NEW YORK — On the shelves at Trixie & Peanut, a boutique in Manhattan, are indulgences for dog owners concerned with image: pink sequined tank tops, moss-green lizard-skin collars, rhinestone barrettes shaped like tiny bones. Then there are specialty products for a different kind of shopper: People who don't want their pet to be electrocuted.
For them, the shop's owner recommends $79 hiking boots with thick black rubber soles that might protect them if they should walk over one of the city's unpredictable sites of stray voltage.
Add this to your list of urban anxieties: During the snowy months of late winter, when salt mixes with slush, electric current escaping through uninsulated wires can be conducted up to the street through manholes, streetlights, service boxes, grates or cracks in the sidewalk.
New Yorkers became painfully aware of the phenomenon two winters ago, when a 30-year-old woman named Jodie Lane was electrocuted while walking her dogs in the East Village. Lane's death opened people's eyes to the risks posed by the wires that weave in and out of the city.
But dogs -- whose skin touches the ground -- have known it all along.
For years, Garrett Rosso wrote it off as eccentric behavior on the part of his Rhodesian Ridgebacks, Java and Kai. They would startle and run ahead or strain on the leash, refusing to go near certain spots on the sidewalk around his apartment.
Paul Schwartz, an East Side veterinarian, would see dogs that had burns on the bottoms of their paws, or, in one case, a dog whose spinal cord had degenerated so badly that it died. At the time, "I chalked it up to God only knows what disease. Now that it's happened year after year after year," he said the cause was no longer a mystery.
New Yorkers were reminded of the phenomenon last week, when a chow-collie mix named Barkis was electrocuted near Prospect Park in Brooklyn.
The dog's owner, a music producer named Danny Kapilian, was walking Barkis when the dog "started yelping and jumping" and lunged into the street. Assuming the dog was reacting to rock salt on the street, Kapilian bent down to wipe his paws. For a moment, Barkis seemed calm. Then he went into a fury -- eyes flaring, teeth gnashing, so violently that Kapilian was afraid his sweet-natured dog would attack him.
Barkis then fell, flopping on to the sidewalk, and went into convulsions. Kapilian sat beside his dog for 40 minutes, a crowd gathering around him, while he waited for help. When two animal technicians reached down to try to move Barkis, they too were shocked.
