A Small Furry Prayer (6 page)

13

We had been in New Mexico about three weeks and Joy had been to the local animal shelter about six times. She first went to introduce herself, then came back to volunteer. She walked dogs and cleaned cages, and always tried to get me to come along. I never came along. I wanted nothing to do with the place. Or anyplace like it. Shelters scared me. In hindsight, I think it was fear of empathy, of feeling too much, of the level of commitment that might come from feeling too much, keeping me away. At the time, though, it was just lower-belly dread—the very real sense that whatever emotional fortitude I'd developed in my forty years wasn't enough to handle rows of dogs in cages, most of them destined for euthanasia.

Joy felt otherwise. She felt that seeing a shelter was an initiation, an important rescuer rite of passage, and wouldn't shut up about it. In LA I'd made up excuses. Then we moved to New Mexico to run a dog sanctuary—of all things—and how could I run a dog sanctuary without knowing why I was running a dog sanctuary? I was out of excuses. In the middle of our fourth week in New Mexico, I paid a visit to the Española Humane Society and made what rescuers commonly refer to as “Sophie's choice.”

The Española shelter is a long, low brick building comprised of a main reception room, a few offices, a small vet clinic, and a warehouse of dogs. Making Sophie's choice involves combing that warehouse to select one dog who will live from the hundreds who will die, and doing so requires paying considerable attention to detail at a time when it's not necessarily comfortable to do so. The goal is to find an adoptable dog who would otherwise go unnoticed. Dogs in shelters go unnoticed for a variety of reasons. Most people come looking for puppies and purebreds, so older mutts are at a considerable disadvantage. Beige dogs are often overlooked, brown dogs ignored. Black dogs are so hated that rescuers refer to their trouble as “black dog syndrome,” which oddly extends beyond the boundaries of race: even black people don't like black dogs. Ugly dogs, sick dogs, handicapped dogs, retarded dogs, shy dogs, fat dogs—those too don't stand a chance. Pit bulls are out of the question, Rottweilers as well. Dogs that need too much house training, dogs with bad coats, dogs that like to chew, dig, drool, et cetera. As it turns out, what makes a dog adoptable has very little to do with dogs, a great deal to do with humans.

Yet the above preferences are mostly fetishes, as our real attraction comes from
neoteny
. Developmental biologists use the word to refer to the retention of childlike characteristics by mature members of a species. These characteristics include physical attributes such as dimples, floppy ears, and large eyes and personality dispositions such as playfulness, curiosity, and helplessness—all of which fall under an analytical model in ethology known as “cuteness.” In 1949, the Nobel Prize–winning zoologist Konrad Lorenz introduced the concept to science, arguing that “infantile features produced nurturing responses in adults.” The way he saw it, cuteness was the secret weapon evolution came up with to ensure that parents cared for their children. And neoteny is the biology behind cuteness, a biology to which humans are particularly susceptible. As
New York Times
science writer Natalie Angier pointed out, the reasons humans are so attracted to cuteness are simple: “As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can't lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire.” And the reason shelters scared me so much is also simple: dogs, more than any other species, have infantile desire down to an art.

At the Española shelter, the strays occupy a small hangar, about fifty feet long and twenty feet wide. Puppies are kept in a wire pen in the center, bigger dogs alone, in pairs, or occasionally in trios, in cages around the sides. The lighting is fluorescent, the air stinks of piss, the floors are cold concrete. At first, not wanting to look at any of the dogs directly, I kept my eyes on those floors. But diverting my gaze only made their barking, whining, and whimpering that much more emphatic. Eventually I had to look.

The first dog I saw was a chestnut brown pit bull. She was directly to my right, jumping up and down, wagging her tail, completely desperate for a playmate. I walked over and let her lick my hand through the bars. It was the ears maybe, perhaps the shape of her muzzle, but I remember thinking how much she reminded me of my friend Tara's pit bull. That was my first mistake. Pretty soon I was walking down the line of cages, letting any dog that wanted to lick my hand do so, and finding out that all of these dogs reminded me of other dogs. There was the shaggy terrier with the same sideways head cant and nervous tongue flick as the shaggy terrier Ahab used to play with at the dog park in LA. There was my friend Barry's Australian shepherd, my friend Amy's German shepherd. I felt sick to my stomach. There wasn't anything wrong with these dogs. I wanted to take them all home with me. The whole damn warehouse of misery. Just strap it to my back and get the fuck out of the way.

There are two competing theories as to why my feelings were so strong, as there are two competing theories as to how canine domestication occurred. The first idea is that early hominids stole cute wolf pups from their mother's dens and raised them as pets. The wolves that were friendlier, calmer, and more socially adept around humans were kept; the wilder ones were either driven off or killed outright. The remaining “tamer” wolves were bred together and produced even tamer offspring, but as James Serpell, professor of humane ethics and animal welfare at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, writes in
The Domestic Dog
: “No one … could have foreseen the bizarre ontogenetic ramifications of this simple process of selecting for tameness. When this same process was … applied systematically to captive foxes at a Siberian fur farm, weird things started happening. As expected, the selected lines became tamer, but they also began to look and behave increasingly like dogs, even to the extent of developing piebald coats, drooping ears and dioestrus reproductive cycles.” Domesticated dogs, it appears, are not just expert at neoteny, they're nature's most complete blueprint for the process.

In the stealing-wolf-cub version of this story, mankind domesticated dogs, and this version is another often cited reason for our species' specialness: humans are the only species to have “tamed” another species. And this was the only version of the story until Hampshire College biologist Raymond Coppinger realized that if you want to steal a wolf cub to raise as a pet, you have thirteen days to do it, because afterward wolves are virtually untamable. Since thirteen days is a pretty tight window for roving hunter-gatherer bands to climb through, Coppinger proposed a different, somewhat stranger idea: that wolves domesticated themselves.

How this happened comes down to “flight distance.” How close an animal will allow something dangerous—like a human being—to get before fleeing is flight distance. The reason it's important is because as humans learned to live in fixed settlements, even if those settlements were nothing more than a cave for the winter, we produced a lot of garbage. Our refuse included prime wolf chow such as rotting vegetables, fruit seeds, and discarded carcasses. Once wolves discovered they loved our leftovers, biology took over. The wolves with shorter flight distances got more of those leftovers than the ones without. Better-fed wolves had more pups, and those pups were also born with shorter flight distances. As Coppinger points out: “My argument is that what
domesticated
—or tame—means is ‘to be able to eat in the presence of human beings.' That is the thing that wild wolves can't do.”

No one is quite sure how to settle this domestic dispute, but we do know that the act of selecting for tameness triggered a further cascade of neoteny in wolves. And then humans, already perfectly designed to respond to this cascade, pushed things even further. The cute pups were the more beloved pups, so they were kept inside, fed better, and allowed to have offspring. As this process made them healthier, these select few were more likely to have larger litters. And the cuter pups from those larger litters would get the same preferential treatment the next time around. Which is why these days adult dogs act far more like puppy wolves than adult wolves, and also why going to a shelter and choosing a dog to rescue can be so damn hard: it involves trying to overlook the very animals several millions of years of evolution have shaped us to notice.

In attempting to do just that, I tried to set my biases aside. I was looking for a dog who, under normal conditions, I might never quite see. I found him cowering in a cage in the corner. His name was Leo, and he was just about the saddest sack I'd ever met. My personal preference is for friendly and fuzzy, and Leo was neither of these. Some generations ago, he had started out as a German shepherd, but things had gone haywire ever since. His coat was stringy, his eyes sunken, his weight about thirty pounds below normal. He had the spunk of a big rock at the bottom of a deep lake, was already red-listed—destined to be euthanized within twenty-four hours—and in no danger of being adopted before his time was up.

Then again, neither were many of the other dogs in cages. I was having a hard time breathing. I glanced back at Leo. There really was nothing appealing about him. There was really no way I could stay in this room another minute.

“Perfect,” I said, “I'll take him.”

Not so fast. Leo still had his balls. The problem at most shelters comes down to overcrowding, and overcrowding comes down to too many dogs who still have their balls. So before I could spring him from the pound he had to be neutered, and this took an extra few days and didn't go as planned. During the surgery, the vets found out Leo was a hemophiliac. After the surgery, they also discovered he was smart enough to be able to rip off his plastic neck cone and dumb enough to tear out his stitches. They couldn't risk another procedure without risking him bleeding to death, so they shrugged and sent him home to me—with a hole the size of a tennis ball where his testicles used to be.

Since Leo could still get out of a cone, during the two weeks it took that hole to heal, he spent his days under careful supervision and his nights stockaded, tied by leashes between two vigas on our back porch. The vigas were the only things around strong enough to hold him. As there are wild dogs and coyotes and cougars in the area—all of which can smell blood at a distance and can quite easily hop our fences—I spent those same nights sleeping on the porch for purposes of his protection, a heavy shovel within arm's reach.

As a man whose primary response to children has always been the desire to run fast in the other direction, I assumed a certain immunity to neoteny. Moreover, Leo wasn't really my kind of dog to begin with, and spending my nights on protection detail was not my idea of a good time, but humans' response to helplessness is innate and completely automatic. A switch flipped, a cascade followed. Sympathy became empathy and empathy is always the point of no return. Pretty soon I was more than a little attached.

My first real rescue was complete. The thing I had been afraid of ever since Joy mentioned visiting a shelter was now behind me. It didn't take too long for Leo to gain back some of that weight and begin coming out of his shell. The difference was magnificent. He had started out barely walking and soon was barely containable. In a few weeks' time, he'd be ready for adoption. I felt like something significant had occurred.

On the one-month anniversary of my springing him from the shelter, I went into town to buy Leo a bone to celebrate, and that chestnut-coated pit bull popped back into my mind. I decided to drive over and check up on her, but when I got to the shelter she was gone. In her cage was an old hound dog. I asked the woman at the front desk if someone had adopted her. Her face fell, just a little, but I knew. The dog had been euthanized, put down because of our personal fetishes, the shelter's lack of space, and a whole series of reasons that no longer made much sense to me.

“No one adopts a pit bull,” she said, as if that cleared everything up.

PART  THREE

And probably you had no business being out in the rain in the first place.

—Alan Furst

14

Salty is a three-pound Chihuahua, handsome, blonde, shell-shocked, and not too unlike Michael Caine near the ragged end of
The Man Who Would Be King
. Who knows why he was dumped at the Espanola shelter, but that's where Joy met him. He was enough of a looker that once the shock wore off she figured finding him a home was not going to be much of an issue. Then the vets discovered Salty had heartworm. Untreated, the disease is always fatal, but the cure is arsenic, which is almost as bad. Dying worms can clog the bloodstream. To avoid death by circulation shock, doses are kept low and delivery stretched out—often six months to a year. Even then, few make it through. The secret to survival is keeping the heart rate low and the dog calm, but a year is a long time and few people have the patience to try and few shelters have the space required. Mostly heartworm means euthanasia.

Of course, Joy wanted to try. I wasn't so sure. We had arrived in New Mexico with eight dogs. Squirt made nine. Leo was ten. Ten had been our agreed-upon cutoff point. Joy put me in charge of enforcing that limit. After bankrupting herself in Mexico, she felt that I should be in charge of admissions. Her difficulty there had been that she couldn't say no to dogs in need. My difficulty here was that after visiting a shelter I was starting to share her opinion. Pretty soon we were up to eleven, then twelve, then “How many dogs do you have this week?” became funny to my friends, then thirteen, then I found myself standing in an aisle at Petco, wondering if it was normal to be this terrified buying dog food.

I must have been standing there a while. The manager walked by twice. Some guy in a blue uniform and a name tag reading “Bob” walked by three times. Then they both walked over to see if they could help.

“Might be a little late for that,” is what I said.

My cell phone took this opportunity to ring, and I took this opportunity to answer it. Bob and the manager were not amused. I told them I was about to spend five hundred dollars on dog food, then held up the phone up for emphasis: “But I need to speak to my therapist first.”

That was about the point where Bob and the manager walked away. I put the phone back to my ear. It was my friend Joe Donnelly, sounding incredulous.

“Five hundred dollars on dog food?”

“Uh-huh.”

“It's a one-time expense?”

“It's this month—who knows how many dogs we'll have next month.”

And then I told him about Salty and my misgivings and how the shelter was going to euthanize him the next morning, so I needed to make up my mind quickly.

“Ten was the limit?” he asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Financial or emotional?”

“Little of both.”

“And Salty makes fourteen?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So why are you doing this to yourself?”

I had no answer for him. I had a thousand answers for him. Every one of them sounded stupid aloud. But Joe had introduced me to Ahab and later introduced me to Joy. I felt like he was owed an explanation.

“I fell in love with Joy,” I said. “She was the perfect storm.”