The thing about the Midwest is that nobody has to know your dog is crazier than a shithouse rat except for you - and probably the neighbor kids.

When I was growing up on the border between suburban and rural Missouri, everybody had dogs. Outside. First of all, no one had anything smaller than a labrador anyway, except the crazy old lady with the poodle down the street. (In my case, that was my great aunt who had a three-pack-a-day habit that killed off a whole succession of indoor poodles. But she was eccentric.)

As I was saying, your average fork-lift-driving dad and diner-waitressing mom didn't have any dog that didn't outweigh the average five year old. And they would no more keep that dog in the house than keep a horse in the attic. What the heck did you think those two acre lawns and six miles of chainlink were for? It's not the grass we're trying to keep in. It's Snickers.

Each dog had his own dog house that got filled up with straw - nature's own insulator - in the winter time. If you had a little more acreage, the dog might prefer to bed down in the barn. But there was likely to be a whole mess of cats in there. If they could work out a peace accord as to sleeping arrangements, fine. We humans didn't interfere much in their personal business.

All of that means dog ownership was a lot less demanding. Nobody walked their dog. Nobody. The dog got all the exercise it could handle chasing squirrels and neighbor kids in their fenced-off corner of the world. If you happened to have a pond and the pond happened to have ducks, so much the better. Occasionally the dog would catch something, but unlike the cats, they didn't drag the carnage up onto the back stoop. As long as whatever they caught wasn't the cat - or at least your cat - that was just the dog's personal business, and again, we mostly stayed out of it.

But L.A. is a little short on lawn space at the moment. And with nary a barn in site, dog owners are forced to leash up their furry mental patients and parade them around for the world to see. The neurotic shakers, the leg humpers, the spring-butted jumpers and, worst of all, the Cujo disciples are let out to mix with the general public. Mostly this is just humiliating for the owner - or at least, it should be. But there are times that make me reconsider my decision to run without mace.

Take the fawn-colored mix that looked suspiciously as though his mother spent a little extra-curricular time over at the pit bull's pen. He had several long scars making uneven gash marks through his short fur and a propensity to lunge and snarl at anything that moved, throwing his body forward until his leash caught him and let him hang, dangling, in mid-air. A special treat on a jogging path.

He's just the sort of dog we Midwesterners keep around for guarding junk yards and meth labs. Maybe we could all get together and set up some sort of exchange program. I'm sure the Missourians could rustle up an old lady with a poodle who'd fit right in.