Everyone who came into my life had to understand. Billie was the kind of shepherd-Lab mix that is so eager to be trained and was a perfectly obedient, wonderful dog. You just had to teach her the words a couple times.”Sit.”“Stand there, Billie.”And she just did whatever you asked.
Soon I gathered another Shepherd mix in my life, a boy. He was really pathetic. At the pound, he wouldn’t even stand up. Totally inexplicably, we named him Chaac, after the Mayan rain god. There was nothing at all about him that resembled a god. He always had his tail turned under and his ears pressed down. He was frightened of life. His mother had the pups in the woods, and he was utterly feral. We had to rehabilitate him. Eventually my friends started calling my house a rehab because I was taking in these dogs who were shaking and traumatized.
I inherited the third dog who became part of that pack. My nephew, Kevin, died of AIDS in 1992. In the last six weeks of his life, he adopted an Akita-shepherd mix. He called her Sadie. She had been hit by a car, and had a broken foot. My sister-in-law, while she was taking care of her son, ended up taking Sadie to the vet twice for foot operations. I thought she was pretty remarkable for doing all that. He asked me if I would take her, and I had refused because I had these two big dogs already. It was hard enough to find people to take care of them when I went away, and there was all that expense when I had to board them.
At Kevin’s memorial service, everybody who stood up, even doctors and nurses, said that what Kevin thought about most in the last days of his life was finding a home for Sadie. It was obvious that I was meant to take her. So Sadie flew home with me right from the funeral in Georgia.
We drove right up to our home in Woodstock from the airport. My other two dogs came up, tails wagging, to greet her. We stopped the car, opened the door, and the first thing she did was attack Chaac. Within thirty seconds, there was screaming and blood everywhere. She sent him to the vet with three puncture wounds. Just home from the airport, we got right back in the car and rushed to the emergency vet.
That was how Sadie came into my life. She terrorized every neighborhood dog. I paid several hundred dollars in vet bills to my neighbors over the years because of Sadie. At least she didn’t go seeking out dogs at their homes; she only attacked dogs who wandered onto my property. If they happened to make that mistake they tended to end up in the hospital. It was a little scary, and I probably would have thought about putting her down if she had come to me in any other way.
She was tough, and very powerfully built. She had very thick fur, a Chow-like head,
and a black spot on her tongue. She was built for hunting, which she did very well. I loved her because she had been my nephew’s dog, and she was very loving to people, just not to any other dog or creature. Akitas can be that way.
Since I live in the country, my dogs live mostly outside. They have a warm place in my barn to sleep when they want. They take care of groundhogs and rabbits and those other pesky little creatures that look cute but destroy your garden. They keep deer away from my plants, which is fine with me, because I’m a gardener. I really enjoy seeing dogs who have a purpose in life, as opposed to being just pampered and treated like children, which they aren’t. We treat our dogs very much like dogs.
Billie, Sadie, and Chaac formed a pack, and watching it was really fascinating. They had a whole life that I was not part of. They were happy to see me, and I fed them, and they obeyed me, and I was definitely the alpha. But the three of them worked out a relationship that was very complicated.
The white shepherd, Billie, stepped up, since she was the first on the property. She defended Chaac and punished Sadie for any kind of infraction. She established the hierarchy in very specific ways. For example, when I would drive home, I would step out of my car and the three dogs would come over. Sadie would attempt to walk toward me, and Billie would take her by the throat and take her down. It was worked out that Billie and Chaac would walk toward me to greet me, and Sadie would wait.
I would throw the tennis ball for the dogs. But Billie determined that Sadie was not
allowed to play ball. If Sadie touched the tennis ball, Billie would punish her severely: teeth to the throat, down to the ground, really tough. If Sadie was sitting somewhere, I could put the tennis ball right in front of her, and she wouldn’t touch it. She wouldn’t even look at it. Because Billie had made the rule that she was not allowed to play with tennis balls. They didn’t need me; they worked it out themselves. Dogs do that.
They lived together for eleven or twelve years. Eventually, as Billie aged, there came a moment when Sadie attacked her and tried to establish her dominance. That’s what dogs in the wild would do.
I was in the city on the day it happened, and the dog sitter was here. It was a vicious, brutal attack. Sadie broke Billie’s back. Though they had slept together, played together, and ate together, Sadie had all this pent-up frustration, getting Billie back for all those years she couldn’t play with the tennis ball.
After that, I kept Billie by my side to take care of her. Even though I try to let dogs be dogs, I had to take care of Billie. First Billie died, then Chaac died, and I was left with Sadie.
It really reinforced for me that dominance is what dogs yearn for. Either you assert dominance, or they do. It was great for me to watch, to see how dogs behave when humans aren’t trying to interfere too much with what they essentially are.
In June 2003, my fiancé and I were driving near my house, and we saw a pit bull standing in the middle of the road, literally on the double yellow line. I screeched to a stop, got out of the car, and went up to the dog. He had a collar on and looked like he was in good health. I dragged him off the road. By the time I got back into the driver’s seat, he was back in the middle of the road again. Just standing there, oddly enough.
It was real pit-bull behavior. He had determined that he was going to stand on that spot in the road. And no one was going to tell him not to. There is a determination in pit bulls that is really strong. So I put him in my car because I didn’t want someone else to come around the turn and hit him.
Spike was a beautiful six-month-old puppy. He has a black eye, like Petey from the Our Gang television show. He has the floppy ears. He’s white with black spots. I went out in the neighborhood, knocked on doors, put up signs, and didn’t find anyone who claimed him. I fell completely in love with this dog, but then, of course, the phone rang.
With trepidation, I answered. It was somebody saying, “I think you have my dog.”
I said, “Oh? Well, describe him.”
She described him utterly accurately. Obviously it was her dog. Then her husband got on the phone and started talking about what a bad dog Spike was. He said, “He always broke out of his cage.”
I asked, “How long do you keep him in a cage?”
He said, “Well, we work sometimes fourteen hours a day.”
As soon as he said that, I said to myself, I just have to figure out how to get out of this gracefully. They didn’t know where I lived.
But it worked out. I said, “I’m in love with your dog. I’ll buy him from you.”
The guy said, “How much would you pay?”
You can see what a tough negotiator I am. I said, “How much do you want?”
The guy said, “Twenty dollars.”
I said, “I’ll give you forty.”
He told me where to meet him. I kind of thought there would be a confrontation. But when I met him and his wife, he admitted that he was a little embarrassed because he knew he should never have owned a dog. He said, “We know it’s not right to keep a dog in a cage fourteen hours a day.”
I said, “Well, he’ll be really well taken care of.” It worked out for everybody.
Sadie didn’t attack him at first because he was a puppy. But on the second day, Spike galloped up to her, wanting to play. That was not the way to approach an older, cranky Akita.
I had boots on luckily. I had to rip them apart with a lot of kicking and yelling. But I got them
apart. I’ve broken up a lot of dog fights in my time, but I’ve never been bitten.
There is a certain validity to fear of pit bulls because they were bred to fight in the pits. But they were trained not to bite their owners. The owners of the dogs had to lean in to break up the fight at a certain point. They would grab their dogs.
Sadie attacked Spike twice after that, very seriously. At one point, my friends were creating all this well-intentioned drama, saying I had to give Spike away or Sadie would kill him. I even made an appointment to drop him off at a kennel. My heart was breaking, though, and I couldn’t do it.
So what I did—I’ll tell you, but you’ll think I’m crazy. They were hanging out in front of house. I went up to the Akita and the pit bull, and I faced them. I said, “This is it. This is my house, and I have the right to make the decisions here. You are going to live together. And you have to start living together right now.”
I know I live in Woodstock, but I’m really not the “touchy feely” type. But I have to say that from that moment they lived in peace with each other. I had seen dogs work these things out before. And I just figured, They’ll work it out. And they did.
Spike learned to be submissive to the older female. He learned you don’t run toward Sadie, you approach her from the side. That’s how dogs show respect—they never make eye contact. And they were good friends until Sadie’s death about a year ago. She was about twelve. All my dogs come to me rescued, so we never know their exact ages.
Spike is the single dog in my life right now. He is the least ferocious and fearsome pit bull there is. He is so popular that he should run for mayor of Woodstock. People don’t invite me anymore, they invite Spike, and I come along. He is fascinated by babies, and he loves my three-year-old goddaughter. I take him to kids’ soccer games. He’s like a mascot.
I’m very passionate about Spike. But I have to say I’m also very passionate about my fiancé. I should make that clear. James never had a dog in his life—never, not as a child, not as an adult. He’s an actor and lived in an apartment in New York City. Spike is his first dog. He’s completely enamored with him.
A day in Spike’s life is a day many people would like to have. I get up awfully early, around four-thirty or five, to begin work. Spike does not get up. He sleeps in his crate in the kitchen. It’s open—he just chooses to sleep there. He watches me make coffee, then stays in his bed until around seven. Then I figure he needs to get up. I have to sometimes drag him by the collar to the door.
He lives inside, as opposed to my other dogs who used to live outside. He really has no interest in an activity that doesn’t include a human being. My other dogs would love to go running and hunting. I used to open the door for my other dogs and say,
“Go kill something.”And they’d bound out, full of energy.
If I don’t go with Spike, he has no interest in going outside. We take a walk at seven, the first of several during the day. Right now he’s on an arranged walk schedule with a lady who comes three times a week to relieve me a little of the duty.
He has play dates, when I take him to play with other dogs.
People call and borrow Spike. The woman who boards Spike when I’m traveling sometimes calls and says, “I have a dog here who needs some play. Could I borrow Spike?”
Spike loves it. I could probably rent him and make a living off him. At a certain point, we’ll go visit his friend, a black Lab named Jagger. Spike and I will stop and visit with the kids. He rides in the car while I go shopping. At night he heads for his crate, utterly content to be there.
A pit bull’s attention span is very short. You can throw a stick for him once or twice. He’ll grab the stick very enthusiastically, see a squirrel, and drop the stick. Or he’ll decide to chew on a clump of grass. He doesn’t have the intensity that Retrievers have.
I think my dogs have helped me spiritually and emotionally. They are always there for me. They’re the perfect companions. The pack of dogs were present during the darkest times in my life, when I was really struggling with drug addiction and a lot of grief.
They have seen me at my worst, walking around the house, whacked out on drugs, very paranoid. And they kept giving me this complete, unconditional love.
I remember very clearly one horrible binge weekend, when for at least twenty-four hours I hadn’t fed them. I was just too screwed up. I remember as I was coming off that binge, I felt this incredible guilt that I had forgotten them. And they were so loyal; they were sitting there, waiting for me, as if nothing unusual was happening.
Even though their master was locked in the house, covering the windows with sheets, thinking the FBI was after him. There was no judgment. None at all.
It was hard, recovering from my drug addiction. It took a long time. But I had this great place to live, and it became a kind of rehab for me. One of the steps, as part of my spiritual program, was to make amends to those I’d injured. As soon as I heard that, I knew what I had to do. I had been thinking a lot about the dogs, about how grateful I was to them for sticking with me through all the hard times. They never thought I was crazy. They never ran off when I forgot to feed them. So I made amends to the dogs. I apologized to them, and tried from then on to be attentive to their feeding times and the things that they thought were important.
I talk to the dogs all the time. I think a great thing about having dogs is that you can talk to yourself but pretend you are talking to your dogs. I walk around the house all the time talking. But there’s a dog present. So I’m not really talking to myself. Or in the car. They have heard all my screenplay ideas first. What’s great about dogs is they don’t give a shit about screenplays or Hollywood or my pathetic career. All they care about is the squirrel running through the woods.
All these false things we get attached to—dogs don’t. They have a great sense of sanity. They know where the center is. That’s why I love dogs.
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Randall McCormick: MESSAGE FROM THE HEART
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In churches and cathedrals of southern France, there is often a statue of a saint who holds a staff in one hand while a friendly dog leans against his side. This is St. Roche, patron saint of dog trainers.
His story is an interesting one. In 1350, he was the son of the wealthy mayor of Montpellier and lived in aristocratic comfort until one summer when Pope Urban V visited from Rome. Roche was transfixed by the pope’s devotion to his faith and decided to make a pilgrimage to Rome. God showed his approval by giving him the gift of healing.
On his return journey, Roche entered village after village where the plague was decimating people. At each village, he tended to the sick, often curing them. But in the village of Piacerna, Roche himself fell sick.
He didn’t want the villagers to see his suffering, as he knew they would tend to him and thus reinfect themselves. So he disappeared into a quiet spot in the woods to live out his days. But a dog followed him to his hiding place, and each day the dog appeared carrying a loaf of bread. Roche ate the bread, which gave him sustenance to recover. When he was strong enough, the dog led him back to the home of his master, where Roche found friendship and the means to start over in his life as a healer.
The cessation of the plague in 1439 was attributed to prayers to St. Roche. In recent times, various priests of the Catholic Church have advised their parishioners that against an epidemic like AIDS, prayers to St. Roche are once again in order.
While dogs aren’t needed to carry bread to the sick any more, Randall McCormick’s story demonstrates the ways in which dogs help us—as comforters and companions, warmers of the body and the soul. He talked with me from his home in Atlanta about the important part dogs have played in his life.
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FOR AS FAR BACK as I can remember, my family always had animals. Cats, fish, birds, frogs, turtles, rabbits, and, of course, dogs. We were a very large family; I’m the last of seven children.
My father was a plasterer for the city of Milwaukee, and when I was seven years old we moved to a one-street subdivision within the city limits. Our house was right on the border, as far out as you could go and still be in Milwaukee. There was a lot of farmland around us. My parents felt that it was a safe place to raise their kids.
My first recollection of a family dog was a Collie named Queenie. She was a beautiful purebred, and my mom thought it would be a great idea to breed her. We were all in favor of it, because we could each imagine ourselves with our own puppy. But when it came time to do it, Queenie bit the male.
Shortly after Queenie died, at age eleven, my sister-in-law Judy came over and said she knew of a great dog for us. The couple who owned her was going to put her to sleep. It never occurred to my mom that there might be some problem with her. She just said, “Sure, we’ll take her.”
We were all excited to see our new dog. She was a terrier mix with a mottled brown coat. As soon as Judy put her down on the floor, she ran under the kitchen table and wouldn’t come out. I crawled down and reached out to pet her, but she backed away. My mother said she spent the whole first night sitting under the table, trembling. She was afraid of everybody and everything. It made us wonder if she had been abused.
Paws and Reflect Page 13