of a correlation between the mass poodle suicide and mass human suicide events. (See: Jonestown 1978.)
Notes
Isotta Nogarola, “Park Fire: California's Largest Wildfire Grows to 387,000 Acres” San Francisco Chronicle, August 30, 20–; Al-Kindi,“Sahara Desert Flooded for the First time in Decades,” CNN, August 31, 20–.
Albert Ranseier, “Drunk Poodle Leads to Emergency Landing,” Tallahassee Times, September 2, 20–.
M.N. Thales, “Poodles Jump to Deaths in Manhattan,” New York Times, September 2, 2071.
M.N. Thales, “Authorities Dismiss Night of Poodles as ‘Exceptional’,” New York Times, September 1, 2075.
Status: Grant denied. Email notification Sept. 2, 2085.
Rita Kasperek is a Pushcart Prize nominee whose work has appeared in The Portland Review, Terrain, Across the Margin, River Styx, and other publications. She teaches at UC Berkeley Extension and has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona. She is a scholarship recipient of Summer Literary Seminars and Community of Writers (formerly Squaw Valley Community of Writers). Her Bay Area condo holds a personal library of 1,000 books and serves as a high-priced scratching toy for her two black cats. She’s working on a novel(la).