LOS ANGELES — So this is where the other half yaps.
Doggie utopia awaits at Canyon View Training Ranch for Dogs, where stick-throwing attendants seem never to tire, a waterfall and koi pond compete with smashing hilltop vistas, and tail-wagging guests frolic in a bone-shaped wading pool.
"We didn't want to run a standard kennel," says Randy Neece, 48, the dog resort and training school's co-owner, who counts Disneyland among his greatest life influences.
"I will not remember any owners' names. I remember the dogs' names," adds Neece's business and life partner, Joe Timko, 44, who trained his own Tibetan terrier, Max, to win national dog shows and wanted a place to teach other pooches.
So in 1998 Timko and Neece, two guys with killer tans and giant smiles who never do anything halfway, turned several acres of brush in the Santa Monica Mountains into a bonanza of rose gardens, a fruit orchard, and a manicured lawn where, on one recent afternoon, not one of the sunbathers was barking.
"Dogs often bark because they're bored," Neece says. "Here, they don't have time to get bored."
It would figure. Not only are the rich and famous having more fun than the rest of us, but so are their best friends, courtesy of Southern California's luxury dog spas.
Actresses Charlize Theron and Christina Ricci, for example, take their pooches to Kennel Club/LAX, a few blocks from Los Angeles International Airport, where dogs run on treadmills and watch All Dogs Go to Heaven in their private, themed cottages - "Western" and "Victorian" are two of the more popular ones.
At Paradise Ranch, near the Burbank Airport, dog owners who include Gary Sinise and Calista Flockhart can pay extra for staff members to snuggle with their dogs at night, on real beds.
You can almost hear all of Hollywood's stray dogs baying jealously at the moon.
(Of course, if one had to be a stray dog, one should hope to be a stray dog found by Baywatch babe Pamela Anderson. She rescues dogs from animal shelters, sends them through one of Canyon View's pricey training courses, and gives them away to friends.)
And how the chosen ones are pampered. Canyon View, for all of its sun-drenched five acres, will only take 30 pooches at one time.
In Canyon View's sloshing Blue Bone Lagoon on one recent gorgeous late-spring morning, Ava the poodle dipped her paws, while Bo the Boston terrier dried off in the sun. An attendant - a doggie lifeguard? - watched closely.
