Better steer clear of her, you left-wing ideologues and right-wing religious types!

Taking into account the fact that Namit has introduced me as a Dragon Lady to be feared, I will inaugurate my blogging efforts at Shunya’s Notes with a kinder gentler post.

As I say on my page, I am an ardent animal lover. No, not one of the kooky, irrational types who would let children starve while they pamper their pets – are there really many people like that?  ( But I must admit that when I watch epic war movies or westerns, the twinge of sadness I feel seeing a horse die on the battle field, is a bit more acute than the one I feel for its slain human rider.) I also believe that wanton cruelty towards animals should be punishable by serious jail time and fines. That said, I do not write about animals very often. Some time ago, when the memory of having lost a greatly loved pet was still fresh in my mind, I came across an extraordinarily moving essay in Newsweek by a man who had to put his beloved Doberman to sleep because it had become a threat to the safety of his family. The following thoughts had crossed my mind at that time.

For animal lovers, the joy of living with a companion animal is tempered by the knowledge that our pets most likely will die before us. We also know when we bring animals into our lives that some day we ourselves may be the instrument of their death – when disease, old age or some other consideration will compel us to euthanize them. Knowing this does not make the decision of putting a pet to sleep any easier … ever.

While most pets are euthanized because of disease or debilitation, dogs sometimes are put to sleep because they become a danger to us even when they are young and healthy. Dogs of aggressive breeds like Doberman, Rottweiler and less often German Shepherds, sometimes imperceptively cross the line between frisky, exuberant and playful …. to dangerous. The pet owner is often slow to recognize the transformation because the dog can remain docile and obedient to one human in the household whom it regards as the alpha animal. Jonathan Cooperman’s dog was one such tragic case.  Jack, whom Cooperman called “My Boy” had to be euthanized at the age of four, in the prime of his healthy life when it became clear that he had become a potential threat to his human companions.

“Sometimes there are no words–just a look. Upon my command, my Doberman, Jack, sat obediently in the vet’s examining room. Four years old and in his prime, with 115 pounds of strapping muscle, he was at once impressive and intimidating. He sat between the vet and me, wagging his tail.

When I gave him the instruction “paw,” he offered that big foot to the vet, who placed a tourniquet on his leg. The medicine was drawn into the syringe and pushed into Jack’s vein. Two seconds elapsed, and it was during this extraordinarily brief space of time that Jack gave me that look, one I’d never seen before. I couldn’t turn away. Then all that bulk went lifeless, and he was gone.

There were no words. There was no quote that I could take home and put in a diary. There was just that look.

Earlier that morning, Jack had jumped onto the bed (something he was not allowed to do) and attacked my wife, Tracy. He’d given no warning. Even as an experienced Doberman owner, I was amazed by his lightning speed as he bit Tracy three times. I rushed her, shaken and bloody, to the hospital, and it was later that day that Jack and I ended up at the vet’s office.

…..We forge special bonds with our pets, and my relationship with Jack was no exception. I called him “my boy,” having raised him since he was a pup. When I first got Jack, I owned a sports car, and his idea of going for a ride was jumping into the trunk, then crawling Army style half-way through the dropped-down back seat, so that his hindquarters remained in the trunk as we drove around town. My decision to buy a Jeep as my next vehicle was pretty much influenced by imagining Jack as a passenger. He deserved to be transported in style.

Just before Jack and I went to the vet’s, I took him for a long walk and one of our car rides. We played Frisbee and I let him chase squirrels in the park. I wanted his last moments to be normal–and fun. Two hours later he was gone.

So what was Jack trying to convey with that unforgettable look he gave me in the last seconds of his life? Hard to say. Like most pets, he had an assortment of expressions and sounds that spoke loud and clear to me: a quick bark meant he had to go out; pushing his bowl across the floor meant “feed me”; wide paws and a low stance meant “play with me,” and my favorite–jumping six feet in the air while banging all four paws against the sliding glass door–meant “I want to come in.”

But that last look was something altogether different, and like most people who have been left with a hole in their lives, I find myself filling in the words that were never said. I’d like to believe Jack was saying, “It’s OK. I had a good time.”

All of us who have gone through the heart wrenching experience of putting a beloved animal to sleep, have wished that we could have fathomed what went through the mind of our pet at the moment before the lethal injection was administered – to know whether they understood.  I know that this will be dismissed by many as unnecessary sentimentality of projecting “human” feelings on to animals. But the very essence of our empathy is to be able to humanize an event and a relationship. How else do we bond with our animals?