Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover's Soul

by Jack Canfield

  In 1971, on the fourth of July, a gorilla was born at the San Francisco Zoo. She was named Hanabi-Ko, a Japanese word meaning “fireworks child,” but everyone called her Koko. She was three months old when I first saw her, a tiny gorilla clinging to her mother’s back.

  Soon after that, an illness spread through the entire gorilla colony. Koko almost died, but she was nursed back to health by doctors and staff at the zoo. Her mother was unable to care for her, and even though Koko was healthy again, she wasn’t old enough to live among older gorillas. It seemed the perfect solution that I begin my work with her.

  I started visiting Koko at the zoo every day. At first, the baby gorilla clearly didn’t like me. She ignored me or bit me when I tried to pick her up. Then slowly, because I never failed to come see her every day, Koko began to trust me.

  The first words I attempted to teach Koko in sign language were “drink,” “food” and “more.” I asked the zoo assistants who helped in the nursery to form the sign for “food” with their hands whenever they gave Koko anything to eat. I signed “drink” each time I gave Koko her bottle and formed her small hand into the sign for “drink,” too.

  One morning, about a month after I began working with Koko, I was slicing fruit for her snack and Koko was watching me.

  “Food,” she signed.

  I was too surprised to respond.

  “Food,” she clearly signed again.

  I wanted to jump for joy. Koko could sense I was happy with her. Excited, she grabbed a bucket, plunked it over her head and ran wildly around the playroom.

  By age two, Koko’s signs were more than just simple, one-word requests. She was learning signs quickly and stringing them together.

  “There mouth, mouth—you there,” Koko signed when she wanted me to blow fog on the nursery window to draw in with our fingers. And “Pour that hurry drink hurry,” when she was thirsty.

  The next year, Koko moved into a specially remodeled trailer on the Stanford University campus, where I could be with her more of the time and she could concentrate on her language lessons with fewer distractions.

  We had a big birthday party for Koko when she turned three. She carefully ate almost all of her birthday cake with a spoon. But when it came time for the last bite, the little gorilla couldn’t resist. She scooped the cake up with her hand and stuffed it into her mouth.

  “More eat,” she signed.

  By the age of five, Koko knew more than 200 words in ASL. I recorded every sign that she used and even videotaped her actions so I could study her use of sign language later. The more signs Koko learned, the more she showed me her personality. She argued with me, displayed a very definite sense of humor and expressed strong opinions. She even used sign language to tell lies.

  Once I caught her poking the window screen of her trailer with a chopstick.

  “What are you doing?” I signed to her.

  Koko quickly put the stick in her mouth like a cigarette. “Mouth smoke,” she answered. Another time I caught her chewing a crayon when she was supposed to be drawing a picture.

  “You’re not eating that, are you?” I asked her.

  “Lip,” Koko signed, and she quickly took the crayon out of her mouth and moved it across her lips, as if putting on lipstick. I was so amazed, I almost forgot to reprimand her.

  Like any naughty child, when Koko behaved badly, she was sent to a corner in her trailer. She was quite aware that she had misbehaved: “Stubborn devil,” she would sign to herself. If it was only for a small thing, she would excuse herself after a little while in the corner. But if she felt she had been very bad, she soon turned around to get my attention. Then she would sign, “Sorry. Need hug.”

  I decided to find a companion for Koko and so Michael, a three-year-oldmale gorilla, came to live with us. I wanted to teach him sign language and I also hoped that one day, Koko and Michael would mate. Would they teach their baby ASL? It was a question I was eager to have answered.

  Michael was a good student. He often concentrated even longer on his lessons than Koko did. At first, Koko was very jealous of her new playmate. She called Michael names and blamed him for things he hadn’t done. They squabbled like a couple of typical human toddlers.

  “Stupid toilet,” she signed, when asked about Michael.

  “Stink bad squash gorilla,” Michael answered back.

  Koko loved to see Michael get scolded, especially when it was for doing something that Koko had encouraged him to do. She would listen to me telling Michael to be a good gorilla, and a deep breathy sound would come out of her—it was the sound of a gorilla laughing.

  But they loved to play together and spent a lot of time wrestling, tickling and signing to each other.

  If you asked Koko what her favorite animal was, she would invariably sign “gorilla.” But she also loved cats. Her two favorite books were Puss in Boots and The Three Little Kittens. Still, nothing prepared me for the way Koko reacted when a small, gray, tailless kitten came to live with us.

  When asked what presents she wanted for her birthday or Christmas, Koko always asked for a cat. When she was twelve, we brought her three kittens to choose from and she picked the one kitten who didn’t have a tail. The very first time she picked up the little kitten, she tried to tuck him in the crease of her thigh, and then on the back of her neck, two of the places mother gorillas carry their babies. She called him her “baby” and picked the name “All Ball.” Without a tail, the kitten did look like a ball.

  All Ball was the first kitten Koko had, but he was not her first pet; she had played with a rabbit and a bird among other small animals.

  “Koko love Ball. Soft good cat cat,” she signed.

  Then one morning All Ball was hit and instantly killed by a car. I had to tell Koko what happened. At first Koko acted as if she didn’t hear me, but when I left the trailer I heard her cry. It was her distress call—a loud, long series of high-pitched hoots. I cried too. Three days later, she told me how she felt.

  “Cry, sad, frown,” Koko signed.

  “What happened to All Ball?” I asked her.

  “Blind, sleep cat,” she answered. She had seemed to have grasped the concept of death.

  Koko finally chose another kitten, a soft gray one.

  “Have you thought of a name yet?” I asked her.

  “That smoke. Smoke smoke,” she answered.

  The kitten was a smoky gray, so we named her Smoky.

  Many days when Koko has her reading lessons, she sees the written word for cat and then forms the sign for that word. We can’t show her too many pictures of cats, though. She still gets sad when she sees any cat that looks at all like All Ball, her adored first kitten.

  My language project with Koko, which I began in 1972, has become my life’s work. Over the years, I have watched Koko grow up. As a scientist, I have documented every phase of her development. As a “parent,” I have cared about and for her and have been proud of her every accomplishment. Koko has surprised, enlightened and inspired me. Although raised by humans and now part of a family of humans and gorillas, Koko has no illusions that she is a human. When asked who she is, she always signs, “Fine animal gorilla.”

  Francine (Penny) Patterson, Ph.D.

  7

  SAYING

  GOOD-BYE

  . . . love knows not its own depth

  until the hour of separation.

  Kahlil Gibran

  ©Calvin and Hobbes. Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

  The Price of Love

  If only I can keep the kids from naming him. That would be the trick.

  “No family needs two dogs,” I began dogmatically. And so I invoked the Bauer Anonymity Rule (BAR), which prohibits the naming of any animal not on the endangered-species list. That includes anything that walks or squawks, sings or swims, hops, crawls, flies or yodels, because at our place a pet named is a pet claimed.

  “But we gotta call him something,” o
ur four children protested.

  “All right, then, call him Dog X,” I suggested. They frowned, but I thought it the perfect handle for something I hoped would float away like a generic soap powder.

  My no-name strategy proved a dismal failure, however. Long before the pup was weaned, the kids secretly began calling him Scampy, and before I knew it he had become as much a fixture as the fireplace. And just as immovable.

  All of this could have been avoided, I fumed, if Andy, a neighborhood mutt, had only stayed on his side of the street. But at age fourteen, this scruffy, arthritic mongrel hobbled into our yard for a tête-à-tête with our blue-blooded schnauzer, Baroness Heidi of Princeton on her AKC papers, who was a ten-year Old Maid. Before one could say “safe sex,” we had a miracle of Sarah and Abraham proportions.

  We were unaware that Andy had left his calling card until the middle of one night during our spring vacation in Florida. I thought the moaning noise was the ocean. But investigation revealed it was coming from Heidi, whom Shirley, my wife, pronounced in labor. “I thought she was getting fat,” I mumbled sleepily.

  When morning brought no relief or delivery, we found a vet who informed us that a big pup was blocking the birth canal, which could be fatal to Heidi. We wrung our hands for the rest of the day, phoning every couple of hours for an update. Not until evening was our dog pronounced out of danger.

  “She was carrying three,” the doctor reported, “but only one survived.” The kids took one look at the male pup, a ragamuffin ball of string—red string, brown string, black string, tan string, gray string—and exclaimed, “Andy! He looks just like Andy.” And there was no mistaking the father. Heidi’s only genetic contribution seemed to be his schnauzer beard. Otherwise, he was an eclectic mix of terrier, collie, beagle, setter and Studebaker.

  “Have you ever seen anything so homely?” I asked Shirley.

  “He’s adorable,” she answered admiringly. Too admiringly.

  “I only hope someone else thinks so. His days with us are numbered.” But I might as well have saved my breath. By the time Dog X reached ten weeks, our kids were more attached to him than barnacles to a boat’s bottom. I tried to ignore him.

  “Look at how good he is catching a ball, Dad,” Christopher pointed out. I grunted noncommittally. And when Andy’s folly performed his tricks—sit, fetch, roll over, play dead—and the kids touted his smarts, I hid behind a newspaper.

  One thing I could not deny: he had the ears of a watchdog, detecting every sound that came from the driveway or yard. Heidi, his aging mother, heard nothing but his barking, which interrupted her frequent naps. He, on the other hand, was in perpetual motion. When the kids went off on their bikes or I put on my jogging shoes, he wanted to go along. If left behind, he chased squirrels. Occasionally, by now, I slipped and called him Scampy.

  Then in the fall, after six months of family nurture and adoration, Scampy suffered a setback. Squealing brakes announced he had chased one too many squirrels into the street. The accident fractured his left hind leg, which the vet put in a splint. We were all relieved to hear his prognosis: complete recovery. But then a week later the second shoe dropped.

  “Gangrene,” Shirley told me one evening. “The vet says amputate or he’ll have to be put to sleep.” I slumped down in a chair.

  “There’s little choice,” I said. “It’s not fair to make an active dog like Scampy struggle around on three legs the rest of his life.” Suddenly the kids, who had been eavesdropping, flew into the room.

  “They don’t kill a person who has a bad leg,” Steve and Laraine argued.

  Buying time, I told them, “We’ll decide tomorrow.” After the kids were in bed, Shirley and I talked.

  “It will be hard for them to give up Scampy,” she sympathized.

  “Especially Christopher,” I replied. “I was about his age when I lost Queenie.” Then I told her about my favorite dog, a statuesque white spitz whose fluffy coat rolled like ocean waves when she ran. But Queenie developed a crippling problem with her back legs, and finally my dad said she would have to be put down.

  “But she can get well,” I pleaded. I prayed with all my might that God would help her walk again. But she got worse.

  One night after dinner I went to the basement, where she slept beside the furnace. At the bottom of the stairs, I met Dad. His face was drained of color, and he carried a strange, strong-smelling rag in his hand.

  “I’m sorry, but Queenie’s dead,” he told me gently. I broke into tears and threw myself into his arms. I don’t know how long I sobbed, but after a while I became aware that he was crying too. I remember how pleased I was to learn he felt the same way.

  Between eye-wiping and nose-blowing, I told him, “I don’t ever want another dog. It hurts too much when they die.”

  “You’re right about the hurt, son,” he answered, “but that’s the price of love.”

  The next day, after conferring with the vet and the family, I reluctantly agreed to have Scampy’s leg amputated. “If a child’s faith can make him well,” I remarked to Shirley, “then he’ll recover four times over.” And he did. Miraculously.

  If I needed any proof that he was his old self, it came a short time after his operation. Watching from the kitchen window, I saw a fat gray squirrel creep toward the bird feeder. Slowly the sunning dog pulled himself into attack position. When the squirrel got to within a dozen feet, Scampy launched himself. Using his hind leg like a pogo stick, he rocketed into the yard and gave one bushy-tail the scare of its life.

  Soon Scampy was back catching balls, tagging along with the kids, running with me as I jogged. The remarkable thing was the way he compensated for his missing appendage. He invented a new stroke for his lone rear leg, moving it piston-like from side to side to achieve both power and stability.

  His enthusiasm and energy suffered no loss. “The best thing about Scampy,” a neighbor said, “is that he doesn’t know he’s got a handicap. Either that or he ignores it, which is the best way for all of us to deal with such things.”

  Not that everyone saw him in a positive light. On the playground, some youngsters reacted as if he were a candidate for a Stephen King horror flick. “Look out,” shouted one boy, “here comes Monster Dog!” Tripod and Hop-along were other tags. Our kids laughed off his detractors and introduced him as “Scampy, the greatest three-legged dog in the world.”

  For better than five years, Scampy gave us an object lesson in courage, demonstrating what it means to do your best with what you’ve got. On our daily runs, I often carried on conversations with him as if he understood every word. “I almost shipped you out as a pup,” I’d recount to him, “but the kids wouldn’t let me. They knew how wonderful you were.” It was obvious from the way he studied my face and wagged his tail that he liked to hear how special he was.

  He probably would have continued to strut his stuff for a lot longer had he been less combative. In scraps in which he was clearly over-matched, he lacked two essentials for longevity—discretion and, partly because of his surgery, an effective reverse gear.

  One warm August night he didn’t return at his normal time, and the next morning he showed up, gasping for air and bloody around the neck. He obviously had been in a fight, and I suspected a badly damaged windpipe or lung.

  “Scampy, when will you learn?” I asked as I petted his head. He looked up at me with those trusting eyes and licked my hand, but he was too weak to wag his tail. Christopher and Daniel helped me sponge him down and get him to the vet, but my diagnosis proved too accurate. By midday “the greatest three-legged dog in the world” was gone.

  That evening Christopher and I drove to the vet’s office, gathered up Scampy and headed home. Scampy’s mother, Heidi, had died at fifteen, just a few months before; now we would bury him next to her in the woods by the garden.

  As we drove, I tried to engage Christopher in conversation, but he was silent, apparently sorting through his feelings. “I’ve seen lots of dogs, Christopher,” I said, �
��but Scampy was something special.”

  “Yep,” he answered, staring into the darkness.

  “He was certainly one of the smartest.” Christopher didn’t answer. From flashes of light that passed through the car I could see him dabbing his eyes. Finally he looked at me and spoke.

  “There’s only one thing I’m sure of, Dad,” he choked out through tears. “I don’t want another dog. It feels so bad to lose them.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said. Then drawing on a voice and words that were not my own, I added, “But that’s the price of love.”

  Now his sobs were audible, and I was having trouble seeing the road myself. I pulled off at a service station and stopped the car. There, I put my arms around him and with my tears let him know—just as my father had shown me—that his loss was my loss too.

  Fred Bauer

  Forever Rocky

  One gray morning I took the day off from work, knowing that today was the day it had to be done. Our dog, Rocky, had to be put to sleep. Sickness had ravaged his once-strong body, and despite every effort to heal our beloved boxer, his illness was intensifying.

  I remember calling him into the car . . . how he loved car rides! But he seemed to sense that this time was going to be different. I drove around for hours, looking for any errand or excuse not to go to the vet’s office, but I could no longer put off the inevitable. As I wrote the check to the vet for Rocky to be “put down,” my eyes welled with tears and stained the check so it was almost unreadable.