If you’ve ever had difficulty coercing your preoccupied dogs to come home from the woods or fields, you might want to try my method: the Tarzan yell. Now, I haven’t actually done the yell myself. I use a P.A. system and broadcast a recording of the original 1930s MGM Tarzan yell; it’s a very complex phrase – half yell and half yodel – and it has proven to be physically impossible for me to emulate.

It all happened by accident. One summer day while setting up a P.A. system for a graduation party, I noticed our dogs run off down the yard to greet some neighbors walking near the end of our driveway. My dogs were too excited to pay attention as I whistled for them, so I thought I’d give the Tarzan yell a try. I quickly found it, hit play, and that unmistakable call from 1930s Hollywood blared out through 600 watts of loudspeaker, echoing through the valley – and by golly if those dogs didn’t just stop in their tracks and high-tail it back to the house!

The only problem with this method, as I soon found, was that my yard simultaneously began to fill with a variety of eager wild and domestic animals – obviously heeding the call to assist The Lord of the Jungle himself. Raccoons, deer, possum, a Shetland pony, wild turkeys, a three-legged poodle, an owl, a walking stick, and one mangy coyote gathered, clearly awaiting some sort of direction from Tarzan. But, when I myself stepped out onto my front stoop to address them, wearing much more than a loincloth, beer-gut protruding, they all seemed to collectively sigh and slink back to where they came from, resuming the animal business that my false alarm had interrupted. Sorry, animal kingdom – I’m no Tarzan.

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