Giant George

by Dave Nasser

  There were also a whole load of questions I needed to have answered, as Great Danes, like any other special breed of animal, come with their own set of unique challenges. One of these was their potential, given their great size, for having serious problems with their hips. Happily, that potential could at least in part be spotted after a simple examination when the dog was still a puppy.

  George (and I would come to realize this was also the case with almost all the dogs our veterinarian saw) took to Doc Wallace right away, and wasted no time in making his admiration felt, by wagging his tail and leaning his ever-growing frame against the doc’s legs. George loved to lean against people he liked. It was one of his favorite ways of feeling close. It’s a real Great Dane thing, this love of leaning up against people. As it turned out—understandably, I guess—George’s affection would slowly begin to dissipate as he made more visits to the vet, as soon as he realized that going to Doc Wallace’s would invariably mean lots of poking and prodding and needles.

  But when George liked you, you knew about it. Now that he was getting bigger, his displays of affection could have you pinned temporarily against a wall or a piece of furniture. It was his version of a bear hug.

  Right away you could see that our vet had a gift. It seemed he could do almost anything to an animal without it getting angry and growling or biting. I’m not sure I’d have reacted with such grace and equanimity had a man in plaid pants laid me down on my back and immediately splayed my hind legs, even if it was to investigate my hip joints. But George didn’t so much as huff at him. And his hips, the doc confirmed, seemed just fine.

  “But you’ll need to get him neutered,” he told me, as he righted George. “And it’s important that we do it at the right time,” he added, “because if it’s left too long, it can result in his bones not fusing properly and then overgrowing, which could give him all sorts of other problems.” I assured him that that’s what we’d do. “And at the same time,” he explained, “we can do his gastropexy—that way he’s only under the anesthetic one time.”

  The gastropexy, he explained, was an operation to staple George’s stomach to the inside lining of his abdominal wall to prevent something nasty called bloat from happening. Bloat is a well-recognized problem with large breeds—most commonly in Great Danes—due to their size and the dimensions of their chests, and is caused by a buildup of swallowed air in the stomach.

  Swallowing air when stressed is very common in Great Danes. They tend to do it most when they’re feeling anxious, and that happens when they lack company. They’re not great dogs to get if you’re going to be away working all day, because they really do hate to be left alone, as we were well aware.

  Bloat not only creates pressure on the surrounding organs, it can also lead to the stomach flipping over on itself and cutting off its own blood supply. It’s dangerous if that happens, as it can kill a dog in hours; even with professional intervention and treatment, around thirty percent of dogs with bloat die. The gastropexy, therefore, was a sensible option, especially since he was going under for his sterilization anyway. It might also take his mind off an even more distressing scenario: having some human, however friendly he appeared on the surface, put him under and then cut off his manhood. It was just as well George didn’t know what we were talking about right then, or I swear he’d have bolted for the mountains.

  A more sensible option still, and I remember this did cross my mind as George and I left the vet’s office, would have been not to have a Great Dane in the first place, given this huge potential for heartache that came with them. Like many large dogs, their life span wasn’t that long. Anything over about seven or eight years was pretty good going for a Dane—something we’d known from the outset. But now I had a bunch of new pictures in my mind of the horrible things that could go wrong with our pet—the potential for hip problems and the dreaded bloat—which could take his life at an even earlier age.

  For the moment, however, George was pronounced fit and well, and as fine a specimen of a Great Dane puppy as the doc had ever seen. And, as I pointed out to Christie that evening, so far—given his current growth rate—the biggest…

  Once George had begun his inoculations and was free to socialize with other dogs, we were finally able to unleash him on the world and let him explore a little farther afield. Since there was a dog park not too far from where we lived, it made sense to go and acquaint ourselves with it.

  But first, being responsible parents, we decided we should get him a little training. Christie had seen puppy-training classes advertised at the pet store we usually used to buy our ever-expanding supplies of puppy food, so she signed up to join some group classes.

  George proved himself to be a model pupil, and took to the training with real enthusiasm. The system was based on Pavlovian-style conditioning, using clickers to reinforce various commands. He took to it easily, soon learned the commands “sit,” “stay,” “down” and so on, and graduated from class in no time. However, Christie felt, since he was such a large breed of animal, some private tutoring would be beneficial too.

  We’d chosen a Great Dane partly because they are temperamentally quiet, well-behaved pets, but we’d also read that they could be emotionally fragile if not properly trained from the start, and this could lead to them becoming difficult to manage. We had no idea at this point just how big George was going to get, but it made sense if you were going to have a big animal in your home to train that animal to obey you at all times—not to do so would have been irresponsible.

  So George had five sessions of training with a private dog trainer, and he loved every minute of that too. The private trainer used something called a “pinch collar,” which looks, if you don’t know about them, like an instrument of torture, since it’s a chain-link collar with blunt spikes at regular intervals that face inward, toward the dog’s neck, but it’s actually much kinder than a choke collar. Whereas the choke collar does pretty much what its name suggests and constricts the throat, the pinch collar simply gets the dog’s attention, making the process of getting him to know his place in your “pack” much quicker to establish. And since the key to having happy dogs is for them to know where they stand, we felt the training was money well spent.

  With the help of the pinch collar, our boisterous boy became, once again, a model pupil. So we were done. Our ball of cuddly blue fuzz had come a long way since we’d picked him up from the Phoenix airport. As well as being bigger—and, boy, was he getting bigger—he was also confident, socialized, obedient and good to go. He was ready to meet the world, play and make some new doggie friends.

  We just had no idea how tricky that was going to turn out to be.

  CHAPTER 4

  It’s a Jungle Out There

  Like any new parents who dote on their baby, we thought George was lovely—the perfect family pet. Okay, so that may be a little bit of an overstatement, to be honest, since he was still big, and getting bigger, and chowing down huge amounts of food, and making a mess, and doing poops, and taking over the whole bed, but even so he was a real nice puppy.

  And like any new parents, when we started taking him to the dog park, we hoped everyone else would think he was a nice puppy too. Why wouldn’t they? George was totally gorgeous.

  I guess we just hadn’t figured it out yet.

  In Tucson there are several dog parks—places where people can take their pets to run around off the leash, play with other dogs and generally enjoy some downtime together, safely away from any roads. Our nearest one was the Morris K. Udall Park, which was named after an esteemed Arizona politician, Morris King Udall, who’d served in the House of Representatives for thirty years. Morris was a bit of a local hero by all accounts. The state of Arizona was always at the forefront of championing the rights of Native American Indians anyway, and Morris, together with his brother, Stewart, was responsible for several political initiatives to support them. He was also an enthusiastic and committed environmentalist and saw through a lot of important legi
slation. It was a nice park; I’m sure he would have liked it.

  The park was a five-minute drive from our new home and was split into two big areas: an area for puppies and small dogs, up to around thirty pounds, and another area for adult and bigger dogs. Right away this gave us a problem: George, at just a few months old, was still very much a puppy, but already weighed more than the maximum thirty pounds for the puppy area. Still, since he was a puppy, we figured he should be in the small dog area. After all, you wouldn’t leave a young child in a schoolyard full of teenagers, would you? But right away, on our very first visit to the dog park, it appeared he wasn’t welcome in the puppy part. Though he wasn’t doing anything wrong—he was just doing what puppies do: running around, having fun, getting to know the other dogs—he was clearly the object of disapproval.

  “Did you hear that?” hissed Christie. She was sitting at one of the benches in the shade. I’d been throwing George’s ball for him and had just sent it soaring. He galloped off to get it, and I sat down.

  “Hear what?”

  “What that woman over there said!”

  “What woman over wh—”

  “Shhh!” Christie whispered. “She’ll hear you!”

  “Oh, right,” I said. “Sorry.” I followed her gaze. “What, that woman? The one in the green?”

  “Yes, that woman. Her.”

  “So what did she say?”

  Christie moved her mouth a little closer to my ear. “She pointed and she said, ‘What are those folks doing, bringing him in here?’ And then she shook her head. Look, there!” Christie now poked me in the rib cage. “Look—see? She’s pointing at him again!”

  I rubbed my rib. “Just ignore her. He’s a puppy, so he has a perfect right to be here.”

  She beckoned to George, who was galloping back with his prize. “Hmmph,” she said, picking up the ball from where George had dropped it. “She obviously doesn’t think so.”

  “Well, that’s just too bad. He isn’t doing anything wrong.”

  I took a look at her as Christie stood and hurled the ball into the air again. The woman’s dog was small and well manicured—like a lawn, a bit like her 1980s haircut. The dog was white, and looked like it might be a Pomeranian. It also, I saw, had a bow in its hair.

  The bow told me nothing, of course—absolutely nothing. But at the same time I really couldn’t help but consider that… well, it did kind of figure. Would she, I wondered, view George a little more kindly if we’d taken the trouble to accessorize his head? But no, that was silly; it wouldn’t make the slightest difference.

  It was about then that the woman glanced in our direction, before turning back to the other owner she’d been chatting with, their conversation clearly still about George. George was still doing nothing other than playing with the other dogs and puppies, and, if anything, was doing so a little shyly. You could see that he was nervous about being there; he was actually a bit anxious about all the other dogs milling around him. With or without ribbons in their hair, they were still dogs, pack animals with a code of seniority, and among them, George was very much bottom dog. He looked to me about as threatening as a wet paper bag.

  “You see!” said Christie again, indignant as any slighted mother.

  “Ignore her,” I told her. “George is doing nothing wrong. Besides, if she has something to say about him being here, then she should quit with all the whispering and pointing, and come over and say it to our faces.” I added a glare in her direction to display my solidarity, and decided that the best thing to do was to dismiss her as a silly, neurotic, overanxious woman.

  But what did I know? She clearly wasn’t alone in her disapproval.

  “That dog shouldn’t be in here.”

  It was only a couple of days later, and George and I were back in the dog park. This time the person was saying it to my face, and it wasn’t the silly, neurotic, overanxious woman. Well, he might have been some of those things, but he was definitely not a woman.

  Since I was sitting and he was standing, I blinked up at him, shielding my eyes from the glare of the sun. “Excuse me?”

  “You shouldn’t have your dog in here,” he went on. “He’s too big. This part’s for small dogs. It says on the sign.”

  I stood up. “And puppies,” I pointed out, because I’d read the sign too. “It’s also the area for puppies. And he’s a puppy. He’s only just seven months old. He’s too young to be in the adult dog area.”

  “But he’s too big to be in here,” the man said, clearly implacable. “He could hurt other dogs by running into them—”

  “Which he doesn’t.”

  “Or treading on them accidentally—”

  “Which he doesn’t do either.”

  “But he might. C’mon, here! He’s way, way too big. He should be”—the guy pointed—“in there.”

  But the truth was that far from George hurting or intimidating any other dog, the exact opposite was what mostly happened. The smaller dogs would run both around him and under him, and he’d be constantly sidestepping them, anxious and jittery, not to mention traumatized, as any sensitive guy would be, when some of the adult ones tried to hump his legs.

  But it seemed our George, without doing anything to deserve it, had been cast in the role of social misfit. And, bowing to the pressure from other owners, which was becoming oppressive and difficult to deal with, after a few visits during which we took George to the puppy section, we decided that perhaps we’d better take heed of the comments and give him a try in the large dog enclosure instead.

  At least there, we thought, he wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb, and as a big guy perhaps he would feel right at home. And maybe we wouldn’t feel quite so stressed. It was no fun to sit there and feel everyone’s eyes on us—even less when they started up with all the pointing.

  How wrong we were. This was far worse. The fact is that whatever size a creature is, it’s the maturity that is important, and with pack animals like dogs, this is key. George, however intimidating-looking people seemed to find him, was very much a puppy in the world of the adult dog enclosure, and right off the other dogs let him know that.

  Whereas in the puppy part he’d struggled with his size and lack of confidence, here, even though his size didn’t matter, he was bullied remorselessly from the start. He was constantly buffeted by other, older dogs, who made their authority clear by running fast and bumping into him, sniffing him aggressively and generally acting kind of mean. Any time we threw his ball or his beloved piece of rope for him, there was always sure to be some other dog who’d go haring after it, invariably, even if he didn’t beat George to it, making it clear that he’d better keep back.

  It was hard to police this—they were animals, just being animals—but a line had to be drawn, and one day, sure enough, it got crossed. We were at the dog park one lunchtime a few weeks later, when George was attacked by not one but two dogs at once. They were a pair of mixed-breed dogs, both smaller than George, but adult and very confident.

  We’d just arrived at the park that afternoon, and were walking toward the central area, when this guy came in with his two dogs. It all started incredibly quickly. One minute all was quiet, and George was bounding around happily; the next thing I knew, a terrible commotion had started up, with that all-too-familiar—not to mention horrible—noise when a dog starts acting really aggressive.

  I leapt up, but by the time I was over to the three animals, the first of the dogs was just about to bite George. The other was at his opposite flank, trying to do the same thing, and Georgie was whimpering and trembling uncontrollably. There was no fight in this gentle giant of ours, but his lack of reaction or retaliation didn’t seem to make any difference.

  The other dogs’ owner looked as shocked by what was happening as I was. Though he repeatedly yelled at his animals to get off George, neither dog paid him the slightest bit of attention. In the end, it took brute force to drag the dogs off a now terrified George, the owner hauling one of his pets off by
the collar, and then, having had no success in getting near the front end of his other dog, and no other option, yanking him off by his tail.

  He looked mortified, and was very apologetic about it all, and immediately put his dogs back on their leashes. As for me, I’d been a dog “dad” for such a short time, I had no idea what the appropriate etiquette was at times like this. As scared as I’d been of what might have happened to poor George, who was shaking, and cowering close at my side, I figured the whole thing must have come as a complete shock to the other guy as well, so I accepted his obviously sincere apology, and just hoped George didn’t run into his two dogs again. The guy left the park right away.

  I gave George a once-over, and no blood had been shed, but he was clearly bruised and very traumatized. His confidence, always tenuous, was shot to pieces, and it occurred to me that George had been bullied at the park only because we’d let a few dog owners in the puppy part bully us. We decided then and there that the adult park was not where he belonged yet, and began taking him back into the puppy and small-dog part, determined to ignore the constant comments and glares from the other owners. The phrase “pick on someone your own size” had a distinctly hollow ring. Our poor pup was a misfit, it seemed.

  Ironically, it was only a few days after the incident in the adult dog section that a guy entered the park with a Great Dane. As dog owners do when they have pets in common, he came straight over to the chain-link fence that separated the big dogs from the smaller ones, beckoned to Christie and me and said, “Hi.” His dog was named Drake and was a handsome black Great Dane. He obviously also had a great temperament, like George’s—you could see it. He was, his owner told us, about five years old. He seemed enormous to us, and having become so preoccupied with George’s size lately, we asked him how much Drake weighed.

  “One hundred and forty pounds,” he said. We were both openmouthed. Yes, George was pretty big, but we couldn’t imagine him ever getting—ever being—that big. It seemed impossible, unthinkable, that George could get so huge.