Helter Shelter
Poor old Michael Vick. On top of the world one day, haunted by dead pit bulls the next. There goes the money—the lawyers are going to get it all. There goes the house, the car, the entourage. All this trouble, all this upset because Vick couldn’t stay away from dogfights and couldn’t resist mistreating dogs with his own two hands. All these new prison friends just waiting for a chance to hang with Vick. It just can’t turn out good.
Every now and then, I hear somebody defend Michael Vick with something like, “It’s not like he killed a person. He just killed some dogs.” And then there’s, “They eat dogs in China, and nobody goes to prison for it.”
Well, sure. In China, they spike the dog food with liver-killing melamine and paint the baby toys with brain-killing lead. You wouldn’t want to be a dog eating Chinese dog food, or a baby gumming Chinese baby toys.
But what you really don’t want to be is a man who’s famous for mistreating dogs—especially here in America, where we love and spoil our dogs. We Americans kiss our dogs square on the lips. We sure as hell wouldn’t eat them. Of course, we have to make allowances for people with serious, intractable mental illnesses who might serve up a Chihuahua and wash it down with a pitcher of Dos Equis.
But I digress. The way I see it, American dogs are here to serve a noble purpose. They’re here to be the meter that tells us if we—the American humans—are fit to live. If a day comes when an average American citizen doesn’t have it in him to love a good dog, or help a down-and-out dog, or rub the belly of a dog who’s begging for a belly-rubbing, then we might as well go to China and eat up all their melamine-laced dog food. It’ll be time for us to go. And we’ll all go to hell, guaranteed. As my friend Rev. Bob once told me: if you wake up in the afterlife and there aren’t any dogs around, then you’re not in heaven.
I can understand how some people could learn to hate certain animals and even kill them. For instance, I don’t have any use for pigeons. When pigeons build nests on the gable brackets at my house and start dropping their toxic histoplasmosis poop into my driveway, I shoot them with my pellet gun. They fall to the ground, then the neighbors’ cat carries them off and eats them. I think that deal is fair to all parties. Taking pigeons off the planet is a public service, not a transgression.
As much as I despise pigeons, I really enjoy turtles. Back when I was a teenager living next to the Jowers swamp down in South Carolina, I made at least one trip a week to the sorry-ass little department store that had the sorry-ass little pet store in it. There, I’d examine the baby painted turtles one by one and find the turtles with the softest shells. A soft shell on a baby painted turtle means that turtle is malnourished. I’m just not the kind of man who can watch a turtle soften up a little bit every day until it’s dead. So I bought one baby painted turtle per week, for a quarter.
I took the turtles home and put them into a little plastic terrarium. A few times every day, I’d feed them worms that I dug out of the loam at the edge of the swamp. After about a week’s worth of worms, those turtles’ shells hardened up nicely, and I set them free in the swamp. Some of those turtles could still be alive today.
I have killed one dog. She wandered up to my house one night, followed me on my nightly jog and stayed close to my side after that. I named her Nuisance, because she stole the neighbors’ laundry off their clotheslines. Nuisance was a little bit shepherd, a little bit collie and who knows what else. She loved two things: biting the lawn mower wheels while I was cutting the grass and running with me at night. After a few months, though, Nuisance came down with an intractable case of mange. She was miserable, and her hide was an oozing mess. Nothing the vet did helped. So one evening I dug a grave by the creek, then took off running with Nuisance. We ran east to Langley, turned around and ran west to Bath, then back home to the grave at the side of the creek. There, with one shot, I cured Nuisance of mange.
For the life of me, I can’t understand how anybody could deliberately torture a good dog. A dog is the only animal I know who’ll wander off and die alone rather than trouble his master with the final arrangements. The least we can do is treat the dogs as well as they treat us.
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