Books: Short Tails the Mexican Pet

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A woman finds a little dog in Tijuana, and when she discovers that the animal's eyes are runny, takes it to the vet. His diagnosis: "First of all, it's not a dog -- it's a Mexican sewer rat. And second, it's dying."

If you believe that really happened, you, like thousands of other gullible Americans, have been taken in by one more of the hundreds of urban legends that regularly make their spoken way across the country. "The Mexican Pet" is nevertheless, the authentic title story of Jan Harold Brunvand's third collection of whoppers. Together, these new wives' tales merge as an American picaresque, a compilation of myths that keep the telephone wires humming and cocktail parties doubly fueled.

A believable urban legend, argues Brunvand, must have a combination of active ingredients in anecdotal form: currency, anonymity ("Guess what happened to a friend of a friend of mine"), an ironic twist worthy of O. Henry and a lack of factual foundation combined with a seductive plausibility. The hardiest perennials include "The Choking Doberman," a gruesome tale synthesized from two old legends: "The Witch and the Telltale Wound" and "The Misunderstood Pet." In the modern version, a woman returns home to find her Doberman choking. After two severed fingers are discovered in the dog's throat, the police are summoned. In a closet they find a cowering burglar trying to stanch the flow of blood from his mutilated hand.

Some of these stories are cautionary: the child who is missing at the supermarket only to turn up in the rest room, where two kidnapers have cut the girl's hair and changed her clothes. Some are funny, like the student survey that "discovers" that green M&M's are an aphrodisiac, and some maliciously lead to racial stereotyping. Brunvand, a professor of English at the University of Utah, sees little humor or truth in the 1980 rumor that Southeast Asian immigrants in California were capturing and eating pets. Yet many people want to believe such tales. "I could run ads with the Super Bowl broadcast saying that the latest hot legends are pure folklore," says Brunvand, "and still some people . . . would pass on the story itself rather than the expose."