Give a dog a bad name… THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY ONCE A DOG has learned to suck eggs, you have to shoot him, they say in Alabama, an aphorism I’ve always loved, because you can almost hear the banjos playing. But, as canine-based pithy truths go, I’ve always preferred, “Give a dog a bad name and you might as well hang him.” Besmirch someone’s reputation and, figuratively, you’ve destroyed the person. But I’m playing with the aphorism’s literal meaning now. We have a new rescue dog. He came to us as a jumpy little guy, not quite knee-high, who’d been hopping out of the cane fields, overturning a garbage bin, and disappearing back into the cane. Even after my wife let him into the yard, where the fence calmed him, he would not come to me. (I suspected the usual male human abuser in his background.)