On the Trail of the Ugly Dog by Stanley A. Ransom

Volume 31
Spring-Summer
2005

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Friends of friends had related to them the story of how they had been camping in Florida that spring and had come across a little dog, an ugly dog, with a stumpy tail and a twisted jaw. After they had fed and petted this stray, the animal became attached to them, so they brought it back up to Keeseville, with horrifying results.

Stanley A. Ransom
(sransom@northnet.org)
is a librarian and folk singer. He has recorded the traditional songs of Long Island and upstate New York, where he lives in Plattsburgh. He is on the boards of the New York Folklore Society and Traditional Arts in Upstate New York.

New York Folklore Society
P.O. Box 764
Schenectady, NY 12301
518/346-7008
Fax 518/346-6617
nyfs@nyfolklore.org

On the Trail of the Ugly Dog by Stanley A. Ransom

Most of us relish the idea that the world is filled with strange and unusual happenings. We are curious about very short or very tall persons, and we are amazed at people with unusual talents and at dogs and cats that can do tricks. Many of us grew up reading Robert L. Ripley’s “Believe It or Not” cartoons and books. Thus we have been conditioned to suspend our disbelief when we are confronted with strange stories, and we like to pass on to our friends those stories that prey upon our greatest fears or uphold our basic prejudices.

Photo: Martha Cooper

In 1990, while I was director of the Clinton-Essex-Franklin Library System in Plattsburgh, New York, our children’s consultant, Kathie LaBombard, who lived in the neighboring town of Keeseville, approached me with an unusual tale. Friends of friends had related to them the story of how they had been camping in Florida that spring and had come across a little dog, an ugly dog, with a stumpy tail and a twisted jaw. After they had fed and petted this stray, the animal became attached to them, so they brought it back up to Keeseville, with horrifying results.

Knowing that I had composed several songs about unusual local happenings, Kathie and her mother suggested that the story would make a good topical song. I was interested in interviewing the actual participants, so I asked for the names of their friends. The friends said that this experience had not happened to them but to friends of their friends. Further calls led me to talk with still other families. Finally the eighth informant, a corrections officer from Merrill, New York, declined to give me the name of the person who had told him the story—his sister. And so my investigation stopped there.

After I had written “The Ugly Dog” based on second-hand information, I began to hear more about the tale. I related the story to I. Sheldon Posen, a folklorist from Ottawa and a friend of our family. He laughed and called it an “FOAF story”—a friend of a friend story. In other words, it was an urban legend.

The following June, at the Northeast Dulcimer Symposium in Blue Mountain Lake, New York, Sammy Carr, a dulcimer player from New Haven, approached me and said, “Do you know, friends of mine went to Florida and brought back a little dog, and when they brought it back to New Haven, do you know what it did?”

I said, “Yes, I know what it did. It ate their cat!”

“How did you know?”

We discussed the phenomenon of the urban legend for quite a while. Later that summer a local newspaper carried an account of a family vacationing in Mexico who found a little dog in the state of Chihuahua and smuggled it back into the States, only to learn that it was a Mexican rat.

Was there no end to these stories? I read The Mexican Pet: More “New” Urban Legends and Some Old Favorites (W.W. Norton & Company, 1986), by Jan Harold Brunvand, professor at the University of Utah. Brunvand first began to notice this legend about 1983, both in Utah and from informants in several other states. There are variations on the story, sometimes involving a “long-haired” Mexican rat. Sometimes the vet kills the animal, and sometimes the vet reports that the animal is dying, with perhaps some horrible consequences yet to come. He doesn’t mention the “Haitian rat” of the New York version that was related to me, however.

Kathie and I consulted a book on mammals of the world, and there among the animals of Haiti was long-haired creature resembling a small dog. It had a stump tail and a twisted mouth, and was a Haitian rat. Since the Keeseville vacationers had gone to Florida, the choice of this animal was perhaps logical for the version of the legend they had heard.

The Ugly Dog

By Stan Ransom, The Connecticut Peddler © 1990 Stanley A. Ransom

Let me tell you folks a story ’bout a couple that I know,
While camping down in Florida not many days ago.
They came across a little dog, so friendless and alone.
They petted it and fed it, and finally took it home.

Chorus: ’Twas such an ugly little dog!
In the back a stump tail rose.
Its fur was long and straggly
And it had a twisted nose.

When at last they got to Keeseville, they unpacked their bags with care.
They showed the ugly dog around, and combed and brushed his hair.
Then they stopped down to the neighbors to collect their Persian cat
And introduced him to their dog, and thought that that was that.

Their cat and this small ugly dog just didn’t socialize,
For they circled ’round each other making strange excited cries.
They decided then to leave them, and go out to get some food.
While their pets could get acquainted and be in a better mood.

When they had finished dinner, they came back home once more.
The little doggie wagged his tail when they came through the door.
But what a dreadful shock they got when they turned on the light!
For blood and fur were everywhere, and no cat was in sight!

They put their doggie in the car, and took him to the vet,
And asked in some astonishment, “D’you think he ate our pet?”
“There can’t any doubt,” he said, “I’m sure it ate your cat!
That dog you brought from Florida is a fearsome Haitian rat!”

Searching the Internet brought me to the web site
www.urbanlegends.com which lists dozens of stories. In the category “animals,” I found a story of the Pakistani rat, as reported by the Russian news agency Tass in 1997. While abroad, one Victor R., a resident of Kiev, reportedly bought what he thought was a bull-terrier puppy, which was subsequently identified as a Pakistani rat after it bit his child.

The story even made its way into an episode of Murphy Brown. In “A Rat’s Tale,” which aired on February 13, 1995, TV journalist Murphy dismisses the tale as an urban legend.

The web site www.snopes.com offers an extensive treatment of this urban legend, including stories about Korean rats and Hong Kong wharf rats.

The pattern is the same: visitors to a foreign country find an animal assumed to be a dog, the animal is adopted and taken home, and a veterinarian later determines it to be a rat—Mexican, Haitian, Sumatran, Belgian, Hong Kong, Pakistani, Guatemalan, Australian, Korean, or Chinese. Sometimes the animal is found drowned, sometimes it fights with or eats other animals or pets, sometimes it seems to be ill, and sometimes the owner takes it to the vet for shots. But the vet always knows the identity of the animal.

According to the Snopes web site, xenophobia is central to this legend. The message is, Leave foreign things in foreign places. Don’t attempt to bring them home. Be suspicious of foreign cultures.

“On the Trail of the Ugly Dog” by Stanley A. Ransom was published in Voices Vol. 31, Spring-Summer 2005. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now.