I should start off by saying that my wife Joyce is the real dog person in the family. I like animals, but I refuse to be sentimental about them. Dogs, no matter how affectionate, will never be more wonderful than people; I love knowing that dogs exist, and I want to be kind to them, but I have my limits, even for people who are nice to me.
I can be enormously sentimental about people. I’m sentimental about my wife, and that’s a good thing. And the affection she had for our dog is part of my affection for her. I don’t want to keep her from things that she loves, and she loved our dogs.
A dog we had for nine years died recently. I’ve been looking at the whole dog thing pretty closely. But I need to provide a little background on past dogs before I get to the dog at hand.
Our first dog was a huge, calm brute, a mastiff that, for some reason, wasn’t fitting in socially with the cerebral border collies on my father’s farm. Buying this exotic species was the result of a romantic notion on my father’s part, and his girlfriend. At that time there was only one breeder of Tibetan Mastiffs in the United States, and Duppa was acquired somehow from that breeder. When he was a few years old my father asked me if we wanted him, and I asked my wife, assuming she would say no.
That she said yes also explains the second dog in our life, in some ways just as exotic. My brother asked us if we would be willing to take a Golden Retriever from a woman he knew who had just had a baby. Evidently the dog didn’t get along with the baby, a claim I came to doubt when I discovered the selfish neurosis of this rich idiot. Galahad had been bred and trained, in France, as a seeing-eye dog, but, owing to some failure, had never served in that capacity. He was very well behaved, obedient, and as eager to please as Duppa wasn’t.
You need to understand: we live in one of those townhouse condos, something like a city apartment but cut into three floors, in a suburb. There is no back yard to speak of, so our dog would sit in the house all day, until someone walks him.
Duppa was as far from trainable as I can imagine. An immensely strong animal, even as large dogs go, he was bred to live on a snowy mountain and had spent his whole life until then outdoors on a farm. He really didn’t like being indoors. He pulled on the leash when you walked him like an anvil safe pulls on a rope hauling it up the side of a building. In order to walk him, despite the choke collar, I deployed a mountaineering hold on the leash; I’d hold one end with my right hand, put the chain over my shoulder and down the left arm, guiding it with my left arm. Then I’d lean back, taking the pressure on my legs as I took each step. On two occasions he got out the door and took off. I can remember calling him as he loped away, but he only spared me a brief, quizzical glance. Coming-when-called was as distant a concept to this primitive breed as taking shorthand.
When we left him alone in the house Duppa didn’t pine with separation anxiety, he set to work getting outside. He stood by the front door tearing away the wood door frame with his teeth. After part of the first day he had almost torn the front door off of the rest of the house. Then we bought a length of serious anchor chain, attaching one end to part of the plumbing and the other end to Duppa’s collar. At the end of that day the plumbing was still intact, fortunately, but, vengefully perhaps, Duppa had occupied himself by removing the carpeting from the stairs. (Years later I did this myself with a crow bar and found it to be exhausting work.) The only place we could safely confine him was in the garage, a dark and unpleasant place, and there, too, he removed the door frame with his teeth. Neutering him didn’t help, and I regret doing it. We had to return him to the farm, and my father says he was listless. On the way, in the car, we left him alone while we went into a store for coffee. We returned to find that he had separated the back seat cushion of the car from the metal frame in large chunks of foam and fabric.
Duppa lived out the rest of his life on the farm, a situation that caused much grieving. I think it was this grieving that convinced my wife to say yes to Galahad the former seeing-eye dog.
I should mention that we have never named a dog—they always came with odd names that we would never have chosen. Tahoe, it turns out, was named after the Chevy SUV.
Galahad was everything you want in a placid and friendly family dog. He had one passion: swimming. We took him to a local park, which had a small pond in a grassy field, for some exercise. He ran immediately to the pond, waded in, and commenced swimming around. After twenty minutes of this we naturally wanted to go home. First my wife, and then I, would call this normally obedient dog to come to us. He’d approach the edge to get out, and then think better of it and swim some more. My wife would coax him, then I’d coax him, then I’d yell at him, and finally he’d make his way out, and then change his mind again. He was clearly having so much fun that we felt bad yelling at him. We’d have to hose the black mud off his legs and then towel him dry on returning home.
Once we took Galahad on vacation with us to an island on the coast of Maine. We went down to look at the beach. It was too cold for us to consider swimming, but Galahad didn’t do any considering—he just plunged in. He swam further and further off shore until we could only see his head a quarter mile out in the bay. When he was too tired to swim any more he came back and ran along the jagged shells and rocks on that granite strewn shore. After that first day he spent a couple of days almost unable to move, sitting on a couch cushion. We felt bad for him.
We took him hiking on trails through the woods in our town. It was slow going, as he would stop to sniff at every opportunity. When we wanted to get somewhere, like, for example, out of the woods, I would walk behind him and prod him forward. I feel terrible about this now, as it soon became clear that Galahad had more slowing him down than enthusiasm for smells. He got slower, and it got harder and harder for him to get up, until one day he collapsed while I was walking him. We took him to an all-hours veterinary clinic. They informed us that he had a cancerous mass in his abdomen, and they recommended that we put him down immediately.
It was a sad, sudden loss. My wife and daughter held him and stroked him, while I soothed him with talk of dog heaven. Dog heaven is a place where there are huge fields of grass that feels soft when you run on it. There are other dogs, friendly ones, and interesting smells and furry creatures are all around. You can run, nap, sniff, and frolic all day and night.
My wife grieved terribly for Galahad. She made a sort of shrine to him in a multi-opening picture frame. Being a Guy, I felt I had to solve the problem: the only thing I could think of to end grief at the death of a dog is getting another dog.
And here we come to Tahoe, the rescued greyhound.
I suppose the most significant features of Tahoe were how much he loved my wife and how completely inert he was when she wasn’t around. It’s surprising to remember that we acquired Tahoe largely due to my efforts.
If you don’t know anything about greyhounds besides that fact that they’re racing dogs, you probably think that they’re always either getting ready to run or actually running. The truth is greyhounds are the calmest, least active dogs of all.
We once had a book that was a guide to the different breeds of dogs as pets, and their disadvantages. It was a great book because it was very frank about why each breed made terrible pets. (It never seemed to occur to us to get a mutt.) For example, it pointed out that hunting dogs with their strong sense of smell can be difficult to take for walks.
The advantages of greyhounds are:
- They don’t move much, but tend to lie motionless all day, making them suitable for living in apartments.
- They are not known for separation anxiety, the problem that makes many dogs miserable and whiny when their owners are away.
- Owing perhaps to limited intelligence, they don’t get bored or expend much effort trying to figure out how to escape or acquire food.
The disadvantages of greyhounds are:
- When they do move, they run without regard for anything else. So they don’t stop when you call them, when they reach a busy road, or when they pass over one of those invisible-dog-fence systems.
- They can get whiney about unexpected things, such as the fact that you’re watching television.
- Owing, again, to limited intelligence, they are supposedly untrainable. So they won’t fetch, roll over, come when called, or walk up a flight of stairs. (I have come to doubt this, but it’s the prevailing view.)
The good things about greyhounds seemed to overwhelm the bad things, and one day we went to the greyhound shelter, where former racing dogs are available for adoption at the price of $275 plus incidentals. The incidentals keep multiplying, but I’ll get to that. My wife stopped grieving as she learned to care for this sensitive dog.
When I say Tahoe was sensitive I’m not just talking about his personality, I’m also talking about his digestion. Certain gastric symptoms led us to believe that he was sensitive to the one thing we always gave him when he was sick: chicken. Chicken seemed to make him sicker. So my wife embarked on a project that lasted until his death, trying to discover the food that would encourage Tahoe to eat and gain weight.
Tahoe was always a picky eater, except when it came to nasty bits he scavenged while he was sniffing around the dog-walking trail—those he would eat readily, even if he could barely get them down. My wife finally found an expensive kind of dog food composed of nothing but duck and sweet potatoes. She supplemented this with daily hamburgers, which she fried for him. She formed the opinion, which I’m in no position to deny, that he wouldn’t eat unless she gave him special food and lots of encouragement. Also, if we left him at a kennel or anyone’s house, he wouldn’t eat at all and would return thinner—a mere skeleton of his former self, my wife felt. So we could never leave him anywhere, ever—if we traveled, he had to come too. That way my wife could scrupulously supervise his diet.
But taking him with us was fine with Tahoe. He loved to come for rides in the car. He would stick his snout out the window and let the breeze blow in his face, until we reached about 40 miles an hour and drool went flying.
When we got him we owned an Audi with leather seats. Tahoe tended to slip off the seat when the car braked. So we bought a station wagon. This worked fine—he would brace himself against the front seats when the car stopped short. But with rear-wheel drive, the wagon couldn’t make it up hills in the snow. We shopped around for winter-drivable cars with a big enough back area that Tahoe could stand up and brace against something as he enjoyed the breeze. Eventually we settled on a Subaru Forester—my wife held out for a car with enough room for Tahoe to stand up without touching the roof.
When Tahoe had an accident, when he couldn’t wait for a walk, he always went to the one place in the house that he regarded as a suitable indoor toilet—the white-carpeted basement guest room. I bought a carpet steam-cleaner and became an expert at using it. With shampoo spot remover I could remove most dog stains in under three hours. The steamer got a lot of use until I devised a pet gate to keep him out of this carpeted area.
At first, Tahoe couldn’t figure out how to walk up and down stairs. Given the damage that he did to the basement carpet, and the snorting noises he made when he slept by us, I sometimes wish I hadn’t taught him how. My recollection of it is that we started working on the going-upstairs part. One of us would begin tugging him up the stairs by his collar, using a leash. The other would push him from behind, lifting a foot for him and placing it on a higher stair. It took a couple of days before he was comfortable with it.
Evidently to avoid dog behavior problems you have to be firm with them. You have to keep them in their place. This makes them less anxious and more obedient. But this wisdom misses the reason many people get dogs, or at least people like my wife: they like the affection. They don’t want to discipline an animal to put it in its place. Instead they want a warm, lively creature to cuddle. I’m not saying she wanted a toy, but my wife’s reason for wanting a dog was not to have a pack with a hierarchy. She wanted a creature she could shower with love and kisses. And that’s what she did to Tahoe. She sat with him for long periods, talking baby-talk to him and encouraging him to eat.
I once read that dogs don’t really love people, that their behavior is an adaptation to enable them to deal with a pack hierarchy, ingratiating themselves to higher-ups. But after all, we can never really know what they’re thinking. The next week the same magazine published a letter that asked “Why would nature go to the trouble of making dogs pretend to have love, when it would be so much simpler just to make them love?” I guess there are all kinds of love, and dogs have the simplest kind.
Anyway, Tahoe sure loved Joyce. He’d run down the stairs when he heard her car pull up. The fact that she slept upstairs was what motivated him to learn to use stairs. If I was home alone, he wouldn’t get off the couch once. If Joyce was home alone he’d be in her face all day hoping for something or other. She generally gave him what he was after, but he got a bit less from me. It’s not that we didn’t like each other. But I always saw a dog when I looked at him. Joyce saw a warm love object, something a little more abstract.
Joyce had paid so much attention to keeping his weight up that when Tahoe got sick for the last time, he hung in for quite a while. During his last month he didn’t want to eat at all. Joyce finger-fed him baby food all day. In the end, even the best dog food money could buy didn’t interest him. Finally, he couldn’t get up at all. Now we have his ashes.
It seems simple, but I don’t understand it—if you can think of the love you get from a dog the same way you think of human love, you should have added something special to your life. So I guess I’m missing something. I guess I’m just not a dog person. There are people who will say, “The puppy is so cute! It’s licking me and its nose is wet!” All I feel is “I now have dog mucus and saliva on me.”
