You Had Me at Woof: How Dogs Taught Me the Secrets of Happiness (6 page)

“First thing, love,” she said gently, “when owners are surrendering, many times they will say anything.”

“You mean lie?” I said, and she laughed.

She gave me some suggestions to calm Hank and told me to set up his neuter appointment; she explained the protocol about the billing and I told her that Charlotte was paying.

When I got home, I e-mailed Charlotte. She answered right away asking how Hank was doing. She said she’d been extremely worried about him. I told her he was fine and she was relieved. I told her that I was arranging his neutering and she didn’t respond. The next day I e-mailed again to tell her the appointment had been set up and that it was going to be about four hundred and fifty dollars, not including post-op pain medication. Again, silence. A couple of days later she sent a reply that she’d been in Hawaii and got my e-mail and that four hundred and fifty dollars was too expensive; she offered to pay half. I was livid. Here I was taking in her effing dog that she didn’t give a whit about. I called Sheryl.

I spewed my unedited thoughts about Charlotte’s behavior. I was shocked! Simply shocked. Sheryl was not. “Welcome to rescue,” she said.

As it turns out in life, very little ends up being how you think it’s going to be. You know the Yiddish proverb
“Mann traoch, Gott lauch”
: “Man plans, God laughs.” My grand plan was to join a rescue group because it would be
less
of an emotional investment than getting a second dog. Kind of like thinking that having a different date every night is easier than a steady boyfriend or girlfriend. What I saw about fostering was that in addition to the obvious difficulties of taking in a surrendered dog, you also weren’t keeping them forever so in a sense you had to stay on an emotional leash—or not and then end up keeping the dog.

I started to see that there was a strong learning curve, and that the rhythm of rescue involved expecting anything at any time. But being part of a group helping hundreds of dogs a year was so amazingly rewarding. I felt like I was more than a drop in the bucket; I was on a team of superheroes. Doing the work helped me to figure out that giving was a crucial part of my fabric. It was only when I began to help give voice to these creatures who cannot speak or ask for help for themselves that I felt the balance come into my own life.

LESSON FOUR

How to Listen to That Still, Small Voice

Our first foster, Hank, it seemed, had some deep issues. We read articles and books about how to deal with them and correct his behavior. This was a new frontier for me since I’d never trained any of my own dogs. In fact, when Otto came to me, he understood the commands “sit,” “stay,” and even “roll over.” After a few months, I had unlearned him. With me it became clear to him that he got what he wanted whether he sat or stood on his head and no longer had use for commands. Every so often he’d sit when I asked him to, but his heart wasn’t in it. Occasionally, he’d do it for guests, like someone who picks up a child’s yo-yo at a party. (“It’s something like this, right?”) Once I had a dog trainer come to my home to help me teach him. I was concerned about his snapping at certain people. She walked into my apartment with a little bag of dry cat food X’s that she used to reward the dogs and her eyes fell on a plastic plate on the floor on which I’d lined up several kinds of treats including deli meats.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“That’s his snack tray,” I replied.

“I don’t think I’m going to be able to get him to obey for my Friskies when he’s got his own buffet.”

Later when we were outside walking she told me to make him go left when he wanted to go right. I looked at her. What was on the left? If he wanted to go right, I saw no problem with this. Finally she told me that Otto didn’t need a trainer, I did.

So here I was years later wishing that I had gotten one. One article by a respected dog trainer said that when the puppy bites you, you should make a noise like a hurt puppy. I gave this nugget of wisdom to Paul and watched him respond to Hank’s nips with a high-pitched yowl.
“Yee!”
he yelled. Though it made me laugh really hard, it had zero effect on Hank.

We quickly passed the two-week mark. Charlotte, the owner, ceased to exist, it seemed, and never came across with a cent. At the end of each week, I sent the directors of the group an update on Hank’s progress—of which there was none. The first one I creatively called “Hank’s Pupdate.” The next one was simply “hank.” Rather than settle in, he got worse and worse. I didn’t care about the chewing of shoes and dolls, or the fact that every time we turned our backs on him he’d be standing on our dining-room table, face in a plate. I could even bear the relentless barking, but when he took flight, his mouth wide open, heading our way, we all got really unnerved. We gave him a circus name: Hank the flying biting clown dog. (We pretended he was funny, so Violet wouldn’t be so frightened.) Returning from the playground one day we opened our apartment door and Hank’s teeth sunk into Violet’s arm. She was physically hurt, but worse than that, her feelings were hurt. I told Sheryl and Jane that we weren’t the right people to foster him. I suggested military school. They called a guy in the group who had taken some other bad seeds and turned them into upstanding dogs and he agreed to take a stab at Hank. We were looking at a minimum wait of a week to get a transport set up since the guy lived eight hours upstate. Mattie lent us her car so Paul could meet the guy halfway and we could get Hank out of our lives sooner. Once he was going, which he seemed to know, he was pretty much in a constant state of ballistic. We just ducked and covered, ducked and covered. It was like
Hope and Glory.

With all that, we still felt sad when we watched him drive away, his face plastered against the back window of the car. After all, it wasn’t his fault he’d never been socialized. It’s an owner’s job to teach manners.

I spent a lot of time ruminating over what was behind the surrendering of a dog. In my mind, there was a list of what I considered compelling reasons to give up your dog, and other reasons that stunk. I was always most struck by people who put so much energy into getting a dog and then dumped it. My therapist, who has the two bichons frises, met someone with a bichon puppy who was going to put the dog in a shelter—and she asked to take the dog, certain she could find it a home. It was a terrific, smart, cute puppy with a normal puppy’s energy. In the end my therapist’s daughter took her. The bizarre part of the tale was what came with this puppy to my therapist’s home:

The outfits.
The outfits!
How on earth do you go from a person who spends hundreds of dollars at posh Manhattan pet shops on clothes and grooming items to a person who leaves a dog at a shelter? Not even looking into rehoming! The whole thing is so puzzling. I remembered getting an engraved birth announcement from a couple who’d bought a dog. Six months later I saw them and asked them about the “baby.” “Oh,” the wife said, “we gave her to my uncle. She chewed everything and messed all over the floor!”

A puppy that chewed on things and wasn’t housebroken? Why didn’t you put it on a chain gang? It was mind-boggling, but not something that infuriated me, until I was the one taking in these castoffs. We’re not talking about a family who has to give up a dog because of allergies or discovering upon the birth of a child that the dog is aggressive, or someone who has to move to an elder care facility. I’m just thinking of people who put more effort into researching the aspects of owning a car than what it takes to have a dog.

 

 

 

 

AFTER THAT
Paul and I agreed that our family was not up to the job of fostering dogs. We couldn’t take that kind of risk. There were still many ways I could help the rescue organization, and before long I was assigned my first home check, then my second, then my third, and on.

Pretty much everyone who wanted to adopt a Boston terrier in Manhattan lived in a fifth-floor walk-up, or so it seemed to me. I would arrive at these apartments breathless and say, “You do know”—huffing and puffing—“that Boston terriers’ legs”—gag—“are very, very short”—catching breath—“don’t you?” I didn’t discount them for that, unless they were looking to adopt a senior dog, in which case I still didn’t want to reject them. It’s a very unique position, sizing up someone to possibly adopt one of our guys. As I’d ride the subway to 135th Street or St. Marks Place, I’d think about the process adoptive parents go through before being allowed to adopt a child, while the people who got pregnant themselves were under no such scrutiny. In the case of our Bostons, we were the guardians and they were our charges. We couldn’t be responsible for backyard breeders or pet shop sellers not investigating the homes, but we could do it and at least we knew we were placing our rescues in homes where we’d be comfortable placing our own dogs.

Most people tried very hard. You could see they’d cleaned up and they listened carefully to questions. One woman opened the door, never looking at me, and led me to the living room, where she kept her eyes glued to the Animal Planet channel. It wasn’t an act to show me she was an animal lover. She was just very weird. But a lot of excellent pet owners were not necessarily people I wanted to hang out with. I sort of liked to think of myself as a moderate, between the crazy animal people and the people who saw pets as disposable. The home checks I did in the city were vastly different from the ones in rural areas, because New York apartments generally didn’t have fenced-in yards. Many people who look to rescue a dog have had one before and know what it involves. And they’re attracted to a breed for a reason. As an apartment dweller with Boston terriers, I had a lot of insight to offer, and could highly recommend them as city dogs. I felt particularly connected to the applicants who’d seen a dog on our website and were applying for them. Many times a photo that gets to someone triggers something. It’s like the way I want to take every dog whose eyes are bulgy and go in different directions. My cousin Mandi, who is a veterinary technician and has worked in many shelters, cautions against picking a dog who looks like a dog who has died, because of course it’s not that dog and she feels like the owners can become disappointed when they see that. Her mother had a beloved English bulldog who passed away and was followed by another one who looked like the first one but was not. She actually hated the new one, and true to her prediction, it outlived her. But having taken Beatrice on the heels of Otto and knowing they were nothing alike and still being okay about it, I wasn’t so sure. I definitely agreed with keeping expectations realistic. I also knew people who would get the same breed of dog over and over and keep naming them the same thing (Sparky 1, Sparky 2, Sparky 3) and it didn’t seem to bother them (though I can’t speak for the Sparkys).

I’d been busy with work and not paying as much attention to the list as normal when I got a call on my cell phone while I was at the gym. It was about ninety-five degrees outside and I had to dry off repeatedly to hear the message. It was Sheryl and she said it was urgent.

I called her back and she boiled down the story. There was a woman with a found Boston in the West Village who was going to dump the dog in the city pound if someone didn’t get him TO-DAY. Violet was with a babysitter so I used the opportunity to get the dog (someone in Pennsylvania was set to foster but she couldn’t pick up the dog immediately). Sheryl said I should call Joy, the volunteer in Pennsylvania, because she’d been in touch with the woman. I called her as I started to walk. I didn’t know Joy, but after two minutes I felt like I’d known and loved her my whole life. She’s from the Deep South and she works as a psychiatric nurse.

“Okay, you ready, Julie?” she asked, took a deep breath, and said, “So last week Sheryl gets a call from this woman saying a guy in her office found this nice Boston in New Jersey and he was going to keep him, but his mother wouldn’t let him. Now I don’t know why this guy lives with his mother but, anyway, he took the dog into the city and gave her to the woman. I talked to her myself and told her I’d meet her anywhere, but not in New York City because I’m afraid to drive there. So she told me she’d be going out to the Hamptons for the weekend and she’d bring the dog halfway and meet up with Cindy [another volunteer], and then right before this was supposed to take place, she canceled because she didn’t have a ride. So I talked to Sheryl and she said tell her to take a car service and
we will pay
for it, but she wouldn’t, so then I get a call from her today saying, ‘You have to take him now or I’m bringing him to the pound.’ So that’s where you come in.”

I took everyone’s phone numbers and called the woman, whose name was Coco, and asked her if she could bring the dog to me. She told me she didn’t have money for that (but she did have money to take the dog to the pound, which was farther?). I asked for her address and told her I could jump on the subway and be right there. She said I should just meet her at the West Fourth Street basketball courts, which I knew from my NYU days.