Dog Gone, It

      My dog and I see things differently, which seems like a no-brainer, but let me give you a for instance.  It comes in threes is an old "wives" tale with little to no basis, sort of like the "myth" of needing to walk 10,000 steps daily, wrote Psychology Today (it was originally a marketing scheme to sell fitness trackers developed in Japan).  But once such idioms are planted in your mind, they becomes Manchurian in a sense, embedded and difficult to shed, particularly when it comes to bad luck or to bad things happening.  Why is that?  The flat tire or the small ding in the fender is followed by a sprained ankle or a bonk on the head.  Nothing too serious, and often with a bit of time and a bit of cash, you survive and chalk it up to a bit of bad luck (yes, we woke up to that flat tire).  But when a good friend got a rare form of cancer, one almost always with a bad outcome despite aggressive treatment, it was suddenly in our faces...the weight loss, the fatigue, the tales of hospital visits and stents.  A few days after hearing about that, I read Kate Bowler's book, No Cure for Being Human, about her being diagnosed with a similar cancer and how she dealt with the news: In this new economy of scarcity I am skipping arguments, holding my tongue, sorting through the unfinished past for things that need to be said before it's too late.  I am writing down internet passwords and canceling subscription services.  In all my years learning the biorhythms of the "perfect day, " conquering the morning routine, and charting my workflow, I had been racing toward the future along a single mental track.  But now I must lay an entirely separate mental track headed straight for a cliff, and I find myself weighing each decision based on when I believe the road will end... everyone seems to be proceeding under the assumption that their luck is guaranteed once they've hit, I don't know, middle class?  No one seems to understand that everyone's life hangs by a thread.  And then number three happened when my dog pretty much lost the use of his rear legs.  Three vets, three different diagnoses.  End result (we think): degenerative myelopathy, a nerve degeneration for which there is not only no explanation, but also no cure; OR it could have been the canine arthritis drug Librela recommended by friends and now becoming known to have side effects,* OR our dog could have jumped out of the car incorrectly and accidentally tweaked his back, OR it could have been the acupuncture we tried (also based on friends recommending it).  Then again, it could have been a mix of all of those.  So despite my urge to keep dipping into that well of gratitude as i should do every day, I was noticing that somewhere in the back of my mind that feeling that life was unfair --and that bad luck did indeed come in threes-- was beginning to creep in uninvited.

     Dogs, as most every dog owner knows, are quite resilient.  Throughout the years, my wife and I have rescued dogs that are consider "unadoptable," whether because of needing meds, being blind, not having the use of their legs, or simply because they were considered too "old."  This is not to pat ourselves on the back, since there are countless others who do what we do and often do even more.  But when a dog on a certain rescue agency's site has gone months and months without being adopted, they tend to give us a call.  So our recent dog (we've now had him just about three years) was caught by the county animal control as a stray wandering down a busy city street, and sat unclaimed for nearly five months.  He had a few problems, but not many, so it puzzled the shelter workers why, even after all their efforts posting him on social media and such, nobody had come in to claim or even inquire about this dog.  So, since we had adopted other dogs from this rescue agency, and they knew that our last dog had recently passed, they gave us a call.  

     Walk into most any animal shelter and you'll find the place full of both dogs and cats (and sometimes rabbits and whatever).  Organizations such as Best Friends and others have come close to making our state a no-kill state when it comes to stray animals, although legislators from rural areas still introduce bills to consider strays as vermin to be euthanized (most of their bills never get past a committee vote).  And yet as full as the shelters are, it was shocking to read the review in Biological Conservation in 2013 that: ... approximately 75 percent of the planet's dogs live in the street without being cared for by any human.   Alexandra Horowitz, in her book Our Dogs, Ourselves, wrote: Dogs have the legal status of property, but we endow them with agency: they want, they choose, they demand, they insist.  They are objects, to the law, but they share our homes -- and often our sofas and beds.  They are family, but they are owned; they are treasured, yet they are often regularly abandoned.  We name one, yet euthanize millions of nameless others...This state of affairs should startle us.  Our interest in dogs is as dogs; as animals; as non-humans.  They are friendly, tall-wagging ambassadors for the animal world that we increasingly distance ourselves from.  As our gaze turns ever-more toward technology we have stopped simply being in the world -- a world peopled by animals.  Animals on your property, in your city?  Nuisance.  Animals you haven't invited into your house?  Pests.  Those who you have?  Family members, but also owned property.  Part of what we love about the dogs who occupy the exalted, final position is that they are unlike the rest of the family.  There is something of the Other behind those wide-open eyes; someone unexplained, unexplainable; a reminder of our animal selves.  And yet today we seem to be doing all we can to eliminate the animalness from dogs just as we are walking the human race out of the natural world, tethered to our phones, visiting our friends via screens (not in person), reading screens (not books), visiting places on screens (not on foot).

      I couldn't help but think of this as my dog, despite his good and bad days (days where he seems to struggle to drag his 90+ lb. body around -- his front legs are strong but his back legs now wobbly), is so accepting that what has happened, has happened.  Loaded into his "wheels," he enjoys his daily walks, still barks when the doorbell rings, still rushes to the outside gate if he sees someone on the sidewalk, and on and on.  It is both heart-breaking and heart-warming (speaking of hearts, our dog was also discovered to have a grade 4 heart condition so he is on meds for that).  This daily display of resilience brought to mind the words of Anne Carson who wrote about her Parkinson's slowly taking away her ability to gracefully write something down, her cohesive thoughts now becoming little more than frustrated, nearly indecipherable scribbles.  As she noted in the London Review: ...an interesting incidental fact about hands: when a person who has been paralyzed from the neck down is given a tool that allows them to write with their mouth, they reproduce the same handwriting style as before paralysis.  Your handwriting is your brain and your brain is you.  Her progressive loss of what was "her," and how hard it was "to describe the shame of bad handwriting," caused her to reflect on the equally rapid progression of life: There it is before you -- possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map-- let's say you're 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor, a pirate, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up and you're seventy.  Looking ahead you see a black doorway.  You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you look at it or not.  Most moments contain it, most moments have a sort of sediment of black doorway at the bottom of the glass.  You wonder if other people are seeing it too.  You ask them.  They say no.  You ask why.  No one can tell you,  A minute ago you were 25.  I doubt that my dog ever thinks about any of this...

     Think of a wooden house that's worn, wrote Samantha Harvey: ...all its wood smooth to the touch.  Worn by the humidity and heat and snow, and disheveled by small earthquakes.  Then imagine a youngish man and woman bent over their vegetable patch outside while the lead weight of the August sky bears down...Then track the seasons through many years, and the man is maneuvering his creaking parched self into a pair of trousers and wondering how he seems to have aged so much more than his wife who is still wiry-spry and steps out with a spring.  He can't muster much saliva any more and nobody told him that old age would be quite so dry, his skin, mouth and eyes -- his nose with nothing much left to blow (he blows it anyway, all the time).  What a stupefying ill-prepared thing his body is to dry up.  Like a leaf, you might think, but a dry leaf falls from the branch and he isn't ready to go.  Gets up at dawn and stands at the dyke where the bullfrogs belch and digs his toes in.  Sometimes, when I lift my 90+ lb. dog into his wheels for our walks, I can relate to her words, my own loss of strength and a loss of flexibility, a crinkly leaf at the edges but one not yet totally dried out.  My dog likely never thinks about any of this either...

     Wrote Susana Monsó in her book on how animals "understand" death: ...we are probably the only animal with a notion of the inevitability and unpredictability of death.  Could this establish an insurmountable abyss between our concept of death and that of other species?  To my mind, this would be an implausible conclusion, due to the fact that the majority of us go through life paying little attention to the fact that we will inevitably die, that each day could be the day of our demise.  This idea appears so horrifying that we push it to the back of our minds and prefer to pretend that death is something that happens to others, not to us.  We have such a hard time accepting our own mortality that we have turned the topic into a taboo.  It's considered bad taste for a woman to openly talk about the miscarriage she suffered.  It's bad taste to manifest one's grief outside the most private spaces.  It's bad taste to say that someone is dying, even when everyone knows they're dying.  If an old woman who's well into her nineties tells us about how she's arranging everything for when she's gone, we say: "Come on, don't talk about such things."  If someone confesses to us that they have a terminal illness, we are left without words.  Even those sentences that we tell ourselves to find consolation upon someone's demise ("At least she's resting," etc.) seem in this context too macabre.  We also don't like to see ourselves as the predators we are.  The carcasses that city dwellers in the Global North consume come packaged in hygienic containers without a drop of blood, cut into neat little pieces so that they don't remind us too much of the animal to which they once belonged.  Slaughterhouses are in the outskirts of neighborhoods, conveniently hidden from our view.  We eat ham, pork, and beef instead of the remains of an animal who once lived, breathed, felt.  Humans hide death as much as they can.  On the contrary, for animals in the wild, this is a day-to-day reality that can't be avoided.  Despite lacking an explicit notion of the inevitability and unpredictability of death, they live out these notions much more than we do...It's more than likely that there are sensory and semantic dimensions in animals' relationship with death that we're not capable of even imagining, and perhaps not of understanding either.

     When author Kate Bowler found what she thought was a tiny deserted adobe structure but was instead a church filled with lives both lived and passed: The room was a miniature sanctuary, unheated and inelegant.  The floor was loose gravel, and someone had nailed together some benches to face a chunk of stone serving as an altar...I looked up.  Hundreds of slips of paper were stuffed into the rafters and seams in the wall.  All the people who have fallen into the cracks in the universe, undone by the smallest tragedies.  We try to outsmart our limitations and our bad, bad luck, but here we are, shouting the truth into the abyss.  There is no excuse for being human...Somedays we don't need hope.  Somedays we don't need courage...In the meantime, we are stuck with our beautiful, terrible finitude.  Our gossip and petty fights, self-hatred and refusal to check our voicemail.  We get divorced, waste our time, and break our own hearts.  We are cobbled together by the softest material, laughter and pets and long talks with old friends...And there is nothing particularly glamousous about us, except that we have moments when we are shockingly magnanimous before forgetting about it the next day.  How lucky, then, that we are not failing.  Our lives are not problems to be solved.  We can have meaning and beauty and love, but nothing even close to resolution.

      My Buddhist friend keeps telling me that in life you may feel that you have many problems, but when you begin to lose your health, you have one.  I think that my dog doesn't think about this either; life just is what it is, running, playing, having fun, being loved.  Or for some dogs, being abandoned, scarred, emaciated, or scared and cold at night.  Dogs are resilient, I say again, especially after reading The Forever Dog and what we do to them, more often that not with the best of intentions.  Big candy and jam companies produce most of today's dog "food": Mars (Iams, Royal Canin, Pedigree, Eukanuba, and 25 others), Nestlé (Alpo, Beneful, Purina ONE, and 17 others), and Smuckers (Hills Pet Nutrition, Gravy Train, Kibbles 'n Bits, and a dozen others), and the food they produce is 85% ultra-processed.  No big deal, since most veggie "burgers" for humans is also ultra-processed.  Except that pet food is not human food, even by definition (although some companies will specify "human grade" on their labels).  Chicken in pet food does not meet the USDA definition of chicken for human consumption; and nutrition standards in pet food are far from standard, said the authors: ...no batch testing is required for nutritional adequacy, contaminants, or toxins...Pet food packaging does not include a nutritional panel, similar to the labels on human food that identifies the quantity of nutrients in the food...only a few nutrients have maximum thresholds.  This means it's acceptable to produce a pet food with excessive amounts of other nutrients that can cause organ damage.  More telling, wrote the authors: There are no laws or regulations requiring pet food companies to screen their products for heavy metals, pesticide or herbicide residues, or other contaminants.  "Veterinarian-approved" on a brand of dog food may be legally displayed even if only a single veterinarian felt it was good enough (or was paid enough) to endorse it.  Added starches and carbs now in our pets' diets led one Norwiegan study to find that dogs "consume up to 122 times the AGEs in their diets as humans" (AGEs are Advanced Glycation End products, which is what happens when heat, glucose and protein are chemically found together; inside our bodies, "it causes premature aging and inflammation in dogs and humans," wrote the authors).  But I don't think my dog cares about any of that.

    So Samantha Harvey, again from her book Orbital, put the view from our world as seen from her novel's characters aboard the International Space Station, a day when the beauty of the planet dissolves into the hard reality of returning: One day they look at the earth and they see the truth.  If only politics really were a pantomime.  If politics were just a farcical, inane, at times insane entertainment provided by characters who for the most part have got where they are not by being in any way revolutionary or percipient or wise in their views, but by being louder, bigger, more ostentatious, more unscrupulously wanting of the play of power than those around them; if that were the beginning and end of the story it would not be so bad.  Instead they come to see that it's not a pantomime, or it's not just that...They come to see the politics of want.  The politics of growing and getting, a billion extrapolations of the urge for more, that's what they begin to see when they look down.  They don't even need to look down since they, too, are part of those extrapolations, they more than anyone -- on their rocket whose boosters at lift-off burn the fuel of a million cars.  But while I may be tempted to view things that way, I believe that my dog sees none of this.  He may want, of course.  A biscuit or a bite of egg, more so than the carrot or apple slices (unless I am eating them with him); he wants his morning and evening meal, excited when the nearly-identical dish comes down, as if its arrival were of a perfectly seared steak fresh off the grill, a steak being served flambé-style.  His world is simple, but elegantly so.  Day after day, it is enough to just have me there, to sleep contentedly, to bring order to my world should something be amiss (a stranger, a passing dog getting a bit too close); a tail-wagging bodyguard but a bodyguard nonetheless.  

     What's that old saying by Will Rogers?  If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.  (He also said: There are three kinds of men.  The one that learns by reading.  The few who learn by observation.  The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.)  And I must admit that it does puzzle me that virtually every religion, and those who claim that they are psychic and can "see" the afterlife, picture worlds with no animals, other than the occasional (and solitary) lion and lamb (although the lamb is absent at Easter because, well, it's usually on the dinner table).  Certainly there may be too many dogs, especially when there are over 10,000 legal puppy mills in the US, breeding all sorts of grizzly-doodles and what not (and that number does not count the many backyard/basement breeders creating just a few litters a year).  In Los Angeles alone, wrote author Alexandra Horowitz, 100,000 dogs per year were being euthanized (California became the first state to ban pet stores from selling animals bred in puppy mills...prior to the law, pet stores only sold animals from puppy mills).  But I don't think that my dog thinks of any of that.  Perhaps, as author Monsó put it, animals are far from thinking of any human-only afterlife, as do all those gazelles and wildebeests, fruit flies and hummingbirds, dinosaurs and anchovies, all life in general.  Perhaps we become only atoms of ash when we die, or return to energy, or as she wrote, have a: ...relationship with death that we're not capable of even imagining, and perhaps not of understanding either. 

      No, I think that my dog and dogs in general see the world as we once did, perhaps when we were children living in an ideal world, not hungry, not being bombed, not cold or homeless or having limbs blown off, or possibly losing family if we step outside (in a poll in ReliefWeb, 96% of children in Gaza "feel their death is imminent").  Through our haze of the world today, whether we choose to look, or to close our eyes, dogs become our healers, living now, forgiving, emanating love, all the traits we often tell ourselves that we display, all while knowing that deep down we are still students.  It is our dogs who are the monks and masters, the ones patiently waiting to continue teaching us through their silence and their eyes.  We may bicker and grow angry and disrespectful, and hold grudges; and truth be told, we may never learn or choose to learn from them.  And dogs will continue to come and go before we do, their shorter lives often ending without a whimper or a hint of frustration at the life they had, or at life in general.  Perhaps they already know the world as astronauts do upon taking their first views.  Again, Samantha Harvey: ...the planet proclaims to the abyss: there is something and someone here.  And how, for all that, a sense of friendliness and peace prevails, since even at night there's only one man-made border in the whole of the world, a long trail of lights...That's all civilization has to show for its divisions, and by day even that has gone...It's the humanless simplicity of land and sea.  The way the planet seems to breathe, an animal into itself.  It's the planet's indifferent turning in indifferent space and the perfection of the sphere which transcends all language...no countries, just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war.  I may see things differently from my dog (and our 7 rescued cats) but I'm still learning...let's hope that they still want to teach me.

Addendum: Those last three photos are three rescued German Shepherds that we were lucky enough to have over the years...each was considered "unadoptable" due to age, being blind, being born with dislocated hips, or needing daily meds and care.  Each was either abandoned or brought into a shelter to be "put down."

*Librela, canine drug used for osteoarthritis, has quite a large success rate but also has known side effects such as damaging nerves.  Already the FDA has received nearly 4000 letters of such complications (including possible death of the animal), while the EU has received over 20,000 such complaints.  A class action suit has been initiated...Librela is generally NOT used to treat nerve damage.