You Had Me at Woof

by Julie Klam

  We absolutely love him. He has the most wonderful disposition. He’s going to instantly become the neighborhood favorite tonight at the evening school field “doggie dance nightly gathering.” I can tell that this will be a match made in heaven; he and Baxter are starting to chase each other and play. They will wear each other out each day, which was exactly what I was hoping for. They look great together too—a perfect contrast.

  We feel so blessed to have him—He is so wonderful—It It must have been very difficult for you to part with him. Thanks.

  It was my first successful placement, from pulling to homing. And I was feeling quite pleased with myself . . . until Tuesday.

  The woman who’d done the home check, the one who said how great a home this guy would be, forwarded me an e-mail from the woman who fostered the boxer he’d adopted from them. It said, “DO NOT LET THIS MAN ADOPT FROM ANYONE! HE KILLED MY DUSTY! I WILL ALWAYS FEEL RESPONSIBLE FOR LETTING HIM HAVE ONE OF MY BABIES!!!”

  It was a little loony-sounding, but discomfiting nonetheless. I forwarded it to Sheryl and responded to the woman, saying, based on your recommendation he’s got my foster now. What was the story here?

  She said the woman heard that he’d let the boxer out in his front yard where there was no fencing even though he’d promised never to do it and the dog had been hit by a car and killed. Now, he’d told us that he had a boxer who died from cancer. None of this was making sense. When we went back to the vet, they said they’d treated a dog for seizures and then put it to sleep on the day after the other dog was killed. They had no record of a dog who’d been hit by a car.

  At this point, we were freaking out. Number one, this had all been hidden from us, and number two, it was starting to sound like he had two dogs killed in a two-day period; number three, he had Sherlock. It had also been four days and this vet had not seen Sherlock about his eye and no appointment had been made.

  I was totally second-guessing myself, wondering if I had tried to push all of this through because I was anxious for Sherlock to move on. I spoke to Sheryl and she said, “Don’t even go there. He was recommended with flying colors and even if someone had visited him, this isn’t something we would have known.” Either way, I was anxious to get it resolved.

  We decided to have Mary Lou call him. If it seemed like he had lied, we should take Sherlock back. There were too many loose ends. I called the Boxer Rescue contact listed on that website and the woman called me back to say her group had split from the one I talked to, and that she knew this guy was on the DNA (do not adopt) list. I suggested she take him off their website success stories.

  So Mary Lou called. We were talking about whether to make up a story that some blood test that had been done on Sherlock came back positive and we needed to get him back. And if he said no, should we just steal him?

  When Mary Lou called, he told her he’d been expecting to hear from her. For whatever reason, Boxer Rescue was trying to ruin his life. Then he told her the story. The boxer had cancer and had been having seizures. Tragically, he “got out” of the house, wandered into the street, and was hit by a car.

  Mary Lou is tough but she’s a good and fair judge of character. “I spoke to him for about forty-five minutes,” she said, “and one thing that stuck in my head was that Boxer Rescue never would have known what happened to the dog—he reported the accident to them and they freaked out. While none of us likes to see anything happen to our prior fosters, there are a lot of dogs we never hear about again and go on faith that they are fine.” She said he didn’t seem like a bad guy to her and he did say if we wanted Sherlock back, while it would break his heart, he’d understand. That made all of us feel a lot better. Then he sent me an e-mail:Julie,

  There seems to be some controversy regarding my last pet—Although being hit by a car, the root cause of him uncharacteristically wandering off was the effects of the recently diagnosed brain tumor. I spoke with one of your senior NEBTR volunteers the other day, and fully explained the horrid turn of events. I also reassured her, and wish to reassure you as well, that I am a lifelong dog lover, and treat and have treated all my pets with extreme care and oversight. As I said to her, Send as many home adoption inspectors as you wish, as often as you wish. The forwarded attached message should also help to clear the controversy.

  On a good note, Sherlock is very happy, and we love him. He and Baxter are bonding, and it is an absolute joy to witness. They have advanced from the initial humping stage, which had Baxter on the defense, to what I would call the “wet neck” stage. They love to attempt to gnaw on each other’s neck, until they drop from exhaustion. Also, I am very happy to report that they have selected one (of many) toys that they love to play “tug of war” with (which I consider a milestone development). Sherlock’s right eye is completely healed and looks the same as the left eye. I will take him to my vet on Wednesday for a follow-up appt. I’ve been trying to capture some “Kodak” moments, but they are too fast for the camera. I will have photos very soon. Please forward this message to the NEBTR lady that I spoke to recently—I did not ask for her e-mail address. Thanks.

  ARCHIE THE BOXER’S DEATH [e-mail message that he sent to the woman who approved him]

  Although we have never met, I feel a stronger connection to you than anyone else in boxer rescue. Therefore I am responding in general to you, in hopes of appeasing some other volunteers that seem to have categorized me as a heartless murderer of defenseless animals, and wish for my crucifixion. Again, I accept full responsibility for Archie’s death, and will be haunted more so than anyone by that guilt forever.

  However, am I to be judged on one momentary lapse of judgment, which tragically resulted in the death of my precious loving Archie??!!—We were in love!! Please remind everyone of all the good boxer work that I have done over the years—in particular with Elmore, who no one wanted due to his fear aggression issues.

  I adopted him, rehabilitated him, and gave him the best years of his remaining life. I have never discounted the adult/ senior adoptable boxers, and have adopted them exclusively knowing full well that my home was their last stop before dog heaven, without regard for end stage life medical expenses, and emotional trauma.

  My heart has no more strings to pull, and I agree not to ever again attempt to adopt a boxer (and will be content with two Boston Terriers that have a much longer life expectancy).

  In the end we decided to send Joy to do a home check as quickly as possible. If she felt the home was not safe, she would take Sherlock with her. She did it and said that although they were a little wacky, they were good wacky and her recommendation was to leave Sherlock right where he was.

  Which we did.

  I felt ultimately good about Sherlock’s placement, but it made me think a lot about what makes a good home for a pet. A while back there was a discussion in our group about the automatic “no” someone wanted to give to an applicant who was single and worked away from home eleven hours a day. One of the board members, a single working mother, said, “If that’s the case, then you wouldn’t give me a dog.” The person argued that we know our board member and what a good dog parent she is. It was a lengthy debate and one that was never quite settled. Look at me, I was single, living in a tiny studio, and working when I got Otto. Could there have been a better home for him out there? I think not!

  When you’re looking for a home for your foster, you want everything to be perfect. A loving family with a fenced-in yard, who can afford to take care of the sometimes very costly medical issues that come up. The benefit of a whole fenced-in yard is a big issue. I live in an apartment, so my dogs are only walked on leashes, but no matter how careful you are, accidents can happen. Archie’s death was an accident, just as Moses’s death was. There is so much to consider, but fundamentally you are considering a person who is choosing to adopt from a rescue group, not buying from a pet shop in a mall.

  When the story started to unfold, and we thought that we’d been misled, I thought for sure Sherlock was comin
g back to me. It was totally enlightening to me that Joy and Mary Lou allowed for there to be a gray area. Their collective good judgment and sanity were a relief and for that I was grateful. There have to be strict guidelines in place for potential adopters, and a group has to be allowed to turn people down. Like people who spontaneously buy a $2,000 dalmatian in a pet shop after seeing the Disney movie, then change their minds when they see what having a dalmatian actually means, and drop the dog at the front door of the local animal shelter, not everyone is meant to have a dog. There are times when a dog is placed in the most perfect home, only to be returned to the group because the perfect people were unhappy. That wouldn’t make us stop placing dogs in perfect homes, and by the same token taking the time to look a little closer at what might not sound ideal on paper could lead a dog to the happiest place he will ever go.

  LESSON NINE

  How to Feel Good About Your Neck

  By the time I turned forty, Madonna, Sheryl Crow, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Kim Basinger had all fortied stunningly. So I didn’t have an issue with the age at all. Nothing would be different from thirty-nine. I wasn’t going to suddenly start wearing longer skirts or cut my hair above my shoulders. I was still me, though I do remember looking up “middle age” in the Oxford English Dictionary, where I was slightly relieved to see it defined as beginning at forty-five. The one good-bye I said was to my future second child. I felt very strongly that my body wouldn’t be able to handle a pregnancy after forty (it hadn’t done that well at thirty-six). While I saw a multitude of women having first, second, third, and fourth babies after forty, and doing it gracefully, it was just something I didn’t feel I could manage. And it was an easy decision, except that it wasn’t. Even after I made it, I internally debated it nonstop and occasionally discussed my conclusions with Paul. Was it selfish to have only one child? I adored my brothers. Would I be depriving Violet of something that meant so much to me? But if I did it and was miserable—which I was convinced I would be—wouldn’t everyone suffer? And once we had the baby, I wouldn’t be able to work; with the kind of money I made, we couldn’t afford the amount of child care we’d need. I had finally gotten into this nice rhythm with taking Violet to school, going to the gym, and getting a chunk of work time in before I had to pick her up after school. And I liked being the one to drop her off and pick her up. Everything was just the way I wanted it . . . so I had to punish myself. If it was that good for me, it must be a lousy, selfish act. The one thing I knew was the more time I spent debating it, the less chance there’d be that I’d ever be able to do it. Suffice it to say, I drove a lot of people nuts and carved in some new worry lines in the process.

  It was the summer before Violet started kindergarten and we were doing lots of trips instead of camp—to my parents’ home on the New York/Vermont border, Mattie’s house in Montauk, and to visit my brother Matt in Washington, D.C.

  Matt and I talked about the issue of a second child. He and his wife were going through a similar struggle. They had a child and felt like they should have another, but weren’t sure it was the right thing.

  “Why don’t you get a dog?” I asked Matt. My mother and I spent a fair amount of time on the phone talking about how it was possible that Matt, who had been the dog kid in our family, was the only one of us who’d grown up not to have one.

  “I can’t take the responsibility,” he said.

  “Of what?”

  “Walking it, feeding it,” he said, as if he were saying something that was very much harder than walking and feeding.

  “You have a yard!” I responded. “Just open the back door and let it out!”

  “We don’t have the space!” he said.

  “How come you live in an entire house with a front yard and a backyard and you don’t have space, but I live in an apartment in the city and I do have space?” I wondered aloud.

  “Maybe,” he said, “if we don’t end up having another kid.” (Before he’d had his first child, he had told me if that didn’t happen, he was going to get a Ferrari.)

  Paul had to work, so he stayed back in New York with Bea. We were in a nice single-dog calm. Joy was putting pressure on me to adopt a dog she was fostering. An elderly gentleman by the name of Edgar. He had a medical issue that we were waiting to hear about, but Joy thought he was another Moses. Paul and I talked about it (with about the same ease as the kid issue). He wasn’t crazy about the idea; an old dog with health problems sounded like a lot of heartbreak, but I had long wanted to take in a senior. They were the last to be adopted; not many people were looking to get a dog who was in its twilight years. And the old ones always broke my heart. Once we heard what the surgeon said about Edgar, I’d revisit the discussion with Paul.

  Two nights before we were due to come back to New York from D.C., Paul called. He said that Jane, the intake coordinator, had left a voicemail and that it was important. I called in and listened to the message myself—a ten-year-old Boston was dumped in the Brooklyn Center for Animal Care and Control (which made the one in Manhattan look like Club Med) by a family who said they could no longer take care of her because of their financial situation. She said she posted on the site and was waiting to hear if anyone could foster her, but in the meantime, could I pull her as soon as possible?

  I called Jane back and told her I was coming home from D.C. on Monday and asked if they could hold her until then. She felt like that would be too late and said she’d left a message for a new member in Manhattan to see if he could get her and was waiting to hear back. I told her to call me when she heard. In the meantime, I went on the site.

  The post was more personal and urgent than usual: There is a ten-year-old female in the Brooklyn shelter that was dumped by her owners because of some problem with their lease. The shelter says she is terrified and won’t even hold her head up. The shelter told us that if we want her, we need to get her quickly. We all know what that means. If anyone is available to pull her or more importantly foster this poor old girl so she doesn’t die in the shelter please let me know ASAP.

  I called her back and said I’d come home a day early. Since I’d still be coming back to Manhattan from D.C., if the other member could get her and let me pick her up from him, that would work better. I could hold her until we found a foster home. The other member agreed.

  The next day I came home, kissed Paul hello, dropped Violet off, and jumped on a subway to the West Village to meet this guy. While I waited, I realized it was the exact same block where I’d picked up “Mr. Man/Chip/Shaggy.” It must have been some major meeting of doggie gridlines.

  A guy was coming down the street with a small black dog that wasn’t a Boston. I didn’t remember reading that she was a mix, but clearly this dog was. She didn’t have a flat nose or any white markings and she had a long tail. She looked sort of Chihuahua-ish. Maybe this wasn’t the dog I was meeting. When the guy got closer he said, “Julie?”

  He said her name was Precious and I recoiled. The very fact that a family would dump a dog they called Precious creeped me out. Then I wondered if she was named Precious because of her resemblance to Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. Either way, she didn’t respond to it so I wasn’t going to use it. I took her into a cab. She was so profoundly unresponsive that I wondered if she was dying.

  When I got her home, I saw that Paul had placed a dog bed in the living room so she could have her own space away from Bea. Of course Bea had to keep sitting in that bed, and anywhere Precious wanted to go Bea needed to be, really, really badly. Violet was asleep and Paul and I were looking at her. Ten was conservative; I would have put her closer to twelve. She was old, and she was a mess.

  “What do you think she is?” he asked.

  “Maybe Boston and Chihuahua?” I guessed. She had Boston eyes and ears but a longish nose, no white markings, and a long tail. She would not look at us.

  Her muzzle was gray, and it looked like she had at least the beginnings of cataracts. There were age warts in her fur, fatty masses, bald spots
along her tail and behind her ears, and her teeth were rotten. I offered her food and she ignored it. She had some water and once we moved Bea she took over the bed. With her head down, she breathed in a way that sounded like a sigh, and went to sleep.

  Paul and I were sitting at our dining-room table looking over at her and discussing the highlights of the weekend. Every so often one of us would say, “Well, she’s really no trouble,” and “We could foster her for a little while.”

  The next day I made an appointment with a vet to get her teeth cleaned. The report from the shelter said, “Unable to locate spay scar and very bad teeth.” They had let her come to rescue without spaying her because she was so old. I posted her photo on the site with a short description and got loads of responses; everybody was just so glad to hear she’d been saved.

  In the morning, Violet woke up and met her and asked what her name was.

  “You can name her,” I said.

  “What are some flower names?” she asked.

  “Well, Blossom, Iris, Daisy, Rose, Wisteria, Bluebell,” I said.

  “Bluebell!” she repeated.

  “That’s nice,” I said. “Or Dahlia.”

  “What does a dahlia look like?” she asked. And we Googled a picture.

  “Okay,” she asserted, “Dahlia.”

  Paul called her Black Dahlia after the gruesomely murdered Los Angeles call girl. Apparently her teeth were nasty, too.

  We took her to the vet, a new vet. I was at the point where I’d been to just about every vet on the Upper West Side and I had a reason to dislike each of them. This was one I’d gone to with Otto years before, but had stopped because every time I went back, the vet who’d seen him before was gone and replaced with a new one who’d also soon be gone. But I had taken Sherlock there for his eye and I really liked the guy who examined him.