That Pup

by Ellis Parker Butler

Originally published in 1908, That Pup consists of two related stories: "The Education of Fluff" and "Getting Rid of Fluff." Ellis Parker Butler (1869- 1937) was a native of Muscatine, Iowa. Dropping out of high school to help support the family he worked in a number of jobs including ones in a spice mill, an oatmeal mill, a china store, and a wholesale grocery. Moving to New York City in 1896, he began writing for trade magazines such as the Tailor's Review, the Wall Paper News, and The Decorative Furnisher. In 1905, his humorous short story, Pigs is Pigs appeared in the American Magazine, and the following year it was published in book form. Its phenomenal success allowed Butler to give up editing trade papers and turn to full-time authorship.

Genres: Humor, Fiction, Dogs

84 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1908

About the author

Ellis Parker Butler was an American author. He was the author of more than 30 books and more than 2,000 stories and essays. His career spanned more than forty years, and his stories, poems, and articles were published in more than 225 magazines.

Reviews

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ellis Parker Butler was a full time banker and very active in his community, but he still found time to write more than 30 books and over 2000 stories and essays. I need to remind myself of this the next time I whine that I don't have time to try and write up all the story ideas floating around in my little pea brain.

Anyway, I read this book as part of my Stags Reading list. Butler's recipe for the Stag Cook Book was bouillabaisse. Not going to try that one.

That Pup is divided into two parts: The Education Of Fluff and Getting Rid Of Fluff. In the first part, our narrator is relating the facts as he eventually heard them when he moved into the neighborhood. He becomes more active in Fluff's life (very much more active!) in the second part of this little book.

Here is how Fluff arrived in Illinois by express freight from New York, but no one knew who had sent him or why. He was sort of a mystery pup, but he was sweet then:
"It was the kind of a dog that bounces around like a rubber ball, and eats the evening newspaper, and rolls down the porch steps with short, little squawks of surprise, and lies down on its back with its four legs in the air whenever a bigger dog comes near. In color it was something like a camel, but a little redder where the hair was long, and its hair was like beaver fur—soft and woolly inside, with a few long hairs that were not so soft. It was so little and fluffy that Mrs. Murchison called it Fluff. Pretty name for a soft, little dog is Fluff."

But soft, little dogs don't always stay that way, do they. Here is Fluff when our narrator moves into the neighborhood:
" At the first glance I saw that Fluff was a failure as a dog, and that to make a good camel he needed a shorter neck and more hump, but he had the general appearance of an amateur camel. He looked as if some one who had never seen a dog, but had heard of one, had started out to make a dog, and got to thinking of a camel every once in a while, and had tried to show me Fluff that day worked in parts of what he thought a camel was like with what he thought a dog was like, and then—when the job was about done—had decided it was a failure, and had just finished it up any way, sticking on the meanest and cheapest hair he could find, and getting most of it on wrong side to."


I confess to being easily entertained, but this little story about that little pup gave me the giggles. I'll be reading it again and looking for others by this prolific part-time author.

[Hákon Gunnarsson · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I was writing a two word review of this short story it might sound like this: "Terribly funny." You see, I think it's quite funny, not just amusing, but laugh-out-loud kind of funny.

But this story is also terrible in the way the three main characters try to train the pup. You might say their hearts are in the right place. Well, sometimes at least. They are just so completely clueless when it comes to dogs that it never turns out right. This results in humorous situations, but situations that one should never put a dog in.

I laughed at the jokes in this story, and then my head went: "Damn, you just laughed at those idiots scaring the poor dog half way to death trying to make him into a gun dog." I enjoyed it, but will not be using it as a training advice.

[Stephen Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

The short answer is that the joke just got old in this book, copyright 1905. It essentially is a tall tale built around 3 themes, which if they spanned a few paragraphs might have been funny enough, but those threads went on and on too long. I will give you some excerpts so you can get a feel for it.

Murchison mysteriously gets a puppy shipped 1200 miles to him from New York, with the shipping charges of $2.80 pre-paid. (one of the thing that annoyed me is that we never find out who or why they sent it to him.)

From there the first tall tale theme is for Mr. Murchison to be bickering with his neighbor Mr. Brownlee about the mix of breeds that are in the ancestry of the dog. So this goes on and on as the dog grows and diminishes some as other threads take more center stage.

The second theme relates to the size and speed of the dog primarily around the sound of a gun going off. Mr Brownlee said he could train him to be a hunting dog, but when he shoots off a gun, the dog goes flying off with great leaps. When Mr Brownlee ties a leash on the dog and then around his waist, and then tries to desensitize the dog to the gun with a steak first, it doesn't work when he fires the gun. Here is a good portion of how Mr. Brownlee described the dog running 7 miles back home:

'The first mile was through underbrush, ang that was lucky, for the underbrush removed most of Brownlee’s clothing, and put him in better running weight, but at the mile and a quarter they struck the road. He said at two miles he thought he might be overexercising the dog and maybe he had better stop, but the dog seemed anxious to get home so he didn’t stop there. He said that at three miles he was sure the dog was overdoing, and that with his knowledge of dogs he was perfectly able to stop a running dog in its own length if he could speak to it, but he couldn’t speak to this dog for two reasons. One was that he couldn’t overtake the dog and the other was that all the speak was yanked out of him.
When they reached five miles the dog seemed to think they were taking too much time to get home, and let out a few more laps of speed, and it was right there that Brownlee decided that Fluff had some greyhound blood in him. '

There was more before and after that, but I think you get the picture.

Another thread was of the dog howling, and this bit was mildly more interesting to me:

'Fluff had a bad howl. It sounded as if Cruel Fate, with spikes in his shoes, had stepped on Fluff’s inmost soul, and then jogged up and down on the tenderest spot, and Fluff was trying to reproduce his feelings in vocal exercises. It sounded like a cheap phonograph giving a symphony in the key of woe minor, with a megaphone attachment and bad places in the record. Judging by his Voice, the machine needed a new needle. But the megaphone attachment was all right.'

The last theme is trying to get rid of the dog. They can't kill the dog, because only the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals folks are allowed to do that. They finally find a way to scare the dog to run off and not come back. As the dog runs off and doesn't come back for 48 hours whenever he sees or hears a gun. Eventually they learn the 'law of scared dogs' and that 'a dog is scared in inverse ratio of the number of guns' and when the dogs sees them on the porch without guns the dog runs off and doesn't come back. (sorry, the ending confused me so hard to relate it back to you.)

So overall the book was mildly funny in some places, but not enough to be good. I will not be recommending this book, and I will not be trying to get his other book, 'Pigs is Pigs'.

[Tracy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Maybe this little story was considered humorous 110+ years ago, but now it’s message is disturbing and inhuman. A bunch of yokels trying to get rid of a poor dog by mistreating, neglecting, and frightening him. Not funny. Having said that, the illustrations by Strothmann are charming.