Dog Blog Rant: On the Other Paw

Growl...growl...growl...I typed this on a Saturday in August and thought for a while about whether I wanted to post it. I don't want to join the chorus of "Oh let's pamper domestic animal species into extinction by screaming that every single domestic animal, including hens, needs to be locked up in solitary confinement and sterilized!" I want that chorus to be recognized as coming from pet haters; I want people who actually like animals to start answering it, whenever they hear it, with "Oh go neuter-and-spay yourselves." But then, once in a while, I do see things that make us think, “On the other paw...” and that would be one of Candice's paws with seven claws each.

I was walking to work as usual, one morning in August, and I saw a car stop on the bridge where Route 23 overpasses Route 58. The car then started again, and two dogs ran down along the road. I didn’t photograph the car because I hadn’t seen whether it was the car from which the dogs were dumped out on the bridge, or a passer-by’s car that had stopped to avoid hitting the dogs, who obviously were not accustomed to dodging traffic. The smaller dog ran up the bank above the road and scampered into the weeds. The bigger dog looked as if she considered it and realized she wasn’t small or fast enough to scramble up the steep rocky bank. She was so scared of being in a strange, dangerous place, approached by a stranger, she didn’t know whether to go into a threat display or try to curl into a small ball in the ditch. Oops, she couldn’t curl into a small ball any more. She decided to cower beside the road, shiverinng visibly and wetting herself in panic.

She would have been a dangerous dog if she’d wanted to be. She looked like a mix of bull terrier and something a bit bigger. She looked as if she had never entertained an angry thought, but you wouldn’t want to be around her if she ever did.

Possibly that was why somebody didn’t want her to have puppies. When puppies out of that (well, you know what the correct word is) start scampering about and chomping on things, y’know, they could really chomp...

Or maybe it was because she wanted to be a sweet pet dog, and whoever bred her wanted puppies who were vicious fighting dogs. “Pit bulls” are so called because rather than being trained to herd actual bulls, like bulldogs, they were made to fight other dogs in pits. Bull terriers aren’t nearly as big or ugly as some other dogs. You can carry them around in your arms, let them sleep in your chimney corner or under the cow’s manger to watch for rats, and that is what nature intended them to do. Terriers can wipe out a rat colony where cats fail. But the “sport,” so called, was proving that some terriers can also kill those bigger, uglier dogs. Back in jolly old England there used to be people (?) who thought that was as much fun as a horse race. Most of those people were hanged or shot, but some escaped to America. If you turn over the wrong rock you might still find one somewhere.

Anyway this dog looked as if she might have weighed twenty-five pounds, at least five of which would have consisted of unborn puppies. She was white with blackish brown and tan spots. She had a terrier face, the jaw square and strong but not wider than the rest of the head. She was pregnant, not yet nursing, and looked close to term.

What she actually said was, of course, “Ow ow ow,” which was easily interpreted as “Where am I? Why did they put me out here? This place looks very dangerous. What’s going to become of my babies and me? Can you help me find my way back home?”

I thought that if she made it past the Cat Sanctuary to the home of the Young Grouch, she might be all right. The Grouch is not so very young any more, a Gulf War veteran and a real misanthrope, but he is kind to dogs if other humans keep out of the way and let the dogs find him for themselves.

All I could do was call the police, before this dog found her bearings and became desperate and dangerous. She had that in her. She had learned to depend on humans for food; if she couldn’t do that, she was likely to start killing chickens or kittens, or lambs, or even calves.

I didn’t have food for her. I had a job to do. I was lucky to have a cell phone to report the dog’s plight with.

People. (Is “people” even the applicable word?) If you don’t want your child to learn all about the wonders of birth and nursing and the joys of finding homes for anything that resembles the scare-word “pit bulls,” it’s not all that expensive to have a terrier spayed. If you’re employed and don’t want to be hit up for an inflated veterinary fee, you can always bribe a retired person to claim the dog and get her spayed for a reasonable fee. 

You cannot throw a pregnant bull terrier out on the highway and abandon her like that. You know she’s going to give birth, and then she’s going to want to eat for six, and people are going to panic about "A STARVING SNEAKING DROOLING PIT BULL! PROBABLY RABID!" and probably be so hysterical they only break her leg when they shoot her.

Whereas if you’d done the decent thing...the feed store near the retirement project would be the first place I would have tried to place her. They have dumpsters, and rats. They also have customers who might have wanted to give that dog a good home.

What did she do, anyway? Snap at somebody who bumped her and disturbed the prospective puppies inside her? You didn’t know that terriers are like cats only with stronger jaws, fierce little predators who nibble on people they like and bite when they’re scared, and when terriers bite they draw blood? Is that not the first thing everybody learns about all terriers, and don’t reasonable people live happily with terriers as pets, anyway? 

Or did she eat a chicken? Like duh, pregnant animals have big appetites and sudden cravings just like pregnant humans; so what? You couldn’t keep her away from chickens?

I had no facts to share with the police except that this friendly pregnant ex-pet was wandering around beside the highway. I walked on into town, where I heard that another whole pack of dogs, this time bigger than the ones people hauled up past the Cat Sanctuary to abandon "in the woods" during the Big Freeze, had been dumped out on the bridge. Other people hadn't seen the pregnant terrier and her smaller companion because they'd been more concerned about two bigger, scarier dogs they'd seen stravaging around, heading downtown, as if looking for stray children to devour. Lisiwayu would probably have brought those dogs into her house if she'd been in town. Lisiwayu was not in town. The dogcatcher wasn't either, and I didn't see a police car drive out from town toward where the pregnant terrier had been.

I didn't see her on the way home either. I might have tried to bring her to the Cat Sanctuary and lock her into a cage where she could give birth in peace, if I'd seen her, so I'm sort of glad I didn't see her. I have no experience with newborn puppies. The dog might, con suma suerte, have found her way to the Young Grouch. 

What could she possibly have done to deserve to be dumped out in a suburb, with a lot of town people, while being "A BIG FAT PIT BULL"!?

I wouldn’t want to be responsible for a pregnant bull terrier myself, but what of it? You were feeding her before she was pregnant. You could have made sure she wouldn’t become pregnant. You were what she had for a friend, whoever you were, and with friends like you, who needs enemies.

If you have a dog, and don’t want to have dogs, and if your dog is a mixed breed with a bull terrier look, get her spayed now.

https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/5

Because bull terriers are so much harder to place than Dalmatians.