We Swears on the Precious

I’m sitting in my living room with (most of) my family watching a funny animated movie to help assuage all of our raw feelings. We had to put down the family dog today after a long struggle with canine dementia that struck her very suddenly about five days after we moved nearly two years ago. Prior to the move, she was a Very Good Dog, with the exception that she had never been taught to ask to go outside to potty by her previous owners. This was remedied easily by just making sure she went outside fairly often and paying attention to whether she was wandering near the back door, because she would not make any other indication. Otherwise, she led a fairly nice doggie life of sleeping tucked into my side each night, and during the day she lazily ambled from person to person in the house, napping when she wasn’t. Typical dog life, and well deserved.

In retrospect, I don’t remember why I got a dog, other than knowing I enjoyed spending time with my friends’ dogs when I visited them. I knew I should start small and asked a local rescue if they had any small dogs that would fit the bill. They did, and she was also elderly, which was a bonus to me: I wanted to give an old dog a good home for their last years. Precious, shortened from Precious Chi, which is the name the shelter gave her because she was a small, white dog most strongly resembling a chihuahua, had been picked up by the City and then transferred to our city’s primary no-kill shelter. Like all rescuers, I wondered about the backstory to this small, white dog. I wrote to the rescue group and asked them what they knew, and discovered that she had been picked up by the pound after people reported a stray dog. She was very friendly, but not in very good shape, as one would expect from a dog living on the streets. Very dirty, long claws, and a little thin, but with a sweet disposition and a love of licking the nearest person to death. She had a mild case of heartworms that needed tending but was otherwise in good health for a 15-year-old rat terrier (which is what she really was, not a chihuahua).

Her first night at home was a predictably nervous one. I kept her in a crate as recommended by the shelter, but the clever girl managed to get out of it and I found her in the morning next to a wet spot on the carpet, looking a little sheepish. I patted her head and took her outside to see her new yard. We also had four cats, and they were all viewing her with some trepidation, despite her small size. She stuck close to me in the daytime, and loved a lap. That night, I tried to put her into the crate again, but she was so unhappy that I broke recommended protocol and let her into our bedroom to sleep with us. It was as if she’d always lived with us: she ran into the bedroom, jumped up on the bed, and sat down between mine and my husband’s pillows in eager anticipation of a snuggly night between us. If she had any memories of being a hungry street dog, they seemed to be long forgotten.

I had never had the privilege of sleeping with a dog, so I was unprepared for the happy feeling of a warm dog body tucked up right against my ribs. She stuck her nose between her paws and went right to sleep while I watched my shows on Netflix, and when I got up in the morning, she trotted to the kitchen with me and patiently awaited her breakfast.

We got to enjoy one good year with Precious before her aging brain gave way to stress. We moved from our small house in central Austin to a much larger one in the suburbs, and about five days after we moved, it was like a switch went off in her little head, and she was never the same again. She stopped sleeping with me, preferring a bed beneath a table, and no longer gave any indicator at all when she needed to go outside, necessitating keeping paper towels in strategic places in the house to wipe up her accidents. I would learn after her death that sudden change can result in the sudden onset of dementia in older dogs, which gave me some comfort that there wasn’t anything I could have done to prevent it.

In January, she began suffering from “loops”: little points of doggie anxiety that she would get stuck on, and she would be inconsolable. When this began happening at night, we finally took her in to see the vet about having her put to sleep. Her existence, and ours, had become miserable. The vet assured us we were doing the right thing, and that we had been doing the right thing in allowing her to live, for I was visibly showing distress at not having brought her in sooner to put her out of her obvious misery. She was afforded the courtesy typically reserved for a fallen soldier by both our family and our vet, and a few short days later, we were gifted with a lovely, small redwood box containing her ashes. A brass plaque was atop the box: Precious.

And she really was precious to me. As pagans, we have a fondness for Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and we frequently made jokes about swearing on the Precious and how we’re just “filthy hobbitses” to people who don’t understand pagans (seriously, pagans are just hobbits in big bodies: we like good food, good company, good drinks, gardening, long walks in the woods, are often fond of “hobbit leaf”, and the only hexing that gets done is when someone draws a protective mandala on something). And when she died, it felt like part of myself had died with her. Indeed, that evening, I experienced my first menopausal hot flash, which is common during life stresses, and it was as though I was going through the cremation process myself, because I felt like my whole upper body was on fire. That night, I dreamt of being on fire and quenching myself with a mighty river.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever have another dog, but even as I say that, I think of dogs I would love having: I have a special place in my heart for German Shepherds and corgis. I’ve had cats my whole life, and cats and dogs are completely different in their needs. A cat is very self-sufficient and can tolerate things like its owners being away at work all day. A dog is different: dogs and humans have evolved together over the last several thousand years, and as such, we have developed a symbiosis and emotional connection that is rare between humans and animals. My friends with dogs have a deep relationship with their animals that I don’t quite understand, because I’m a cat person and only got one good year of dog experience. While I could definitely benefit from the presence of a dog due to my mental health issues, at this time, I think I’ll be sticking with the felines.

Which is not to say that I regret my time with Precious in any way, shape, or form. I adored that little dog, and she loved me back in a way that I had never experienced before. The love between cats and their owners is singular, but so is the love between dogs and their owners. Dogs are devoted to whomever they decide is their pack leader, and I was definitely Precious’ main pack leader. She considered my husband to be a secondary, nearly equal pack leader, and she was very upset last September when he had to be away at the hospital for emergency surgery. I stayed at the hospital with my husband at night, and the kids told me that she would make the most awful noise at night when she woke up and found both of us gone.

There is something to be said for having living creatures around that depend on you. Many pet owners refer to their pets as their “fur babies”, sometimes to the consternation of people who have children who object to someone considering an animal to be of equal value as their child. When I’m confronted by someone like that, I have a conversation with them that paraphrases the conversation between Neo and the Indian “programs” in the train station at the beginning of the third “Matrix” movie. Neo says that he has never heard of programs speak of love, and the father says that love is only a word: what matters is the connection the word implies. He sees that Neo is in love and asks him what he would do to maintain that connection, to which Neo gives the obvious reply: “Anything.”

That’s all that matters when dealing with a person’s children or pets, or anyone they love on any level. The Greeks had seven notions of love expressed by six words ranging from divine love to erotic love to brotherly love. I have no doubt that, were they to witness the deep connections some humans have with the animals who live with them, they would find them worthy of the term “love”.