The Doggie in the Window

by Rory Kress

  The storm came with no warning in the dead of night and knocked over his home. He nearly lost an ear.

  “You wouldn’t hate all these people,” Theresa had warned me before we left for this rescue mission. “Many of them got into this because it’s what their families did. This is all they know. They don’t live much different from the dogs. They really don’t. A traditional shit hole is a traditional shit hole. We all know what that’s like. I wonder how willing people are to sacrifice what they want with what is right. If people saw what I have seen over these last nine years, I’m quite certain that they’d never want to support animals living in that way despite how badly they wanted whatever type of dog. I say this to people a lot: you’re not going to turn somebody who wants a [certain breed of] puppy for their kids to grow up with…into somebody who is just going to go to the shelter and get any dog, an older dog or a pitty mix or whatever—you’re not. It’s just an unfortunate truth about people that they want what they want. And many people are willing to put anything aside in their mind to get what they want, even suffering.”

  Theresa sees the hopelessness of a consumer base that is willing to ignore the truth about their dogs. She may be right—but I see that problem as the effect, not the cause. At fault here may be neither the consumer nor even the worst breeders out there. Instead, it’s a fundamental disconnect between the things we love and the way they’re made. As long as convenient access to a commodity is a must, an industry will arise to meet the demand—and few people will question it, especially when they can’t see it with their own eyes. But in spite of the billions spent every year on our dogs, these animals are not simply commodities that can be mass-produced and sold without enormous consequences.

  *All breeder and all dog names in this chapter have been changed. In the case of the dogs, I’ve tried to stay true to the spirit or tone of the original names.

  CHAPTER TEN

  All About Izzie

  Theresa is right: there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to know any more about Izzie than the life she’s had with us. Her story is my story, and being so close to learning the truth feels like it could unravel the innocence that underlies our relationship. I’m not alone in this unwillingness to know the truth. Time and again in interviewing owners of puppy mill dogs, I find the same willful naïveté.

  There’s no question that I feel connected beyond description to my dog. To my dog. Even referring to her that way feels inadequate. She’s not my dog: she’s Izzie. She has a mind, she has a heart, and she has her own set of priorities. She has moods. Sometimes, she’s my shadow, trying to follow me even to the shower, her wet nose pressed against the steamed-up glass. Other times, she seems to resent me for whatever unknown transgressions I may have wrought against her, and she slinks away from me to isolate herself in an unoccupied bedroom or under a table. I respect her complexities and appreciate her unwillingness to offer constant, unquestioning love and affection—it makes her more real, more human, more like me. I wonder if it’s easy to forget and overlook a dog’s individual needs when you’re a breeder with hundreds to tend to, none of which share your living space. As a pet owner, it seems so obvious.

  When I look at this animal, I’m not seeing a dog. I’m no longer seeing millennia of symbiotic interspecies friendship. I’m not seeing the centuries of breeding that created the frizzy-haired, black-nosed, terrified-of-cell-phones creature that can distinguish between the sound of the cheese drawer opening and that of the freezer door opening. I’m seeing a piece of my heart.

  But it didn’t start out that way.

  When we first brought Izzie home, Dan and I expected to feel the magic of human-canine bonding from the get-go: puppy love at its finest. We thought that we’d just throw a leash on her, and she’d know what to do. She’d naturally fetch a ball and learn quickly to do her business outside. She’d snuggle us to sleep each night, and her every action would be an outward expression of her undying loyalty to us. That’s what we assumed. Neither of us had ever had a dog in our lives. What could go wrong?

  We drove out to the American Dog Club on Long Island, the store our relatives had recommended, the one proudly declaring that it only purchased dogs from USDA-licensed facilities on its website. I’d called ahead and had been informed that there was one female wheaten terrier still available for sale—but I had to hurry before someone else got her.

  Dan and I walked up to a wall of cages and searched for this last wheaten. We scanned through the Maltipoos, Yorkies, and goldendoodles, all yapping at eye level, begging for our attention. But there, in a cage on the bottom row by our feet, sat a puppy much larger than the rest, her hair a mismatched tangle.

  I spotted her first and crouched down to get a better look. Dan leaned over and peered into her cage.

  “Is that it?” he asked, first words I still needle him about, even to this day.

  “I think so,” I said, clicking my tongue and cooing through the bars at her. She gave no sign that she even knew we existed. No eye contact, no glance. Nothing.

  We summoned the staff to let her out so we could hold her. They placed her in my arms. She was compliant but stiff. I remember looking around at the other shoppers as they solicited kisses and cuddles from the puppies they took into their arms. I felt a grip of doubt in my chest. But I had decided that a wheaten terrier was the breed we needed because I am, sadly, allergic to dogs, and wheatens are known to be hypoallergenic. With no littermates to comparison shop, it was this dog or nothing.

  A saleswoman ushered us into a small stall, similar to a changing room in a clothing store. This is where the store lets prospective buyers interact with the puppies outside of their cages. I sat with this unfamiliar creature in my lap and tried unsuccessfully to engage her interest or her gaze. I set her paws to the floor so she could walk unfettered and stretch her legs after a day in her cage. She moaned and moaned and, after some skittish pacing, peed on the floor. Brilliant dog psychologist that I was, I assumed that she had moaned because she was actually housebroken and wanted to be taken outside to pee, expressing her frustration at having to soil the floor. I took this as a good omen. The saleswoman rushed in to clean up the mess.

  After about an hour of watching her pace our little stall and wavering back and forth on what we knew was a life-altering decision, Dan and I decided to rip off the bandage and purchase her. For $1,000, they turned her over to us with just a zip of our credit card, no questions asked. They handed us a sheet of paper with the name and USDA license number of her breeder, along with a referral to a vet who would finish her vaccinations for free, and sent us on our way.

  I clutched her close to my chest as we drove her home on that rainy winter evening, along with more equipment than seemed logical for a ten-pound puff of patchy hair. We’d done our research and had overzealously prepared a Great Dane–sized crate for her in our living room and resolutely planned to do our due diligence with the housebreaking process. We’d read that dogs love their crates and some return to them voluntarily to sleep for their entire lives. So we put her in her new home with some toys and a pretty, pink sleeping mat. Dan headed to bed, and I bundled up to catch my ride to my overnight shift at the Today Show.

  It wasn’t long before the text messages started. I was elbow-deep in scripts, assembling my news blocks in the bowels of Studio 1A at Rockefeller Plaza, trying to choose which stories our millions of viewers would wake up to that morning.

  she sounds like a shofar

  It was 2:00 a.m. I’d barely been gone an hour.

  its so loud and sad

  can i just let her out?

  Already, we were failing as dog parents.

  I texted back.

  the books say not to let her out of the crate

  she needs to learn to be self sufficient

  or she’s going to have separation anxiety forever

  An hour passed. Nothing. I settled into my predawn routine, bouncing around the abandoned newsroom, preparing before my team’s writers
came in. I felt self-righteous: Dan had followed my instructions, the still-unnamed dog had self-soothed, and all was well. Puppyhood accomplished. This was going to be easy. Then came the 3:00 a.m. texts.

  she hasn’t stopped shofaring yet

  i’m going in

  Before I could even reply and warn him not to—again—the next text rolled in.

  she’s covered in her own shit

  this is a nightmare

  I blamed Dan. Maybe he didn’t give her enough of a chance to do her business outside before bed. Maybe he fed her something he shouldn’t have after I left. Surely once she was under my supervision after my night shift ended, these types of problems would be unthinkable.

  I got home from the studio just before noon. Dan was off at work, having walked her before he left a couple of hours before. But sure enough, there she was, alone in her crate, cowering away from a small puddle of piss in the corner. I scooped her out and took her down to the street. She just looked down at the grass-free Brooklyn sidewalk and tried to yank her head out of her collar, pawing at it resolutely.

  “Well?” I said.

  She circled my legs, wrapping me up in her leash.

  “Go,” I said. “Make.”

  Nothing. The commands were meaningless. I thought dogs instinctively knew these things.

  “Come on. Just go pee-pee.”

  She yanked forward on the leash, lunging to pick up a cigarette butt her in mouth. I jumped down to free it from her needle teeth. She chomped, leaving tiny bite marks in my hand. Frustrated, exhausted, and betrayed, I took her back inside. It was almost 1:00 p.m., my bedtime. I set her back in her crate and began powering down in the bedroom. With the curtains drawn and my eye mask on, I began the long, slow process of trying to sleep by day.

  scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch

  I sat up in bed.

  scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch

  I tiptoed to the bedroom door. She was clawing wildly at the base of her crate, trying to escape. Her bed was balled up in the corner—what had once been pink velvet now turned brown.

  scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch

  Once again, I freed her from the crate and hastened her to the bathtub to wash the parts of her feet that had plodded straight through her own shit. Her bed—barely twenty-four hours in our possession—went straight into the trash. The crate was a mess. I scrubbed at it as she ran, crazy-eyed and dripping wet, around our small apartment. Finally, the clock nearing 3:00 p.m., I gave her another fruitless walk in my pajamas and put her back in her crate with some old towels for a bed.

  I slunk back to the bedroom and closed the door. Curtains closed, eye mask on, I began trying to sleep again.

  scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch

  I tried to sleep through it.

  scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch

  I couldn’t. And it wasn’t stopping.

  scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch

  I sprang back out into the living room, fearing another feces explosion. But there she was, just scratching away for the hell of it. I threw a blanket over the crate. I’d seen people do it with birdcages before. Maybe she’d think it was nighttime and go to sleep. It didn’t work. This was no bird we were dealing with. This was a puppy on a mission to destroy me.

  By the time Dan got home from work that night, I was crying on the living room floor as the puppy darted wildly around the apartment, pausing occasionally to shred a stack of magazines she’d stolen from the coffee table.

  “She won’t let me sleep!” I wailed. “She won’t shut up, and I’ll never get to sleep, and I won’t be able to do my job, and I’m going to fall asleep at work, and I’m going to get fired, and this was a horrible mistake. We have to send her back.”

  By now, Dan’s gotten used to my pronouncements—which is to say he knows to ignore 99 percent of them. But at the time, he was just my boyfriend, and we had moved in together only a few months earlier. That meant we were still early enough in our relationship for him to take me seriously. All he knew for certain was to be terrified of what would inevitably happen when I couldn’t sleep between my shifts: full-on apocalyptic breakdowns.

  “Send her back?” he asked. “To where?”

  “Back to the store. Maybe they’ll take her back!”

  “We can’t do that,” he said, horrified.

  “Then maybe we should take her to a shelter. She’s cute enough. She’ll find a good home,” I said with the desperation of a junkie, willing to do anything to get my fix of sleep. “We can’t keep her. What were we thinking? A puppy is such an overrated thing.”

  Dan rubbed his thumb and index finger against his forehead, trying not to lose it entirely.

  “We wanted a dog,” he said and sighed. “You wanted a dog. You wanted this dog, and here she is. And now you want to dump her?”

  “But she’s going to kill me,” I screeched, my face hot and swollen as I cried. “And I don’t love her. Aren’t we supposed to love her?”

  “She just got here,” he said.

  “Do you love her?”

  “Well,” he said, looking at the spiky-haired animal now learning quickly to be silent when there’s wailing coming from the humans. “No. Not yet. I mean, what’s to love?”

  It’s true. She was an ugly duckling. Her feathery hair poked out in a variety of wild browns and blacks. Her feet were ungainly on the ends of her wobbly spider legs. She did not make eye contact and hated being picked up or touched at all.

  “I hate her,” I said, assuming the fetal position on the floor to sob some more.

  “No, you don’t. You just don’t love her. Yet.”

  With that, Dan mercifully ushered me off to bed and, with monk-like focus, tended to the dog, carrying her in and out of the apartment for frequent bathroom breaks so I wouldn’t be awakened by her tiny, cacophonous claws on the hardwood floors.

  So the dog stayed.

  Within a few days, we settled on her name: Izzie. We named her after the elderly fishmonger at the Jewish deli my father would take me to on Sunday mornings when I was a child. He’d always sneak me a piece of fish or cheese over the glass when no one was looking. The name came to mind because we quickly noticed that this dog always wanted us to sneak her a treat while we ate—that and Izzie rhymes with “frizzy,” which is one of her defining physical characteristics.

  In the weeks that followed, my diurnal standoffs with Izzie took on a new rhythm. I’d come home from work in the morning and take her on a begrudging sleepwalk around Brooklyn. Occasionally, she’d mercifully reward my efforts by actually doing her business outside. Within a few weeks, she began making eye contact—at first only while she pooped. But when those eye contact–filled poops would happen in the street and not in our apartment, I would cheer out loud for her with delight, showing her how happy it made me to have her choose the sidewalk instead of my floor for this task. It was such a victory that I didn’t even care about the strange looks I’d get from construction workers, gawking at the crazy lady in pajamas in the middle of the day, celebrating while her dog shat on the pavement.

  I began dividing my daytime sleep into shifts to better meet her needs. After her morning walk, we’d nap for a few hours and wake around 5:00 p.m. to hit the postwork rush hour at the dog run where I’d let her romp unfettered for an hour or two and try not to fall asleep in public.

  Izzie learned a lot from these daily trips to the dog run—more than I could ever teach her. She came to know her place in the pack and to understand that while at home, she may rule the roost, in public, she must defer to other dogs, people, and children with their tiny, fragile hands that may sometimes not know their own strength. She quickly learned not to bite and not to antagonize other dogs as, it seemed to me, the canine cast of characters in the park took on the instructive role that her littermates might have if she’d been allowed to remain with them into her later puppyhood.

  People often compliment Dan and me for Izzie’s now-
friendly and loving demeanor and her ability to play so well with both children and other dogs. I can take no credit for her gentle nature, and I’m very up front with people when they seek training tips. In Izzie’s early months with us, my focused attempts at training only confused her. The best thing I ever did for her, I believe, was showing up at that dog park every day, rain or shine, and letting her be free. Supervised, sure. But not micromanaged. Free to wrestle, play, and even earn a warning nip from an older, wiser dog when she got out of line.

  These lessons thankfully have stood her in good stead through the years. To this day, when we encounter aggressive dogs that lunge at her on their leashes and bark in her face during our walks, she never responds in kind, knowing to continue prancing ahead without further engaging their ire. When children toddle up to her without warning to pet her before their parents can stop them and ask if she’s friendly, she knows never to nip or startle. No thanks to any tutelage of mine, in all these years, Izzie has never bitten anyone—although with her breath being what it is, we know that her kisses are her best defense, the ultimate chemical weapon. She reserves her rage and her teeth for one thing and one thing alone: the nozzle of my vacuum cleaner, which is now dented and scarred from her wrath and my attempts to keep a passably clean house.

  After the dog park, when my early evening second bedtime would arrive, I’d try and further my efforts to tire her out by having her chase a ball around the apartment or by trying to teach her a trick or two before tucking her into her crate. She’d wake me occasionally with her scratching or her soft moans, but with every passing day, she learned to sleep when I slept. Sometimes, she was so well behaved, I’d try and get her to cuddle in bed with me. Every time I tried, however, she’d rebuff my efforts and scuttle away to curl up by herself in a corner. So fine—she was independent. That, and I was certainly not her favorite. She seemed to know that on her first day at home with us, I’d tried to eject her from my Brooklyn love nest with Dan to return to the happy peace of our life à deux. When he was home, she tended to gravitate toward him, understanding that he had saved her from my capriciousness and the harsh world outside our door that first night.