Little Boy Blue (2 page)
In the year since we’ve brought him home he’s been wonderful. He’s fun and sweet and he’d clearly lived in a house before because he has great manners. There are a million stories, but I’ll leave it at this: Since we got him, two of our neighbors and Karin’s brother have been so charmed by him that they have started looking to adopt—Chester is the kind of dog who makes people want a dog.
When we stopped to think about these things we couldn’t help but wonder where he came from and how he ended up with us. We knew only the basics. His previous owner had turned him in to a high-kill shelter in South Carolina. He was on the short list to be put down; dogs who are turned in are often put down sooner than others because the shelter knows that no one is going to show up to make a claim, so they don’t have to wait. The rescue group in Westchester, For the Love of Dogs, found him online and claimed him and eight others. No one knows exactly when, but within a few days it would have been all over for him.
Instead, he spent two weeks in a boarding facility to make sure he didn’t have any infections, and then he was crated, loaded into the back of a van, and hauled from South Carolina to New York overnight by a courier hired specifically for the task. There’s a photo taken of him upon his arrival that still shocks. He looks like a different dog—a different species, actually—smaller and scared, his hair matted and wet and dirty. If I didn’t know otherwise I’d guess that he’d just emerged after crawling through a mile-long sewer pipe. The only recognizable feature of the dog I know today are his bright eyes.
Sometimes when I see him running in the yard or lying on his bed chewing on his favorite toy—a stuffed penguin that makes an infernal high-pitched squeak—I want to know more. I want to know who turned him in and why and how such a great dog could be given almost no chance to find another home. At other moments, I don’t want to know any more than I already do. It’s too mind-bending and sad to consider.
But at the end of the day I know that knowledge is better. Shortly after
The Lost Dogs
came out I attended a book signing not far from where I live. It was a beautiful fall day, so not many people showed up, but Kim Kavin did. I was happy to see her. I had met Kim about ten years earlier, when we were both working at magazines that catered to boaters and were members of an organization called Boating Writers International. About eight of us had gathered to discuss an update to the rules and bylaws and standards of professional conduct.
What became clear very quickly was that Kim was among the sharpest people in the room, and I don’t think anyone who was there that day would disagree, the best pure journalist. I moved on from the boating gig shortly thereafter, but I stayed in touch with Kim over the years and continued to enjoy her work. When she told me the tale of her boy Blue and what she’d uncovered about his history I was reminded of her talents all over again. Even more so than Chester, he’d been on the verge of a needless death and only through the efforts of a selfless multitude did he somehow defy the odds and survive.
Here, I’d been using Petfinder for months, sending e-mails inquiring about dogs as far away as Kansas, but never did I ask the questions any good journalist should, including “How the hell will those dogs get here?” Kim had asked, and as a reward she had uncovered a secret world that few of us could even imagine existed. I knew immediately she was onto a great story—not only in the sense that it would be a fascinating one to read but also in that it would be an important one to tell.
As with dog fighting, the best way to change the bad and encourage the good is to shine a light on each. The story of the cruelty and unfairness of high-kill shelters and the lifesaving relief of the Petfinder revolution, including the people who labor so hard behind the scenes to make it work, needs to be told. We’ll all be better off for having heard it. You, me, and the Chesters of the world.
Lately another theory has arisen around our house: Wouldn’t it be nice if Chester had a playmate? When we talk about it honestly, we know that it’s not the smart thing to do. We also know that there are fantastic animals out there who need a chance. I imagine that one of these days I’m going to come home and find my wife and daughter huddled around the computer making those prolonged “awwwing” sounds. I listen for it every time I come through the door.
Jim Gorant
The First Bread Crumbs
I’m the oldest child in my family, but I wasn’t the first to be cradled and loved. My parents’ black Scottish Terrier enjoyed hugs and kisses galore, had all the toys he wanted, and was as spoiled as any kid might be. It’s no surprise that my first word was not “Daddy” or “Mama,” but instead “Mac.” He was my first best friend. It was fated that I would grow up to love my dogs the way most other people love their children.
Countless photos in our family album show Mac planted firmly by my side. There’s Mac sitting next to my crib, next to me in my baby carrier, next to me on a hand-crocheted, pink and white afghan atop the summer’s green grass. I’m sure a few of the portraits would embarrass Mac were he still around today— especially the one where he’s propped up against a 1970s swirl of orange and yellow, as if he were on some kind of disco-inspired acid trip—but I think he’d like the ones of us two just as much as I do, because we were practically treated like brother and sister. We both got presents under the Christmas tree. We both went for the same walks in the park. In the photo I like best, Mac and I are sitting side by side on the diving board at my grandfather’s lake house, and I’m giving him a huge hug. This isn’t your average embrace. It’s the kind where a child wraps her arms around the neck of somebody she adores and squeezes so tightly that you know she’ll never be able to let go, at least not in her own favorite memories. When I look at that photo today, I don’t just see the happiness of a girl and her first dog. I see the heart of a dog lover learning how it feels to overflow with joy.
Even now, more than thirty years later, there are more photos of dogs on the walls of my parents’ home than there are photos of people. My mom’s favorite sweatshirt reads “Ask Me About My Granddog.” My father keeps a fuzzy orange gorilla, the favorite toy of another now-gone family dog, in the china cabinet where other folks might display a sports trophy or retirement plaque. I have precious few memories of our family home without a dog in it. After Mac came the Doberman named Tallen. After Tallen came the West Highland White Terriers Brandy and Corky (their official papers read Brandywine Mist and Kavin’s Colonel Corker III). When they died, we welcomed the Doberman Tanner. When he left us, his look-alike Quincy joined our pack, as did my sister’s black Labrador, Sadie May, whom I fondly call my niece. I’ve liked some of these dogs better than others over the years, but I’ve also adored every last one the way other little girls love their favorite dolls. The thought of going to sleep at night without a dog in the house is as foreign to me as the thought of letting a trained dog sleep anywhere but in the bed at my feet—and under the covers if it’s cold during the winter, of course.
When I graduated from college, the first thing I did was get my own dog. It didn’t dawn on me that I might consider living without one. And though I’d always been raised alongside my parents’ purebreds, I was okay with having a mutt. I figured they needed good homes, too. My fiancé and I found the beagle mix by way of an advertisement in the newspaper’s classified section. This was circa 1994 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa—a heck of a long way from my New Jersey hometown, but the only city that offered us both jobs in the news business right out of college. The puppies were on a farm in Central City, less than an hour’s drive away. We arrived to find a beagle tending to her pups in the shadow of a ticked-off farmer. He desperately wanted the name of the neighborhood tramp who had knocked her up, because the mixed-breed puppies commanded a lower selling price than purebreds.
“What will you do if there are some puppies you can’t sell?” I asked the farmer as I played with the floppy-eared pups in the grass.
“I’ll drown them in that river over there,” he deadpanned, “in a bag full of rocks.”
It might have been a sales pitch, it might have been reality, but whatever the case, I scooped up the puppy with the raccoon-mask face and cradled him in my arms like a refugee. Floyd would survive not only the farmer, but also my relationship with the fiancé (when we broke up, I kept the TV, the VCR, and the dog—my three most prized possessions). That dog would be my daily companion for nearly sixteen years to come. He would move with me back to the Northeast, adjusting without complaint to five different apartments, rented basements, and condos as I traded up to better and better jobs at newspapers and magazines in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. He would sit under my desk at the office, by my side at company softball games, and on my lap at night on the couch. He’d even make room on that couch for the man I would eventually marry— though only after a few grumbling go-arounds in which Floyd made it clear he was still the number one male in my life.
When Floyd turned eleven, I bought a house on five and a half acres of woodland in west-central New Jersey, right between New York City and Philadelphia, in a place where deer still roam in herds and the occasional cow takes a morning stroll up the street. My husband had gotten a job nearby, and my savings had allowed us to trade up from the two-bedroom townhouse where we’d been living into a four-bedroom colonial on a cul-de-sac. The backyard must have looked like a football field to Floyd after all those years of apartment and condominium life, and I took my veterinarian’s suggestion to encourage him to run around by bringing home a playmate.
This time I logged onto
Petfinder.com
. The year was 2005, and Petfinder had been live since 1996, when Floyd was just two years old. I can’t remember seeing any publicity about it, but somehow I had internalized the idea that this website had replaced the local classified ads as a nationwide billboard for pets in need of homes. I was far from alone in my thinking. By 2008, Petfinder would claim more than sixty million visitors each year. That’s a heck of a lot of people. It’s more than fifteen times the number of fans who attended a game in 2010 at Yankee Stadium, which was the best-attended venue in all of Major League Baseball. It’s about the same number of people who receive Social Security—the largest federal program in the United States. It’s about three times the number of people in America’s six largest cities, if you combine the entire populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Phoenix. Petfinder quickly grew into the largest website of its kind, with some thirteen thousand rescue groups and shelters uploading photos of adoptable animals every day. Since its inception in 1996, the website has helped to connect an estimated seventeen million animals with new homes.
Mine was about to become the next one. I typed in my New Jersey zip code and the word “hound,” figuring that Floyd would want a friend who could understand him when he sang out one of his big, bellowing bays.
A brown face with a white lightning bolt caught my attention immediately. She was listed as a Pointer/Labrador, about twelve weeks old, and less than a half hour away. I clicked on the link and was asked to fill out a three-page form detailing our intentions for the dog’s training, the status of our yard’s fencing, and the number of hours my husband and I spent away from home at work. I half expected to offer a blood sample and submit to a drug test. It felt like winning a reprieve from a tax audit when Rawhide Rescue invited us to meet the pup in Plainfield, New Jersey, and pay $250 to bring her home. What a difference from the farmer who had wanted thirty-five bucks to take a “damn mutt” off his hands. The act of acquiring a puppy in America, it seemed to me, had changed substantially during the past decade.
We decided to call her Stella because, well, it was fun to shout her name like Marlon Brando in
A Streetcar Named Desire
. We of course loved her instantly, but we wouldn’t realize for nearly a year that Stella is no Labrador at all. Most likely, according to the breeders, veterinarians, and trainers I consulted, she’s a combination of Foxhound, Pointer, and American Pit Bull Terrier—not to mention a sixty-pound alpha female with aggression tendencies that would require a $100-per-hour private trainer for us to learn how to manage. I had always enjoyed my daily walks with Floyd, but Stella’s insatiable energy required me to become a jogger, with runs as long as five miles simply to help her work out her excessive intensity. She broke her kneecap trying to jump over our four-foot-tall split-rail fence to chase a deer. She figured out how to open the spare bedroom door and ate enough Gorilla Glue to require an expensive chiseling of her stomach. She worked her way past the downstairs doggy gate and shredded our newly reupholstered sectional sofa. Not just the cloth and cushion stuffing, mind you, but also the wooden frame.
Floyd liked Stella for maybe the first three days. Though he would live to be nearly sixteen, he was already old at eleven, and the daily tornado that Stella became was just too much for him to bear. They’d make their peace after about a year, when Stella finally stopped nipping at him, but by then her favorite game had become getting her face as close as she could to his, like a bratty kid who insists, “But I’m not touching you!” And that was better than the countless times when he’d be sitting in the kitchen, an old man content merely to be breathing, and she’d wander by, line her butt up alongside his head, and whap him onto the floor with a flick of her hip. The word bitch most certainly applied.