The worst thing I ever did.

I’ve mentioned this before I’m wanting to go into it in more depth and detail. I used to be a part of a small-town Mississippi humane society that got the county’s permission to run the local dog pound. The original dogcatcher had killed dogs with carbon monoxide, but he took the box that he hooked his truck exhaust up to, so we had no way to deal with overpopulation but to shoot dogs. I was the only man in the group, and the women all said they were too “kind-hearted” to kill an animal (although I never knew any of them to be vegetarians). Because I was the kind of man who wanted to be strong--but didn't always feel that way--and take responsibility for a task that had to be done, I shot at least two truckloads of dogs before I quit the group and the dogcatcher returned. f I had done enough of that kind of thing, I would have come to thoroughly hate my own species, and the fact that the most religious part of this country treats its abandoned animals that way worst didn’t help my feelings about religion either.

The dog pound was an open-air affair without a shade tree for 100 feet. It consisted of a row of wire enclosures which were probably no more than 60-feet square. They each had a concrete floors and an attached house. Each kennel stayed fairly full of dogs that had no protection from the 94 to 106 humid degree days of summer and the 25 to 35 degree nights (rarely into the teens and single digits) of winter. I saw it as simply another example of Christian hypocrisy given that every politician in the county was an active churchgoer, nearly all of them Southern Baptist.

One at a time, I would lead the dogs that I was going to shoot a short distance from the kennel, and hold a nine-shot, Harrington and Richardson .22 revolver to the base of its skull and pull the trigger. The dog would instantly fall straight-down with smoke pouring from the hole in its head. It would convulse for a few seconds and then go limber, blood running from the back of its head and sometimes its mouth. Most dogs realized what awaited them and they would cry, tremble, and force me to either carry them or pull them to their deaths. It was the stuff of nightmares, but at least it ended quickly, for the dogs anyway. Before I gave in and started the killing, we had dogs that were either dying during the night and being cannibalized, or else killing one another during the night, and then cannibalizing the fallen. Since they were getting enough food, I suspect the latter. They had simply become so crowded that they were deranged. When I hear people talk about the horrors of watching a massacre, I think I understand it a little because I was the killer at such an event, and the creatures I killed were innocent of all wrong other than the original sin that their ancestors committed by building an alliance with such a treacherous species as my own.

I don’t anticipate that writing about this will help me feel any better about it, probably the opposite. I share it because I know it’s interesting in a sad and grisly kind of way, and I want to be interesting. I also think it’s important to share this story because every last one of us needs to accept our specie’s responsibility for being so abominably fucked-up in so many different ways. There’s really no excuse for us, and it won’t do to say that any of us are innocent of any of it because our moral and ethical failures are species’ wide. In the movie Unforgiven, a young man kills someone and tries to console himself by saying, “He deserved it.” Clint Eastwood’s character tells him, “We all do, kid,” and I see it the same way.

I don't want to come back and edit this, so you can count it as one of the more spontaneous things you will ever see here..

R.I.P.

We took Bonnie to the vet today to be euthanized. Because we got to the clinic ten minutes before they closed for the weekend, we had to use a vet we didn’t know. She asked if we wanted to be present, and we were taken aback because we’re not the kind of people who avoid the presence of death. As the vet administered the fatal injection, Peggy lay on the floor hugging Bonnie and sobbing while I jabbered on about unrelated things, so you might say that I wasn’t any too present for death myself.

When we got home, the first thing Peggy wanted to do was to cuddle, but the first thing I wanted to do was to bury Bonnie. We waited overnight to bury Baxter when he died three years ago, and by that time, he was cold, stiff, and looked pitiful, so I wanted to get Bonnie in the ground while she was still warm and looked like she was asleep. I’ve been in so much physical pain that I worried that digging a grave would leave me worse-off, so Peggy helped.

Before the burial, I took Bonnie indoors and showed her to our cat because I wanted him to know why she went away. Maybe it didn’t help, but I’ve done that with other pets, and never saw any reason to think it was harmful. While Brewsky smelled Bonnie, I wondered if I could ever love him the way I’ve loved so many dogs. I can tell that there’s a lot going on in that little head of his, but I can’t usually tell what it is, and that leaves a gulf between us.

After the burial, I felt like I was in a movie in which happy images of Bonnie’s life ran before my eyes one after another. Things I hadn’t thought of in years came back like a vivid dream in resplendent color, and I beat them down as best I could. I wanted to be alone, so while I did yard work, Peggy called friends and relatives for support. I was surprised because Peggy usually avoids talking on the phone. After thinking about it for two hours, I took 25 mgs of oxycodone, and it cheered me considerably.

Some people don’t understand how anyone can grieve for a dog, but I’ve grieved more for dogs than for any of the people I’ve lost, probably because my dogs were with me all day everyday and were innocent and dependent.

Peggy won’t want another dog for years, if ever, but I already want one. On the other hand, the last three years of Bonnie’s life were tough on Peggy and me because Bonnie became blind, fearful, arthritic, and started to lose her hearing. People say that dogs adjust well to blindness, but Bonnie spent those years walking into walls and furniture, and it really got to me until I started taking Cymbalta and marijuana.

It’s also true that I started thinking of dogs differently after I had my shoulder surgeries. After two of those surgeries, Peggy was out of town for a week or more during the early stages of my recovery and, it being winter, I found it really, really hard to take two dogs (Baxter was still alive after the first surgery) walking in the seasonal drizzle everyday. I couldn’t dry them and clean their feet adequately with one hand; I worried constantly that they would trip me; and I had a hell of a time just keeping myself from getting wet. One day, a pit bull attacked Baxter, and I had to beat it off with one arm. Luckily, it was a young female and not too aggressive. 

After my third surgery, Peggy was out of town again, and Bonnie became ill with autoimmume hemolytic anemia. For at least a week, she was so sick that I expected her to die at any moment. She needed medicine every eight hours, but this meant having to shove the pills so far down her throat that she couldn’t spit them out, and I couldn’t do it with one arm, so my friends Ellie and Josh came over every eight hours. It was then that I started to think of dogs as a liability that I would be better off without. I also resented Bonnie because throwing tennis balls to her hundreds of times a week for years was probably what ruined my shoulders.

For the last two years of her 15 years and 7 months, not a day went by but what I wished she would die sooner rather than later because her infirmities were so upsetting, especially listening to her bump into things, which made me cringe every time she did it. Dogs need far more from us humans than most of us are able—or even willing—to give them, and I found this especially true of a blue heeler because blue heelers want to be on the move every waking moment. If she hadn’t been my dog, I wouldn’t have believed how much exercise she needed, and when she went blind, I couldn’t satisfy her need except by taking her walking, and my arthritic knees made even that difficult. I was afraid that when she did die, I wouldn’t enjoy remembering her because her last few years were so hard for me (they seemed harder for Peggy and me than they did for her), but I don’t think that’s going to be true. I think I’m going to remember her whole life.