Except for me.
I was expecting a disaster.
Time to Let Go
My guess is that over the years we’ve had 300 dogs in our house as pets. I know it’s hard to believe, but we have loved each and every one of them in the same way that most people love their one or two pets. We’ve known their personalities, we’ve known where each likes to be scratched—we’ve known each one in a way that most people simply don’t think is possible.
As I’m writing this we have 25, which is to say that probably 275 of them have died in our care. Perhaps 10 have passed away at home, usually in their sleep, and we’ve generally found them in the morning. It’s shocking and terrible, but if they’ve died at home, it usually means that they hadn’t shown signs of illness prior to their death. Death came suddenly, and hopefully painlessly.
The remaining 265 have died at a veterinarian’s office, which means that we have decided on the appropriate time for their lives to end. It is an awful decision to have to make.
When we first started in rescue, Debbie saw a golden retriever at the West Los Angeles shelter. They estimated his age as fourteen, and he had a leg injury that made it difficult for him to walk. He had been turned in by someone as a stray that they claimed to have found, a ludicrous deception since it was clear that this dog had not jumped over a fence or run away. He could barely go from here to there without falling over.
The shelter people knew that they could never place him, so they were going to euthanize him. Under the circumstances, it was the obvious move for them to make, and I don’t blame them at all. But Debbie asked if she could take him to our vet and get a health assessment. If our vet said that he could be made healthy with a reasonable quality of life, then we would have him do so, and we would adopt the dog, which Debbie had already named Buddy.
If our vet said that there was no way to give Buddy that quality of life, then he would put Buddy down, with Debbie there to pet and comfort him during the process.
The shelter, of course, was fine with that, and Debbie took Buddy to our vet. I don’t remember all the details, but our vet said that with medication, pain and otherwise, Buddy could certainly be healthy enough to enjoy the time he had left. The vet estimated that time to be about six months.
So we took Buddy home, and he blossomed. He enjoyed interacting with the other dogs, though he certainly didn’t partake in the wrestling matches that spontaneously broke out. But he watched them from a distance and smiled a lot and ate really well. There was not a single day that we had any regret about the decision to rescue him.
The vet was off on his timing by a month, unfortunately in the wrong direction. After five months, it was like Buddy fell off a cliff. He stopped eating, didn’t want to get up, and disengaged from the other dogs.
So we took him back to the vet, who confirmed that Buddy had reached the end.
As I described with Tara, the normal euthanasia process is for the vet to use a mild sedative to calm the dog down. Then he shaves an area on the leg to make it easier to get to a vein, and he administers a vial of pink liquid through a syringe. This is what he did with Buddy, and Debbie and I comforted Buddy and petted him throughout the process.
Debbie and I try to always both be there when we have to put a dog down, but sometimes it isn’t possible, and only one of us is able to pet and provide comfort. When we are both there, she usually pets the dog on the head and whispers in his or her ear. I do the petting on the dog’s back and side, and we both keep it up until the vet checks for a heartbeat and tells us that it’s over.
Since it was early in our rescue lives, we were very, very upset by what had taken place with Buddy. Not Tara upset, but certainly emotionally drained.
But that night we came to terms with it and developed a point of view that we’ve tried to find comfort in ever since. What we needed to focus on was that for whatever time we had Buddy or any other dog, he or she was safe and happy and loved.
That was all we could do, and it would have to be good enough, or we’d go insane. I say this knowing full well that most people would look at our life with dogs and decide that we’ve already opted for the “go insane” route.
People write to me all the time for advice about when to euthanize. They confuse my being a dog lunatic with my being a dog expert. Sometimes they’re facing the dreaded decision and are worried that they might make the wrong one. Just as often they’ve already made the decision and gone ahead with the euthanasia, and belatedly fear that they’ve done something wrong.
I’m very reluctant to offer any kind of counsel. First of all, I don’t know their dog and haven’t seen the situation firsthand. I know only what they’re telling me, and that could easily be colored by the emotional state that they’re obviously in.
I’m also not a vet, although sometimes I feel like one, since among other things I probably give out sixty pills a day for various ailments. But I don’t want to recommend to people that they put their dog down when in fact it might have an ailment that a vet could easily cure. Nor do I want to recommend that they keep it alive, since perhaps that would be prolonging incurable suffering.
The overriding point is that I’m not in their home, and I certainly can’t attempt to evaluate the situation from a distance. I wouldn’t even feel comfortable doing it from up close; it is a personal decision that they have to arrive at themselves, with the counsel of their vet.
So all I can do is give them the benefit of my experience, and tell them how we’ve evolved on the subject.
In the case of Tara, I feel we waited too long. We took extraordinary measures to prolong her life, but in retrospect I think that was more for us than for her, though that is certainly not how we viewed it at the time.
I think we should have let her go sooner, but hopefully we have learned from our mistake.
The most important clue, in my eyes, is whether the dog is eating. Now, I don’t mean to say that if it’s not eating that means its life should be ended; I mean it in reverse. If a dog is in bad pain or feeling miserable, it will not eat. So I don’t think we have ever made a decision to euthanize a dog that was eating well.
The other rule we go by is less well defined. It involves dignity, and our absolute refusal to let a dog lose it. If a dog can’t get up on its own, if it is urinating on itself, those are the kinds of things that involve a loss of dignity in our eyes, and we just don’t think that’s fair to the dog.
But it’s almost always a tough call, and the bottom line is quality of life. I got a call once from a woman in Palm Springs who had heard about us through another rescue group. She had a golden named Winnie, only one and a half years old, who had a tumor on her leg. The woman had neither the money nor the inclination to deal with it, and she asked us if we would take Winnie.
I drove out and picked up just about the sweetest, most beautiful dog I had ever seen. She was blond and thin and had a perpetual smile on her face. She also had a tumor on her leg the size of a softball.
I took her right to our vet, who told me that the tumor was obviously cancerous, and so large that it could not be removed. The only solution was amputation of the leg, and even that would not do the trick. A bone cancer that advanced would have already started to spread, and it was going to kill Winnie, one way or the other.
The question we most often ask our vets is what they would do in a situation if it was their dog that was ill or injured. In Winnie’s case, he surprised me by saying he would amputate the leg.
I pushed back, especially since he said the amputation would probably give her only six to eight months of continued comfortable life. Wouldn’t most of that time be spent adjusting to having only three legs? I asked. Why put her through that difficulty for such a short time?
He made his case, and at the end of the day, we trusted him. We had Winnie’s leg amputated, and the result was amazing. Within forty-eight hours, she was up and around, running on the three legs better than most dogs do on four. I’ve never seen anything like
it.
Her energy level was sky-high; after all, she was little more than a puppy. She wrestled with the other dogs, fetched tennis balls, and loved every second that she had.
Those seconds added up to about ten months. When she got sick it happened all at once, and she really did not suffer at all. Giving her that extra time was as good a decision as we’ve ever made; Winnie made the most of it.
The best advice I can give is to try your best to think only of the dog and its quality of life. In most cases, if a loving dog owner is struggling with the decision, then it’s probably time to let the dog go, because those are the kinds of owners that look for reasons to delay and deny. It’s human nature.
Sometimes you get it right and sometimes you get it wrong. All you can do is your best.
Evie
One day I got home and there was a message on the answering machine from Ron Edwards of the SEACCA animal shelter. The message was simple; he had a Saint Bernard named Evie that we simply had to take.
We had complete confidence in Ron’s ability to pick worthy dogs, and we had always wanted a Saint Bernard, so we headed for the shelter, which was in Downey, immediately.
Rescue people can be a little over the top and demanding of potential adopters, which is why they’re sometimes disparaged as “rescue Nazis.” But if there is one given, it is that once someone rescues a dog, that dog is officially under that person’s protection, and that trust will not be violated.
Debbie and I took it a step further. We considered the dog under our protection once we decided in our own mind that we would take it, even if we hadn’t yet done so.
A typical example of this would be our getting a phone call alerting us to a golden in a shelter that needed saving. It could have come at a time when we were overcrowded and had no space to take in a new dog. But since we would never leave a golden in a shelter under any circumstances, we would immediately pick the dog up.
Once we got to the shelter, though, we might find that it wasn’t a golden after all, but instead maybe a mixed breed that might have been 5 percent golden. It didn’t matter by that point; it could have been a giraffe and we would still have taken it, because the dog was mentally under our protection the moment we decided to go to the shelter. To then turn our backs on it because it was a mix would be the same in our minds as if we euthanized it ourselves.
Evie presented a slightly different dilemma. She was a Saint Bernard, and an adorable one at that, but she had a couple of other issues. For one, she was eight years old, which is very old for that breed, and she had some health problems. That in itself would not have been significant, except for the fact that one of the issues was that she was blind.
We’ve had blind dogs in our house on a number of occasions, and it’s remarkable how they adapt. They say you shouldn’t move the furniture around when you have a blind animal, but we had an average of thirty four-legged “pieces of furniture” walking around all the time. Yet blind dogs always seemed to be able to navigate the situation. And they would do it with a smile.
But Evie was huge, and not that mobile in the first place. We had a real concern about her ability to handle things, and we hated the thought of putting her through the stress that her new surroundings would involve if she wasn’t going to be happy.
On the other hand, not taking her would mean she’d stay in the shelter for a few more days and then get euthanized, because there was zero chance someone else was going to show up to adopt an elderly, blind Saint Bernard. Ron knew that as well as we did, and he had fallen in love with her, which is why he’d called us.
So we took her home. We could have used a crane to get her in and out of the car, but none was available, so we managed ourselves. And then came the scary part: introducing her to the group. They mobbed her, as they always do, and she handled it really well.
I can’t imagine what might have been in her mind, unable to see these hordes of lunatics coming over to check her out, but she just stood there stoically and waited them out. They weren’t intimidated by her size, and she wasn’t intimidated by their number or energy. It was a stalemate, which was welcome news and a good start.
It’s often fascinating to watch dogs’ personalities evolve once they’re in our house, at least as it relates to dealing with our crew. Over time they become more comfortable, and their true nature comes out, often in unpredictable ways.
With Debbie and me, Evie was totally sweet and loving; if I’ve ever met a dog that liked petting more, I can’t remember it. She would hear us walking toward her and would lower her head slightly so as to be in the petting-receiving position.
She was somewhat less tolerant of her canine friends, however. It’s not that she was aggressive toward them; it was more that she wanted nothing to do with them. She staked out a place in the corner of the living room, where we laid a dog bed, to be her permanent place of residence.
We called it “Evie’s Island,” and good luck to the dog that had the temerity to try and enter. Evie would sense their presence and growl angrily as a warning. If that didn’t do the trick, she’d bark and snap at them, and she had to do it only once. The offending dog would immediately retreat back across the imaginary causeway, never to return.
Fortunately, Evie was house-trained, so she would leave the island to go out to the yard a couple of times a day. Suffice it to say that the other dogs cleared a path for her to walk; nobody was inclined to mess with Miss Evie.
One day we were babysitting a friend’s golden retriever, Lincoln. The friend had adopted Lincoln from us not long before and didn’t want to put him in a boarding facility when he went on vacation, so we took him in to stay with us.
Debbie was out of the house and I was working in my office when Lincoln unwisely ventured onto Evie’s Island. I didn’t see it happen, but I heard the scream and came running. Lincoln had made a rookie mistake, and the irascible Evie had reacted to the invasion by biting his ear off.
Actually, I’m exaggerating; I only thought that was what had happened. It turned out that she hadn’t bitten the ear entirely off; she’d just torn it some. But it created a huge amount of blood, especially since Lincoln was shaking his head with the pain, thereby spraying the blood around the room.
I grabbed Lincoln and ran with him to the car, and we were off to the vet’s office. It turned out to be a much less serious injury than I had feared, and the vet quickly sewed him up, assuring me that the ear would be as good as new in a couple of weeks.
In the meantime, Debbie had come home and seen the blood everywhere. It looked like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had been filmed in the place. I wasn’t home, so there was no way for her to know what happened, and in her panic she couldn’t tell if any dogs were missing.
So she frantically called the various vets that we dealt with to find out if I had brought in an emergency case. She ultimately tracked me down while Lincoln was having his ear repaired, and I assured her that everything was fine.
And then it hit me. Debbie had been calling animal hospitals, not human ones. How did she know the blood wasn’t mine? I was missing, and it’s not like she’d conducted a DNA test to determine that the blood was canine in origin. How did she know I wasn’t in some emergency room somewhere, being prepped for surgery?
I pointed this out to her in an effort to make her feel guilty, an effort that as far as I could tell was completely unsuccessful.
So maybe there was a lesson in all of that for me; I’m not sure. But there certainly was a lesson for the dogs.
Nobody, but nobody, was to enter Evie’s Island.
Mamie and Coki
When I was in Houston at a signing event for Golden Beginnings Rescue, Debbie e-mailed me to say that the East Valley shelter in the San Fernando Valley had called to tell her that there was a ten-year-old golden scheduled to be put down that afternoon. She was letting me know that she was heading over there to rescue it.
I knew exactly what this meant; Debbie shops in animal shelters the way most peopl
e shop in malls. She points and says, “I want that one, and that one, and that one…”
She got four dogs that day. The golden, which she named Mamie; Wanda, the mastiff; Luke, a black Lab mix; and Coki, a border collie mix. Luke died well before we made the trip to Maine, but Coki and Mamie joined Wanda on the RVs.
I don’t think Mamie is a purebred golden—there’s probably a little chow in her—but she’s close. She hangs out at the top of the steps in the Maine house, sleeping on the landing, and it gives her a view out onto her world. Except for Sara the beagle, Mamie is probably the most demanding dog we have; she wants to eat on her schedule and will not accept any excuses.
She also demands her own water dish, and would rather die of thirst than drink from the other water dishes, the ones the peasants use.
Coki is scraggly looking but adorable, with a smile on her face twenty-four hours a day. She is completely unintimidated by her housemates, even though most of them outweigh her by anywhere from thirty to a hundred pounds.
I left my closet door open one day, and Coki curled up in there. It remained her base of operations until about three months after our arrival in Maine. She took ill one morning, and the vet discovered an inoperable tumor on her liver, which ended her life.
Mamie and Wanda are therefore sadly the lone remaining witnesses to Debbie’s shopping spree.
The Gang Was All There
We’d flown in everyone that needed flying, which consisted of five people. Cyndi Flores came in from Virginia, Emmit Luther from Atlanta, Randy Miller from Houston, Cindy Spodek Dickey from Seattle, and Mary Lynn Dundas from Northern California. Erik and Nick Kreider, Terri and Joe Nigro, and of course Debbie and I were Southern California–based.
Everybody had arrived, which to me was counterintuitive. If I had been them, I would have parachuted out of the plane long before it got anywhere near us.
We put them all up at a hotel in Costa Mesa, near the RV place, and we set up a dinner, which would serve as a get-acquainted/last-minute-planning session. Everybody seemed normal, which was another surprise, since normal people wouldn’t be doing this.
Dogtripping: 25 Rescues, 11 Volunteers, and 3 RVs on Our Canine Cross-Country Adventure Page 10
