A Small Furry Prayer (18 page)

36

Life started to change as our second autumn in Chimayo began. By then, we'd been in New Mexico long enough to have assembled a decent-sized network, which meant that we were having an easier time finding homes for our dogs, which also meant we were adding more dogs, which really meant that we always had a couple of animals around that we just didn't know too well. Back in Los Angeles, new adoptees had come through a screening process of sorts—either Joy had picked them out from a shelter or someone very close to Joy had done the choosing—but in trying to establish ourselves in Chimayo, trying to develop relationships with different vets and different shelters and the few other rescue operations around, we didn't yet get to be that discerning. If someone asked for help, we went out of our way to help. Because of that, we ended up with a number of dogs who had been described to us as “in need of socialization,” which turned out to be a euphemism for “just about feral.”

Feral dogs bite first and ask questions later. They're scared of humans and avoid humans, and the only way to socialize ferals is to let them do the socializing. We don't talk to them, don't try to pet them, don't even look at them. The entire relationship sits in their court. We let them make all the moves, and they don't always make them quickly. Joy had warned me this process can take months, sometimes years, and in the interim we were left in a peculiar situation: sharing our home with essentially wild animals.

Henry David Thoreau was the first in a long line of environmental philosophers who both understood the difference between “wildness” and “wilderness”—wildness being a state of mind, wilderness being a place—and stressed the importance of the former as much as the latter. Thoreau's most famous line, “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” is both a statement of moral purpose and fighting words. His embrace of the wild put him in opposition to an entire line of thinkers dating back to Plato who felt that taming the wilderness outside and the wildness inside were among the greatest human responsibilities. Whether or not this is the case is less important here than the effects of such thinking on contemporary life.

When I lived in the city, I thought of wildness in mostly binary terms. The coyotes who prowled the canyons of Los Angeles were wild; the house pets they were hunting were tame. When I did have actual contact with wildness, it was always because I sought it out—I went hiking, I went climbing, I went camping—but in dog rescue, wildness was neither binary nor something I had to seek out. Wildness was there when I woke up in the morning and there when I went to bed at night. In fact, it was often there in the bed with me at night.

I don't mean this metaphorically. The socialization of feral dogs is a multistage process. The initial stage occurs when the dog in question comes inside the house for the first time. This usually takes place quickly. Dogs watch other dogs for cues, so when new dogs, even completely feral ones, realize both that the comfortable places to lie down—couches and dog beds and such—are inside the house and that the rest of the pack moves inside and outside without human intervention, they tend to do the same. After about a month of this, as these feral dogs begin to habituate to our presence, they'll occasionally want to sleep in our presence. This happens because the bed serves as the dog's den, and even feral dogs are instinctively drawn to the den. But again, it's a slow draw. In the beginning, while they might wander into the bedroom, if they choose to sleep there, it's usually in the closet. A few weeks to a month later, they'll move to a far corner, tucking themselves beneath a night table, perhaps under a chair. After two months or so, they may begin to sleep on the floor near the end of the bed. As even more time passes and they get slightly braver, they'll climb onto the bed, but only if they're sure it's safe, which is to say only after Joy and I have fallen asleep. But here's the key fact: these dogs do all of this long before either of us has actually touched them, long before they would consider letting either of us actually touch them, when any attempt at contact would still be met by snapping jaws and painful wounds.

This put me in a strange situation. I am an early riser, often awake long before the sun has come up. My routine is to get out of bed, head down to the goat shack, and start working, but that second summer in Chimayo, that routine was dented by a half dozen dogs who had yet to let me touch them but had no problem sleeping in the same room as me. Since it's dark in the bedroom, getting out of bed every morning involved first trying to guess who was sleeping where and then solving the rat's maze of avoiding them on my way out of the house. Bumping into one of these feral dogs in the dark, even if they happen to have fallen asleep directly beside me or, as often happens as they start getting more comfortable, on top of me (dogs in the process of habituation like to sleep on human feet because they know we can't move without first moving them), was enough to get myself bitten. Which meant that everything from getting up in the middle of the night to piss to getting up in the morning to go to work involved negotiating that gray area between tame and wild, a gray area that I hadn't even known existed back when I was living in California.

There is an art to living in this gray area—one that took getting used to. My home was now an environment where some level of danger and unpredictability—two of the defining characteristics of wildness—were part of the basic package. Oddly, I found that mountain lion experience somewhat helpful. That look of disgust had made me keenly aware of the imbalance in power between animals and humans. The truth of the matter is that humans have chewed up so much wilderness and devalued so much wildness that the mountain lion had gotten hit by a car while moving through what was essentially his “living room.” That now struck me as completely unfair. So the fact that I might get bitten by a wilder animal on my way to the bathroom, while it wasn't quite tit-for-tat, at least it was a start.

My perspective started to change as well. Before this point, dogs and mountain lions were not even in the same category. Dogs were common components of a human world and in no sense wild. Mountain lions were the opposite. But once those feral dogs arrived, these divisions started to fall apart. I started to see all animals on a continuum: leash-walked, suburban-raised toy poodles on one end, man-eating big cats on the other, my own dogs somewhere in the middle. And once I thought of my dogs on the same wildness scale that I used to think of mountain lions, something as seemingly insignificant as affection became much less insignificant.

All that had really happened was that I had stopped taking my good relationship with dogs for granted, but once freed from this myopia a number of other facts became readily apparent. Imagine how careful you would be cuddling a giraffe—but the ratio comparison is the same when a Chihuahua snuggles up to a human. And that's a full-sized Chihuahua. I am seventeen times the height of Gidget and thirty-two times her weight. When she decides to run up on my chest and dance her dance, it's now not lost on me just how much trust she would have to feel to be willing to behave like that. And once up there, she's not even skittish. Her eyes close, her jaw drops, her head sways, and she looks a lot like Stevie Wonder playing the piano. It's a state of wild abandon, despite being the rough equivalent of a normal-sized human climbing onto a slightly undersized
Tyrannosaurus rex
to do the fandango.

And this pales significantly when compared to befriending a wild dog for the first time. Since most of us don't live with animals we can't touch, we don't see contact stretching across the border of species as extraordinary. But share a home with feral dogs for a few months—dogs that run out of the room when you enter and bare their teeth if the exit happens to be blocked—and when they finally do decide they might be willing to be petted, well, extraordinary isn't the half of it.

Not surprisingly, all of this had a pronounced effect on the rest of the pack. What I mean is that all our dogs have preferences. Some like me best; most prefer Joy. Some of the ones who prefer Joy had never really warmed to me. But as those feral dogs started to get over their fear, some of those our other dogs did as well.

Farrah was among them. A few years before we met, Joy found her at the South Central shelter in Los Angeles eight hours before she was scheduled to die. Normally, on a dog's last day, shelter workers would be desperate to find a home for the animal. Not this time. Joy was strenuously advised to let them put her down. Farrah was just too broken to mend. She was a puppy mill reject, born in a box, dumped at the pound. Mange had claimed most of her fur; what was left was pink, raw, and reptilian. And mean. She bit everyone. She was just Joy's type.

Farrah came home with Joy, and home is where she stayed. Once her hair grew back she turned out to be a looker, meriting her full name—Farrah Fawcett Minor—and the attention of others. Joy placed her on three separate occasions. None took. Farrah screamed nonstop whenever deprived of Joy's company. Since Farrah's screams sound like those of a cartoon duck, having her do that non-stop is a bit like being trapped in a hell of Walt Disney's design.

For the first year Farrah was with us, she steered clear of me unless Joy was out of the house. Even when Joy was gone, unless I picked her up or there was a thunderstorm—which terrified her enough that she would run to just about any available human for comfort—we rarely had any contact. But after those feral dogs started to come around, Farrah did as well. First she liked me, then she really liked me. She was clingy and constant, and when I got the flu a couple of weeks after getting back from the mountain lion release, apparently she was concerned. In wolves and a number of other species, it's common to return from feasting on a kill to regurgitate leftovers for young pups. Sometimes a male wolf will vomit up food as a show of affection while attempting to woo a female. Occasionally vomit will be offered to a sick pack member or as a gift to a friend. This is the only explanation I've been able to come up with for what woke me that morning, ripped from deep sleep and pleasant dreams by the unforgettable sensation of Farrah puking in my mouth.

Emotions are thought to serve three fundamental functions in humans, with the first being known as
signaling.
Fear signals impending disaster, as does disgust. When humans feel disgust it's an innate response to a bitter taste or noxious odor that often warns of a lethal toxin. Researchers have discovered that disgust can be masked but not extinguished. Trained psychologists can always spot it, as it's just too basic and powerful to hide. A dog puked in my mouth—certainly a morality tale against the dangers of snoring—but instinctive reaction or not, I didn't feel disgust. I just spit the crap out, availed myself of more mouthwash than is normally required, and turned to address Farrah. “I worry about you too” was the extent of that conversation. Which also might be a morality tale about the perils of wanting to find a life with more meaning—though not reacting to the vomit might be proof that I'd already found one.

I was talking to my friend Michael a few days later and he didn't agree.

“Are you
meshugenah
? A dog puked in your mouth and you think you've found the meaning of life?”

I tried to explain it was less about discovering what I was looking for and more about moving in the right direction, but never got that far. It was too far to go. Michael lived in a place where the gorgeous intimacy of an animal wanting to share a meal with a human was nothing close to gorgeous. In his land, a dog puked in my mouth and that was cause for revulsion. In mine, a dog puked in my mouth and somehow I had come to see this as astounding.

As I was thinking about how recently I would have shared Michael's opinion and—as the instinct that says beware of vomit is a fairly powerful one—how far I must have come to have changed my mind, I was struck by another peculiar realization: I had come this far without ever really wondering about my choice in direction. I had gone looking for a life with more meaning, but why was I sure I'd find that in dogs? Why not pigs or snakes or raccoons? If Thoreau was right and it was just about embracing the mysteries of the wild—well, I hadn't really considered dogs as wild at the time I decided to move to Chimayo. Certainly, if you had asked me back then, I'd probably have said there was something powerfully sacred about dogs, but what something would I have been talking about? What is anyone who talks like this talking about? I knew most rescuers considered the work they do to be spiritual in nature, and I would probably agree, but hearing this from the outside and seeing it from the inside were two different things. What exactly did I find profoundly spiritual about cleaning up shit on a daily basis? The more I thought about it, the more I was sure I'd moved into the ashram knowing nothing about the guru.

And when I backed this line of inquiry up, trying for a bit more perspective, I found even more puzzles. Every archaic religion in history was built around animals—but why were they sure that animals were sacred? And why do so many of us still consider animals sacred? Why are some animals more sacred than others? Is this cultural bias, spiritual preference, or biological adaptation? If it's actually biological, if animal sacredness is some sort of evolutionary adaptation, is it found only in humans, or do the animals feel it too? Do animals think animals are sacred? Do animals think some animals are more sacred than others?

“You got all this cause a dog puked in your mouth?” asked Michael.

“So what do you think—do dogs have spiritual experiences?”

“I'm hanging up now.”

He did hang up, but that wasn't the end of it. I got a little obsessed. And when I said that life started to change at the tail end of that second summer, I mean that I started trying to find some answers.