Breeding Out The Dog

            Staring down, there was only blood––hands covered in blood––dripping from a ragged gash. I had been standing on my neighbor’s stoop. Their door had opened and a black and white-spotted blur lunged. I will never know why that day my neighbor’s Dalmatian, Chip, viciously attacked. Chip and I were not strangers; we had played together countless times. Perhaps, it was just the high-strung nature of the Dalmatian breed. Perhaps, using senses long confused by domestication, he sensed something different about me. Was it malicious? Instinctual? Regardless, later that afternoon, while a doctor threaded sutures through my lip, a veterinarian held a soothing hand on Chip as he lay on a cold metal table, slowly dying from a needle’s prick. Chip was the first of three dogs I have personally known to be euthanized.

            A year passed before I became comfortable around dogs. I would hide underneath tables and beds, behind my mom, anywhere to escape them. But in 1990, my aunt, a Southern Californian dog breeder, gave my family a 6-month-old yellow Labrador named Buck. Eventually, his floppy eared innocent furry face earned my 7-year-old affections.

It’s said that Labradors are water dogs. However, even as an adult, Buck refused to go in above his ankles. On camping trips I used to push him off docks to convince him he was a water dog. He woofed every meal down like it was his last, often choking, then regurgitating and eating it again. In the summer, he would sneak up and steal my mother’s gardening gloves, then zip away, his ears and tongue flapping, and his butt lowered to the ground as he always did when excited. We called it “Butt Dragging.” While my mother picked apples in our backyard, Buck scrounged and gorged himself off fallen fruit. Not coincidentally, Buck suffered from seizures. We often found him jerking in the grass––his head cocked back, eyes rolled sideways, teeth clamping on his flaccid tongue.  The vet said the apples’ sugar caused them. My aunt later said that seizures as well as diabetes ran in Buck’s family. 

            Buck was 14 when he died. In the winter of 2002 he fell sick. My mother had him medicated for fluid accumulating in his lungs. She wrapped him in a dog jacket to ward off the cold, but it created an infected rash on his chest. He also suffered from arthritis and could barely stand. The last time I saw him during a visit home from college, he slowly rose trembling, sauntered to my side and leaned against my leg. There was no “Butt Dragging,” no leaping or bounding, just wheezing and a crusted sad-eyed gaze.

My mother correlated Buck’s old age with her own mother’s. If she could keep Buck alive, she thought she could keep her mother alive as well, as if the two were mystically connected. During his last seizure, however, Buck’s heart stopped. Using CPR, my mother revived him, but his ailments persisted. Saddened by the pain he endured and realizing he would have died long ago if not for her, my mother had him put to sleep. After cremating him, she set his urn on the family room mantle.

            Two years before Buck died, when I left for college, my mother, dealing with empty nest syndrome, decided Buck needed a friend to keep him company in his half-acre pen and bought another puppy. Bob, Buck’s second cousin, had issues: hyperactivity, disobedience and stubbornness. His rippling neck, bulging shoulders and bear-sized paws made him unwieldy. On walks, he used every inch of leash. He often yanked it from my mother’s grasp and ran into horse corrals, nearly receiving several swift hoofs to the face. So my mother sought a professional trainer. During training sessions, however, instead of sitting attentively, Bob pestered the other dogs, chasing the yapping Pomeranians underneath cars with, I have no doubt, the intention to eat them.

In my junior year, my mother came to visit me at college. During dinner she covered her face and started crying. Bob had killed Chloe, my cat. He had cornered her behind a plank of wood leaning against my dad’s tool shed. She tried dodging past him but not fast enough. Bob pounced and sank his teeth around Chloe’s hindquarters. She clawed at his face, and my mother screamed for him to let go. She tried prying his jaws open and pulling Chloe free, but Bob just continued shaking. Not knowing friend from foe, Chloe raked deep scratches across my mother’s hands. Bob dropped the feline once, but her leg was broken and she couldn’t escape his canines as they closed around her neck. Without restraint my mother repeatedly kicked Bob in the stomach and punched his head. It took several times before he finally released Chloe in a slobbery, mangled, furry heap and raced away thinking he’d be pursued as though it were a game. Instead, she knelt and held Chloe in her arms. At dinner, my mother, her scratches still fresh, said she had Bob euthanized, and, because she was embarrassed, told the neighbors she’d given him away to family who owned a horse ranch where he could run free.

My mother called Bob a psychopath, as if to imply he were human. However, he was an animal. I never forget that; I never forget that Chip was an isolated housedog, primped and infrequently exposed; and I never forget Buck lived long past the year’s nature intended. Long ago, our pets were removed from their natural environment, tamed, domesticated and subjected to our societal laws, our emotions. It seems it has been forgotten that they once roamed free. The wild has been bred from them, resurfacing only to be staunched, punished and vilified. Domesticated pets seen loose are called stray and put into animal shelters. Half of which are euthanized annually––9.6 million. The dog breeds we now control have no natural environment. They are stagnant, their genes having been diluted by years of arranged inter-family copulation, done to produced certain favorable qualities: loyalty, aggression, obedience, keen hunting abilities, an impeccable shiny coat. They comfort us when we’re lonely or sad; they are our best friends. However, they are animals, not people, and because we’ve only partially succeeded at remaking them in our liking, creating niches for them in our backyards or family rooms, we control how long they live and when they should die.