Woof

28 November 2005



Thanks, Maggie

Dogs are, in most respects, better friends than people are. Dogs are pretty transparent and can only be sneaky when they are trying to get into the garbage for a snack. While they might mess up a carpet now and then, and perhaps chew up a shoe, they are incapable of genuine deceit or malice. That is why humans live about seven times longer – they need the extra time to get in as much decency as a dog can in a decade or so. This week-end one family had to say “good-bye” to its canis familiaris and came to realize that dogs get a better deal at the end of their time than people do with theirs.

Maggie was a mutt. A big mutt with a rusty short-hair coat, the chest of a Doberman and the body of a grey hound. She was a stray in the South Bronx of New York back in the early 1990s, when that neighborhood was the symbol of urban decay. Somehow, she wound up at an animal shelter in Manhattan, where a family from Queens chose her out of the dozens on offer. The daughter noticed her first, a quiet dog with a nice face. Her younger brother took to her immediately. Mom went along, and Dad never said anything about how she was going to grow into those huge feet. She went home to Forest Hills, where there was a big backyard – doggy heaven. Despite belief to the contrary, she was named after the young lady at the shelter who arranged the adoption and not after the former British Prime Minister (the American dog was only technically a bitch).

She slept at the top of the stairs, protecting the bedrooms from the things that go bump in the night. She got on the couches she wasn’t supposed to climb on, and on more than one occasion, there was dog hair on the bed in the evening that wasn’t there in the morning. She took Dad on runs, his less-than-athletic body struggling to keep up with her 90 pounds of muscle. And she was the subject of at least one grammar school essay – the boy dubbed her “my constant companion,” which for a 7 year-old shows a certain precociousness.

When the humans had another little one join the gang, there was some trepidation about the dog being near the new-born. Maggie settled the matter the first week – she moved her usual spot from the top of the stairs to sleep right by the crib. Although spayed, she now had her puppy. And if there is a love greater than that of a mother for her child, it is the love between a boy and his dog.

Big dogs don’t live as long as the little yapping ones, but Maggie reached a dozen years with only a bit of arthritis in the left hip. Eventually though, she faded and the vet found the masses in her abdomen a short while ago. A little time to say “farewell,” and then the shot, and she slept. The family cried for a while, and it still seems wrong not to leave the house by stepping over her.

Yet if she had been human, she would have been forced to have chemotherapy or radiation -- hair lost, vomiting, endless nausea (and no medical marijuana to fight it just in case a wrong message is sent). The treatment is designed to kill the tumor before the patient if one is lucky. Denied the inalienable right to depart no matter how bad it hurt, she would have gone on and on, needlessly, for the end was indisputable.

Maggie was spared all of that, and rightly so, since the average dog is better than the average human – and she was far from average. She didn’t deserve to be treated like a human, and for all their flaws, neither do humans.

© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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