Remember the Poodle

Last week, we had to say goodbye to a member of our family.

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a dog lover. And when we bought our house nine years ago, we immediately got a dog.  My wife found him at a local shelter, a scrawny, underfed, unkempt little mutt, found wandering around, abandoned.  We named him Joe.

Believe or not, he was not always this dashingly handsome.

Soon after, my wife picked me up from work and told me, "We're going to Billerica."

"Ok," I said. "Where's Billerica?"

She didn't know.  We needed to buy a road atlas to find it.  (This was before the world of ubiquitious iphones and GPSs.)  It turned out to be almost 2 hours away.  There, in some woman's house that doubled as an "animal shelter," we got our second dog, a tiny ball of white poodle that we named Mae.

Mae, pictured moments before she tried to convince my toes to become unattached from my foot.

Mae did not immediately ingratiate herself to us.  She whined a lot, she growled, she bit, she picked fights with Joe.  But over time, she grew on us.  She would sleep at the foot of our bed, and bite my foot nearly every night.   As she got even older, we had to get used to cleaning up her accidents all over the house.

She had breast cancer, which was removed by surgery twice.  She had to have one eye removed after it became swollen and infected.

This wasn't exactly "Marley and Me."

Nine years later, last week, we took Mae to the vet for another eye infection.  They found she'd lost over 2 pounds since she'd been there last.  Considering she'd never weighed more than 7 pounds, she didn't have much left to lose.

Within a day, she'd stopped eating entirely.  The next morning, she passed away in her sleep, in her favorite bed.  We buried her in the backyard.

I don't want to talked at length about this one poodle (although I guess I am), nor do I want to talk about death, about picking up her cold body, or the smell that infused her bed.  No, that's not something I'm feeling up to talking about.

If you remember nothing else about this blog entry, please remember this: there are animal shelters near you, filled with dogs and cats that need a home.  That need love.  That need you.

Don't go to pet stores that sell puppies out of cages.  Please.  Yes, that puppy may be given a good home and a wonderful life, but you're encouraging the store to bring in more puppies, and very few of them will be so lucky.

During one of her checkups soon after we brought her home,  one vet commented that it looked like Mae had had puppies before.  They guessed that she'd been a breeder, used to churn out as many puppies as she could to sell to those same pet stores, and had probably been abandoned, literally thrown out, when she got too old to be useful.

Mae had endured 9 years of being beaten, forced to breed, forced to fight other dogs for food, for water, for a place to sleep.  And because of that, despite being given a safe home surrounded by a family that loved her, she still woke up in the middle of the night snarling and biting anything that moved nearby.  (Spoiler: it was my foot.)

The 9 years she spent with us cannot erase those first nine years, but she was able to die in her favorite bed, peacefully, and that counts for something, since it was probably the first thing she was able to do peacefully in her entire life.

So the next time you see a puppy in the pet store, please remember my little white poodle.  Remember her nine years of torment, and the nine years of peace that couldn't erase them.

Then, drive down to a shelter, and give your love to a dog that needs it.

Or else her ghost will bite your foot off.  I'll make sure of it.