A Good Dog

by Jon Katz

  I pulled Orson inside and apologized to my neighbor, who’d only thought to pat a dog over the kennel fence. For all of our previous coolness, he didn’t blame the dog or even seem particularly angry. One of the many things I enjoy about people in the country is their love of animals, including dogs, and their visceral understanding that trouble will sometimes happen. They rarely sue or make much fuss, which I appreciated.

  But an anxious dread came over me. In the years that he’d been with me, I hadn’t once, even for a second, believed that Orson was a violent or dangerous dog. The thought hadn’t entered my mind. He was the Big Nipper, sure, an obnoxious pain in the ass, a dog who might put a tear in the cuff of your jeans. But not a dog who would cause injury. I’d never dreamed that he could harm a human being the way he had this man.

  I had romanticized, personified, mythologized, and rationalized, and I couldn’t any longer. Now I knew Orson was capable of harming people—a friend like Sarah, a kid walking by, a neighbor coming to the house. This after all of the examinations, the socializing, the training, the herding, the acupuncture and herbs and shamanic retrievals. I felt my heart race with fear.

  I understood too clearly that things couldn’t ever be the same. Before, I could tell myself that Orson wouldn’t harm anybody. But I could no longer say to some child whom Orson bit, whose face was marred by stitches or scars, that I didn’t know it might happen—because now I did.

  It was a jarring reminder of the limits of training, knowledge, patience, of love itself. I’ve never worked harder at anything in my life than I had at training my troubled dog, and the incidents in the garden had reminded me of what I should have known all along: Orson was an animal, and parts of him were beyond my reach.

  I have a powerful vision of what a life with dogs should be; I’ve written books and columns about it, given hundreds of talks about it to people of good faith. And I was not ambivalent. Dogs should not harm people, I’d said a thousand times. If there is any rule involving dogs, it is that we are responsible for them. Every time a dog bites a person, especially a child, the life of every dog is threatened.

  I cursed the gardens. Every attack had happened in or near a garden.

  In all my life with dogs, many of them, I’d never seen a more dreadful, painful sight than my neighbor’s bloodied chest. After the man left, I brought Orson into the house and sat and rocked him in my arms. I closed my eyes and held him tightly to me. “What have you done?” I asked him over and over. “What have you done?” He looked at me inquisitively, sensing my emotion but not understanding it. He seemed concerned about me, licking my hands and face. Perhaps he saw more than I did.

  Then I asked myself the even more painful question, but perhaps the right one: What had I failed to do?

  Orson

  CHAPTER TEN

  Choices

  I had four choices.

  I could ask Anthony to construct a more secure kennel for Orson behind the house, away from traffic and visitors, a place that nobody could reach into, that Orson couldn’t get over or around.

  I could find a more isolated and peaceful home for him, where there were fewer people, fewer vehicles, fewer gates and boundaries and fewer things coming through them.

  I could take Orson to a specialist at a veterinary school like Cornell or the University of Pennsylvania for more sophisticated testing—MRIs, brain scans, further blood work and X-rays—to make certain that no medical issue, a tumor, for example, or some neurological injury, was causing this violent behavior.

  I could bring him to my vet and have him killed.

  The next morning, Orson and I rode up at five a.m. on the ATV to see Sirius. He assumed his navigating position from the backseat. The sky was too cloudy to see the Dog Star clearly, and the sun rose already shrouded in haze. I could tell the day would be sticky and warm. I sat munching a piece of toast, tossing him biscuits and scratching him under his chin, his favorite spot.

  Dogs, dogs. One day he is biting somebody on the neck, the next morning he’s sitting up on this beautiful hilltop with me, gentle as a kitten.

  “What are we going to do with you, my friend?” I asked.

  I considered the first option. Anthony could easily build a secure kennel, with thick fence posts, behind the farmhouse. If the fences were high enough, nobody could reach in. Anthony might even build two fences and electrify the outer one. There would be room enough inside to give Orson space to run, and a vantage point from which to watch the sheep and the house, but no one could get near him.

  Orson, I knew, would hate it. He always wanted to be near me, always wanted to be a part of things. He would be barking and peering anxiously out all the time, looking for me.

  I would hate it, too. I loved being with Orson; I didn’t bring him into my life in order to keep him isolated much of the day. He was a social creature and loved stimulation and interaction.

  “I could build it,” Anthony told me. “And nobody could get into it, and he couldn’t get out. But it wouldn’t be a kennel, it would be a prison. Just so you know.” I did know. Weeks earlier, I had driven by Comstock Prison, north of my farm; it had two fences, too.

  This was not why I had this dog, or any dog.

  As I mulled, Orson tore off into the woods, through the mist, after his first chipmunk of the day. Whenever Orson ran into the woods, I could hear alarmed squeaks echoing through the trees. Then he started digging furiously at some groundhog hole, mounds of dirt piling up behind him. Poor guy, I thought. Always looking for the right work, never quite finding it.

  What if I could locate some remote farm where there would be space for him to run, woods to explore, and someone who would be happy to take in a dog like this? Some farmers might treasure a dog like Orson, and give him a good home. But I would worry about him forever, think of him constantly, miss him always. More important, I’d only be trying to slip off the hook.

  Obviously, there are circumstances where it’s quite appropriate to give a dog away—I’d done it, not long before. But I would still feel, and be, irresponsible if I just passed a problem dog along. If he bit another kid or another adult, perhaps more seriously, a few inches higher, attacked someone’s face or eyes—could I live with that? Should I?

  I was choking on my own statistics, those I’d spouted in my writings and in talks all over the country: nearly five million people are bitten by dogs each year. Hundreds of thousands, more than half of them children, are hurt seriously enough to go to a hospital. Talk to any emergency-room pediatrician if you want to know what a dog can do to a kid. I have talked to several.

  Dogs that bite are likely to do it again. Dog lovers don’t like to deal with this issue, for obvious and understandable reasons. But to me, dogs that harm people violate the fundamental understanding between humans and canines. Dogs that bite cause lawsuits, insurance problems, restrictions on the movement of all dogs, and a lot of human pain and suffering. Keeping a violent dog is antithetical to everything I believe about a life with dogs; passing one along to someone else was no better. No, I could not give Orson away and then simply hope for the best.

  It really came down to this: Wasn’t it selfish of me to value my love for a dog over the safety and welfare of other human beings? Didn’t that distort the history and nature of dogs, their place in our lives? Orson was not more important to me than the safety of a child. At least, I didn’t want him to be.

  The third option was perhaps the most feasible. Go to Cornell, spend five or six thousand dollars (I’d checked) for the elaborate workups necessary to determine if there was any hidden physical factor—a brain tumor, perhaps—causing this aggressive behavior. One vet had suggested Orson might, when aroused, be experiencing something akin to seizures.

  Such tests might or might not find something, however. They would be expensive, frightening, and painful for him, draining for me. I had exhausted the possibilities of conventional veterinary care and much of alternative medicine as well. My kitchen counters were stacked with Chine
se herbs; Orson had been punctured by countless needles. I could rescue fifty dogs for the cost of one trip to a specialist.

  I had bought a farm and stocked it with sheep partly because of Orson, trained him faithfully in the heat and cold and wet. I’d employed truckloads of treats, spent thousands of hours repeating grounding, calming, and obedience commands. We’d even gotten a herding ribbon together.

  What was the outer limit of what was appropriate to do for a dog? How much money was too much to spend? How much time was too much time? How much emotional energy should anyone invest?

  Living in this hamlet upstate, I’d come closer than ever to the grinding poverty people struggled with. There was Margaret down the hill, dying of cancer, living alone with her three cats. Neighbors dropped off meals on her porch, since she was too prideful to accept food for free.

  A family up the road lived in a trailer with gaping holes covered by tarpaper. Teenagers came to my door every week, practically begging for work. Hollow-eyed hunters came, desperate for permission to hunt—not for sport, but for food for their families. I knew of dogs that had been shot because their owners couldn’t afford veterinary care.

  Where was the balance between the care and money I lavished on Orson, and the needs and attentions of human beings that lived within my sight and consciousness, and beyond? I didn’t know, but viscerally and instinctively, I felt I was approaching the line, perhaps had already crossed it.

  No, it didn’t seem right to subject this dog to more tests, to spend thousands of dollars seeking answers I might never find. I cherished the dogs in my life, in part because they lived with and served us so willingly and faithfully.

  When the role of dogs gets distorted or confused, if we fail to put any boundaries on our love for them, then we’ve torn the fabric that so closely connects us. My dogs will never be on ventilators in canine intensive-care units, or live beyond their time, or take the place of human beings. That’s my ethic, not a prescription for anybody else. We all have to make our own choices.

  Suddenly, I had to make mine.

  That left the final choice: putting to death a dog that I loved dearly, that had changed my life, that I’d written books and articles about, that was known and loved by many people beyond me. I owed him so much.

  I was afraid even to talk to my vet Mary about the prospect of euthanizing Orson. I imagined her shocked and outraged that I would even consider such a thing, and pictured her refusing to put Orson down, throwing me out of her office, forcing me to find a less ethical vet who would do it for the money, no questions asked. I had the names of a couple of those.

  I could even hear her words: “We don’t kill animals like Orson. He’s wonderful. He’s healthy. How dare you even ask?” She loved all kinds of animals. She loved Orson, too, and always asked about him. Wouldn’t she be horrified?

  After we rode back down to the house, I called her and asked if I could visit. She said to come right over.

  She seemed puzzled when I showed up solo, without a dog, but waved me back into her small office. I sat on a bench. I remember a painting of a proud Dalmatian hovering above us while we talked, for an hour, about Orson.

  She already knew about his arousal and nipping, of course. Now I told her about the incidents, the bites, the blood and torn shirts. She understood what I was feeling, she said. She had had to put down an aggressive dog of her own.

  We went over, in detail, all the possibilities. Orson might well have some tumor or other medical problem, she said. But conventional care hadn’t found it, and holistic treatments hadn’t eliminated it. She told me what I might expect if I went to specialists or veterinary behaviorists, what they would do, what they might find, what it might cost.

  Sending him to another home was a possibility, and Mary agreed to look around for one. But she agreed that I would, essentially, be passing a serious problem on to others.

  She wasn’t telling me what to do, but she said her practice—a loving, responsible, and ethical one—did not believe in circulating dogs that harmed humans. She believed that violent dogs ought to be put down, and if I sincerely believed Orson was one, if I had serious reason to believe he would hurt more people, she would help me.

  “In the final analysis,” Mary said, “you know your dog best. Only you can really decide. I will support you.”

  It nearly brought me to tears to hear that. I couldn’t ask for more. My vet was telling me she trusted me to make this decision; it meant a lot.

  I went home to think, take a walk and decide. Strolling behind the house, I looked up at the sky, at the spot where the Dog Star would appear in the morning. Pretty, but useless.

  I called Lesley the shaman. This was not her terrain, and I didn’t really want any visions or communications. But, strangely, she had become a friend, one I felt knew Orson’s spirit, so I just wanted her to know what was happening. She had no advice, one of the reasons I liked her. Some things belonged in the spirit realm, some in the human domain, and she respected the difference. The attacks sounded awful and serious, she said. I was right to take them seriously. So even the shaman was out of ideas.

  Everyone around me—especially Paula—grasped that this was my decision to make. Initially, she’d been horrified by the havoc and expense this dog had caused, but she had come to love him, and vice versa. She’d rarely seen the aggression that was causing all this trouble, just the sweetheart who slept at the foot of the bed and slurped our faces each morning. Put Orson down? “Could you really do that?” she wondered. Emma urged me to go slowly, wondered if there was anything else to try.

  One close friend urged me not to kill Orson. “It would be a mistake. You would regret it. Keep working with him.” But this was not advice I either sought or needed, however well-meaning.

  The truth was, I wasn’t really soliciting opinions, and the people who knew me well were not offering any.

  It was up to me, my vet had said. There might be more alternatives. Her practice did not like to kill healthy, well-adjusted animals. But she knew how much I loved Orson, how hard I had worked to help and train him. If I chose to put him down, she would either come to my farm to do it or set up a private time at the clinic.

  So, suddenly, there we were. Four choices, none of them good.

  I’ve often found myself alone when in trouble. I turn inward, pulling myself almost into a ball, trying to reason through what must be done.

  But I have also come to rely on the thinking and writings of a few people who’ve touched or inspired or guided me. I carry their books when I travel, keep them stacked around me at home. They never quite tell me what to do, but always help me figure it out. I call them my secret board of directors.

  It’s a very distinguished membership. Thomas Merton, the late Trappist monk and writer, serves on the board. So does Abraham Lincoln, whose moral clarity and humanity led him through choices so much more awful than any I would ever face.

  When it came to moral choices, the process by which one makes them or doesn’t, I always read and reread Hannah Arendt, the philosopher. I especially cherished Responsibility and Judgment, a series of writings about right and wrong and how each of us decides which is which. I’ve often turned to this book when I have rough choices to make, and it has never failed to help me.

  So I settled on the porch with Orson and read one of Arendt’s chapters on moral conduct. It was a soft, warm late afternoon and the hawks were circling slowly over the meadow in front of the farmhouse. Orson was dozing on the porch near me, Rose sitting by the fence, eyeing the sheep. Clementine was lying on the grass on her back, snoring contentedly.

  It was terribly discouraging to have made it through these five-plus decades, to struggle to get to this place with Orson’s great help and inspiration, to be living on this farm, sitting on this beautiful porch on a sweet, lazy summer afternoon, and be thinking about this awful act.

  Winston the rooster hopped over the fence and came to sit next to Orson, as he often did in the afternoon. I hea
rd the donkeys braying softly from the barn, where they’d taken refuge from the heat, reminding me that a cookie or two would be appreciated. I felt old, weary, and sad. And lonely. I might soon be lonelier still.

  So I read. Moral conduct, Arendt wrote, depends mostly on the discussions we have with ourselves. We must not contradict ourselves by making exceptions in our own favor; we must not place ourselves in positions in which we would have to despise ourselves. Morally speaking, this should enable us not only to tell right from wrong, but also to do right and avoid wrong.

  I found the passage I was looking for. “It certainly is not a matter of concern with the other but with the self, not of meekness but of human dignity and even human pride,” she’d written. “The standard is neither the love of some neighbor nor self-love, but self-respect.”

  It did not matter what other people, or other dog lovers, would have done or would think of what I decided. It mattered what I thought of myself; the respect I needed to seek was my own.

  The world is filled with people of certainty, of strong opinions, who have a sure sense of what others ought to do. Nowhere were they more numerous than in the vast network of people and institutions that constitute the dog culture. I often met people who were very sure about everything. Housebreak the dog this way. Train the dog that way. Always do this, never that.

  Yet if my life with dogs had taught me anything, it was to be less, not more, certain. The more I knew them, the less confident I was about what made dogs tick. Animals have ways of teaching you that for all your books, vets, websites, shamans, and holistic practitioners, you are not in control. Animals live in their own sphere, by their own lights.

  There was a preacher I met, a few miles south of here, who walked the hills and valleys, looking to save souls; I was fond of him, admired his energy and faith. He’d never saved a single soul in all those years of walking, he told me, but he never missed a day of trying.