Something About Harry Old Dogs are the Best Dogs

By Gene Weingarten
Sunday, October 5, 2008; W16

Not long before his death, Harry and I headed out for a walk that proved eventful. He was nearly 13, old for a big dog. Walks were no longer the slap-happy Iditarods of his youth, frenzies of purposeless pulling in which we would cast madly off in all directions, fighting for command. Nor were they the exuberant archaeological expeditions of his middle years, when every other tree or hydrant or blade of grass held tantalizing secrets about his neighbors. In his old age, Harry had transformed his walk into a simple process of elimination -- a dutiful, utilitarian, head-down trudge. When finished, he would shuffle home to his ratty old bed, which graced our living room because Harry could no longer ascend the stairs. On these walks, Harry seemed oblivious to his surroundings, absorbed in the arduous responsibility of placing foot before foot before foot before foot. But this time, on the edge of a small urban park, he stopped to watch something. A man was throwing a Frisbee to his dog. The dog, about Harry's size, was tracking the flight expertly, as Harry had once done, anticipating hooks and slices by watching the pitch and roll and yaw of the disc, as Harry had done, then catching it with a joyful, punctuating leap, as Harry had once done, too.

Harry sat. For 10 minutes, he watched the fling and catch, fling and catch, his face contented, his eyes alight, his tail a-twitch. Our walk home was almost jaunty.

Some years ago, the Style section invited readers to come up with a midlife list of goals for an underachiever. The first-runner-up prize went to:

"Win the admiration of my dog."

It's no big deal to love a dog; they make it so easy for you. They find you brilliant, even if you are a witling. You fascinate them, even if you are as dull as a butter knife. They are fond of you, even if you are a genocidal maniac. Hitler loved his dogs, and they loved him.

Puppies are incomparably cute and incomparably entertaining, and, best of all, they smell exactly like puppies. At middle age, a dog has settled into the knuckleheaded matrix of behavior we find so appealing -- his unquestioning loyalty, his irrepressible willingness to please, his infectious happiness. His unequivocal love. But it is not until a dog gets old that his most important virtues ripen and coalesce. Old dogs can be cloudy-eyed and grouchy, gray of muzzle, graceless of gait, odd of habit, hard of hearing, pimply, wheezy, lazy and lumpy. But to anyone who has ever known an old dog, these flaws are of little consequence. Old dogs are vulnerable. They show exorbitant gratitude and limitless trust. They are without artifice. They are funny in new and unexpected ways. But, above all, they seem at peace.

Kafka wrote that the meaning of life is that it ends. He meant that our lives are shaped and shaded by the existential terror of knowing that all is finite. This anxiety informs poetry, literature, the monuments we build, the wars we wage, the ways we love and hate and procreate -- all of it. Kafka was talking, of course, about people. Among animals, only humans are said to be self-aware enough to comprehend the passage of time and the grim truth of mortality. How then, to explain old Harry at the edge of that park, gray and lame, just days from the end, experiencing what can only be called wistfulness and nostalgia? I have lived with eight dogs, watched six of them grow old and infirm with grace and dignity, and die with what seemed to be acceptance. I have seen old dogs grieve at the loss of their friends. I have come to believe that as they age, dogs comprehend the passage of time, and, if not the inevitability of death, certainly the relentlessness of the onset of their frailties. They understand that what's gone is gone.

What dogs do not have is an abstract sense of fear, or a feeling of injustice or entitlement. They do not see themselves, as we do, as tragic heroes, battling ceaselessly against the merciless onslaught of time. Unlike us, old dogs lack the audacity to mythologize their lives. You've got to love them for that.

At the pet store, we chose Harry over two other puppies because, when wrestling with my children in the get-acquainted enclosure, Harry drew the most blood. We wanted a feisty pup, and we got one.

It is instructive to watch what happens in a tug of war between a child and a young dog who is equally pigheaded, but stronger. Neither gives an inch, which means that, over dozens of days, the child is dragged hundreds of feet on his behind.

The product of a Kansas puppy mill, son of a bitch named Taffy Sioux, Harry had been sold to us as a yellow Labrador retriever. I suppose it was technically true, but only in the sense that Tic Tacs are technically "food." Harry's lineage was suspect. He wasn't the square-headed, shiny, elegant type of Labrador you can envision in the wilds of Canada hunting for ducks. He was the shape of a baked potato, with the color and luster of an interoffice envelope. You could envision him in the wilds of suburban Toledo, hunting for nuggets of dried food in a carpet.

His full name was Harry S Truman, and once he'd reached middle age, he had indeed developed the unassuming soul of a haberdasher. We sometimes called him Tru, which fit his loyalty but was in other ways a misnomer: Harry was a bit of an eccentric, a few bubbles off plumb. Though he had never experienced an electrical shock, whenever he encountered a wire on the floor -- say, a power cord leading from a laptop to a wall socket -- Harry would stop and refuse to proceed. To him, this barrier was as impassable as the Himalayas. He'd stand there, waiting for someone to move it. Also, he was afraid of wind.

While Harry lacked the wiliness and cunning of some dogs, I did watch one day as he figured out a basic principle of physics. He was playing with a water bottle in our back yard -- it was one of those five-gallon cylindrical plastic jugs from the top of a water cooler. At one point, it rolled down a hill, which surprised and delighted him. He retrieved it, brought it back up and tried to make it go down again. It wouldn't. I watched him nudge it around until he discovered that for the bottle to roll, its long axis had to be perpendicular to the slope of the hill. You could see the understanding dawn on his face; it was Archimedes in his bath, Helen Keller at the water spigot.

That was probably the intellectual achievement of Harry's life, tarnished only slightly by the fact that he spent the next two hours insipidly entranced, rolling the bottle down and hauling it back up. He did not come inside until it grew too dark for him to see.

I believe I know exactly when Harry became an old dog. He was about 9 years old. It happened at 10:15 on the evening of June 21, 2001, the day my family moved from the suburbs to the city. The move took longer than we'd anticipated. Inexcusably, Harry had been left alone in the vacated house -- eerie, echoing, empty of furniture and of all belongings except Harry and his bed-- for eight hours. When I arrived to pick him up, he was beyond frantic.

He met me at the door and embraced me around the waist in a way that is not immediately reconcilable with the musculature and skeleton of a dog's front legs. I could not extricate myself from his grasp. We walked out of that house like a slow-dancing couple, and Harry did not let go until I opened the car door.

He wasn't barking at me in reprimand, as he once might have done. He hadn't fouled the house in spite. That night, Harry was simply scared and vulnerable, impossibly sweet and needy and grateful. He had lost something of himself, but he had gained something more touching and more valuable. He had entered old age.

Some people who seem unmoved by the deaths of tens of thousands through war or natural disaster will nonetheless summon outrage over the mistreatment of animals, and they will grieve inconsolably over the loss of the family dog. People who find this behavior distasteful are often the ones without pets. It is hard to understand, in the abstract, the degree to which a companion animal, particularly after a long life, becomes a part of you. I believe I've figured out what this is all about. It is not as noble as I'd like it to be, but it is not anything of which to be ashamed, either.

In our dogs, we see ourselves. Dogs exhibit almost all of our emotions; if you think a dog cannot register envy or pity or pride or melancholia, you have never lived with one for any length of time. What dogs lack is our ability to dissimulate. They wear their emotions nakedly, and so, in watching them, we see ourselves as we would be if we were stripped of posture and pretense. Their innocence is enormously appealing. When we watch a dog progress from puppyhood to old age, we are watching our own lives in microcosm. Our dogs become old, frail, crotchety and vulnerable, just as Grandma did, just as we surely will, come the day. When we grieve for them, we grieve for ourselves.

The meaning of life is that it ends.

In the year after our move, Harry began to age visibly, and he did it the way most dogs do. First his muzzle began to whiten, and then the white slowly crept backward to swallow his entire head. Pink nose, white head, tan flanks -- he looked like a stubby kitchen match. As he became more sedentary, he thickened a bit, too.

I remember reading an article once about people who raised dogs for food in Asia. A dog rancher was indignantly defending his profession, saying that he used only "basic yellow dogs." As I looked down at Harry, asleep as usual, all I could think of was: meat.

But Harry's physical decline was accompanied by what I will call, at the risk of ridicule, a spiritual awakening. A dog's greatest intelligence is said to be his innate ability to anticipate and comprehend human feelings and actions. It's supposedly a Darwinian adaptation -- dogs need our alliance in order to survive. In earlier years, Harry had never shown any particular gift for empathy, but as the breadth of his interests dwindled, and his world contracted, he seemed to watch us more closely. My wife, who is a lawyer, also acts in community theater. One day, she was in the house rehearsing a monologue for an upcoming audition. The lines were from Marsha Norman's two-person play "'Night, Mother," about a housewife who is attempting to talk her adult daughter out of suicide.

Thelma is a weak and bewildered woman trying to change her daughter's mind while coming to terms with her own failings as a mother and with her paralyzing fear of being left alone. Her lines are excruciating.

My wife had to stop in mid-monologue. Harry was too distraught. He could understand not one word she was saying, but he figured out that Mom was as sad as he'd ever seen her. He was whimpering, pawing at her knee, licking her hand, trying as best he could to make things better. You don't need a brain to have a heart.

Harry was always terrified of thunderstorms, but as he aged and his hearing waned, as if in a benign collusion of natural forces, this terror subsided. He became a calmer dog in general, if a far more eccentric one.

On walks, he would no longer bother to scout and circle for a place to relieve himself. He would simply do it in mid-plod, like a horse, leaving the difficult logistics of drive-by cleanup to me. Sometimes, while crossing a busy street, with cars whizzing by, he would plop down to scratch his ear. Sometimes, he would forget where he was and why he was there. To the amusement of passersby, I would have to hunker down beside him and say, "Harry, we're on a walk, and we're going home now. Home is this way, okay?" On these dutiful walks, Harry ignored almost everything he passed. The most notable exception was an old, barrel-chested female pit bull named Honey, whom he loved. This was surprising, both because other dogs had long ago ceased to interest Harry at all, and because even back when they did, Harry's tastes were for the guys. Though he was neutered, Harry's sexual preference was pretty evident.

But when we met Honey on walks, Harry perked up. Honey was younger by five years and heartier by a mile, but she liked Harry and slowed her gait when he was around. They waddled together for blocks, eyes forward, hardly interacting but content in each other's company. Harry reminded me of an old gay man who, at the end of his life, returns to his wife to end their time together on a porch swing under an embroidered lap shawl. I will forever be grateful to Honey for sweetening Harry's last days.

I work mostly at home, which means that during the weekdays Harry and I shared an otherwise empty house. Mostly, he slept; mostly I wrote and paced, and my pacing often took me past his lump on the floor. I would always mutter, almost unconsciously, "Hey, Harry," and he would always respond in the same fashion: His body would move not at all, but his tail would thud, exactly once, against the floor.

I didn't really know how important that ritual was until there was no thud anymore.

One night at 3 a.m., a smoke detector in our house began to bleep in that water-torture way, signaling that it needed a new battery. It was mildly annoying, but to Harry it appeared to be a sign of the Apocalypse. He began pacing and panting, and actually tried climbing our stairwell to hide under our bed. His rheumy legs buckled; we caught him before he fell.

So I mounted a ladder, disconnected the bleeping thing, and took out the spent battery. Then my wife spent two hours talking Harry down into a semi-sane condition. She slept on the floor by his side.

It turned out to be Harry's final eccentricity. When he awoke the next morning, he could no longer use his hind legs, and we trundled him off to the vet. Harry had timed his departure thoughtfully. Had he waited a few more hours, my daughter would have been unable to hug him and tell him what a good boy he had been. She had known and loved Harry more than half of her life, and I believe this was not incidental to her choice of career. She was leaving, that next morning, for her first day of veterinary school.

For nearly a week after Harry's death, my wife and I shared a knowledge that we left unspoken, even to each other. It was simply too heart-wrenching to say out loud.

As he lay on the gurney and the doctor began to push the poison into his vein, Harry had lifted up his head and kissed us goodbye.

Gene Weingarten is a staff writer for the Magazine. He can be reached at weingarten@washpost.com. This article was excerpted from "Old Dogs" by Gene Weingarten. Photographs by Michael S. Williamson. Copyright © 2008 by Gene Weingarten and Michael S. Williamson. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Just wanted to drop a line about club training. Many people don’t know that there are two types of training available, Paid training where you pay someone to train you or your dog or both, and free training. That’s right, free, and that is my favorite kind J When you train with clubs basically you pay dues to belong to the club, but then you have everyone else’s eyes and ears and years of experience to help you along the way. There are many types of clubs, Everyone knows by now my favorites are SAR and Schutzhund, but we are even playing with Agility this year as well and enjoying that. Belonging to a club also reduces your need for expensive equipment as the club usually owns the major pieces of equipment that you need. Most of all though is the social interaction and support group. The sense of belonging and friendship is priceless. If you don’t have a good club in your area, start one! That’s what I do when I am unhappy with what is available, chances are there are many more like minded individuals in your area that would love to get together and do the same thing. There are obedience clubs, agility clubs, sight hound, earth dog, lure coursing, flyball, freestyle (though I forbid anyone with my Dobies to participate J ) The list goes on and on! What’s your pleasure? Do you already belong to a club? If so please take a moment and let us know where and what so we can share that with others in case they are in your area.

 

I also wanted to take a minute and plug the Forum again, it still has not taken off like I expected it would, so…. Please go and share some of your great information with people who may be looking, and ask questions of the others that may have answers. You can use the search feature to go through all the old posts to as there is some great info there just hidden J

 

One last plug, does anyone on the list belong to the UDC? I have been thwarted at every attempt to join, and I really would like membership in the club so I can compete at their nationals. What I need is a member in good standing willing to sponsor me.

Well we have a new Vehicle in the round up here at Family Dobes. I have always been a truck guy, but down here in Arizona heat I can't go anywhere with more than one dog if I take the truck, so I took the plunge. I bought what my wife called a "Plyg Rig" She lived in St George Utah for a while and the Polygamists from nearby Colorado City would come to town and shop and they all drove great big passenger vans and they became known as "Plyg Rigs" in town. Well I couldn't take the nick name for my dog mover, so I had it wrapped and it has now affectionatley become the "DAV" or the Doberman Assault vehicle. It is great for moving around the Doberman puppies or our Champion European Dobermans shuffling back and forth to training or to the Vet, and did I mention how much I love it? I love it!!!! Thanks Arizona Color! Mary worked hard to give me the best Price in town, and Jeni the Graphic designer was not only lightning fast, but came up with an idea that was better than anything I had come up with on my own. I can't say enough good things about them. Thanks Team!!!!

Here is info I wanted to pass on true or not, you can all make your own
judgment.


Steve Parsons
480-993-9797
http://www.familydobes.com
http://www.dobetalk.com

Subject: FW: Dog bones sold at Walmart ~ You need to know this

Steve,
I tried verifying this on Snopes, but couldn't find anything...it's worth a
glance through if it might save a four legged friend.

Lisa

ITA Member Jeannie Watanabe shares the following notice:
____________________________________________________________________________
__

> Subj: dog bones sold at Walmart
>
> *Just wanted to pass along this warning about a potentially dangerous
> dog bone sold at Walmarts. The incident with the bone appears to have
happened
> in FL, but the bone is **most likely sold at Walmarts all over the U.S.
> Please pass along to the dog owners you know.
> Personally, I've never liked bones like this and don't give them to my
dogs
> but i know alot of people do, and are mis-lead by labels, thinking
> they
are
> safe.* * I'd cringe when I'd seen someone purchasing 'Greenies' too.
> *
>
> *----- Original Message -----
>
>
> *I would like to warn all dog lovers out there to be very careful
> about
the
> dog treats that you give your dogs. Last week I bought a "Real Ham Bone"
> made by Dynamic Pet Products of Missouri from Walmart. Here is what
> it *looks
> like: . The label says it is made with "100% Food Grade Ingredients"
> and
it
> isn't made from China. I thought that meant that this would make a
> good treat for my dogs. Boy was I wrong.*
>
> *Trace, my dog, enjoyed chewing on this bone. It did not splinter or
> anything, in fact there is quite a large piece of it still left. Then
> in
the
> evening she started vomiting. She spent the next day at a
> veterinarian' s office where she was diagnosed with a blockage of the
> colon. That night
she
> endured a 4 hour surgery at Brandon Veterinary Specialists where the
> vet picked out small round pellets of the bone, up to the size of
> about a
b-b.
> The next morning she was moved to Florida Veterinary Specialist
> critical care unit. Again in the evening she had another 2 hour
> surgery, because
the
> blockage had caused poison in her body. She passed away at 4:30 the
> next
> afternoon.*
>
> *Everyone who hears this horrible story immediately says "Well that
> sounds like a lawsuit to me". That is what I thought also. Since
> then, I have learned that is not that easy to sue on behalf of a dog.
> The lawyers say
a
> dog is a possession just like a couch. So, so far, all I have been
> able
to
> do is write a certified letter to Dynamic Pet Products of Missouri.
> In it
I
> requested my vet bills to be paid and their product to be relabeled or
> preferably removed from the shelf. I don't know if I will get a response.
> If anyone else has any ideas about how I may address this issue,
> please
let
> me know at **djurgens12@aol. com* *.*
>
> *In the memory of Trace, please pass this email on to all of the dog
lovers
> that you know. This type of bone is sold in all of the stores under
several
> different manufacturers names. I would assume they all may do the
> same thing. Even if they don't splinter, they can cause a blockage.*

> THE PURPOSE OF LIFE,
> IS TO LIVE A LIFE OF PURPOSE
>
> Cathy Allred King
> credking@gmail.com
> 435-640-9095
>

This page is one of those nasty pages that I didn't ever want to create, but I have been affected financially enough to warrant it at least in my behalf, and so many other people could be protected from making bad decisions. If you have had a bad experience with a particular breeder/seller, you are welcome to email your story to me with supporting facts for inclusion here, I will also include it on my blogs.

I am never one to talk bad about other breeders/brokers, it does no good to sling mud. I am also not one to tell you not to buy from a particular person, that is your decision alone. However there are some people I have had a very bad experience with. This does not imply you would also have a bad experience, but perhaps you would you will have to decide. Brokers that I have personally had a bad experience with:

Whited K9 Services. I originally got Zenny through Bill Whited with Whited K9 services. He failed to provide the proper registration and ownership paperwork at the time of sale. It took me a year to finally get the correct paperwork. Zenny was also represented to me in pictures with having a correct earset. Everyone who has met him knows he has an ear that tips in to the center of his head. He also had implants in his ear that have continually erupted and caused problems. That being said, everyone who knows me knows the love I have for that dog, and would never part with him. I am more than satisfied with the dog, just not how the paperwork was handled. I agreed to by a second dog from Bill right after getting Zenny, and sent payment in full for a dog named Exter from the Netherlands. I was told a week later that she had been injured and was no longer for sale. I asked to see the x-rays and said I may be interested in her anyway. They would not provide them, instead they sent me Coco. Again, I would never part with Coco, I love her dearly and she is a great dog, but that wasn't the proper way to conduct business. Years later my suspicions were confirmed by a former employee of Bills who indicated he had a better offer for Exter and sold her to someone else at a higher amount. Business is Business I suppose, but to lie about the situation after I had already sent payment in full initiated a contract. I should at least have been offered the chance to buy her at a higher price even though that was already bad business. I must not have learned my lesson, because once again, I purchased a dog from Bill who was in whelp at the time from Germany. I was much more careful and had a contract filled out to include export pedigrees, litter registration etc. all complete with deadlines and penalties. The deadline came and went and the final words from Bill were "Please do not email or phone me anymore or I will turn this over to our attorneys and they will follow through with a claim of harassment, defamation of character and interruption of business.Yours Truly,Bill Whited, pres." I promptly replied that was possibly the stupidest thing he had ever told me as it became the fuel for creating this page. The contract is two months past due and the proper paperwork still has not been provided, nor was the financial penalty taken care of.

 High Caliber K9 services- Steve Croley People may wonder why I repeatedly go back to the same people when they have not conducted business well, and they fail to understand how hard it is to find good Dobermans and that sometimes you have to gamble on the process to get a good dog. That is how I justify it anyway. The readers can laugh t my stupidity or be smarter :) So the very short version is this: I bought three dogs from Steve Croley, and required in advance that they all came with an export pedigree. Naturally they didn't or the story wouldn't be told! I was told many things over the course of the next year everything from I wired money to have it taken care of and I am waiting to hear back to it should be just next week, or even that they were actually in the mail. Finally one phone call ended with honesty "I lied, /i never sent them off, I can't afford to have them done." At least we were getting somewhere! I spent over a thousand dollars on my own to have some of my other the contacts get the paperwork done for me, and one year later it is finally all done. Now that is bad enough in itself, but wait until I show you pictures of one of the dogs that was sent. He was represented as the best dog in the world. Since he was being sold with IPO and ZTP titles I wanted video. I was told that Steve's contact in Germany (Whom I won't name as I have no quarrel with him) had personally tested the dog and he was "The best Doberman in protection he had ever worked" That said a lot since this guy is internationally know as a very good bite helper. Well the dog arrived, look at the pictures to see the condition, and as far as training? This dog did not even know how to walk on a leash. He did not have a real IPO title, I later confirmed through one of my contacts that the paperwork was forged. Steve finally admitted his contact never tested the dog. He agreed to take him back for training to make it right, and had him for two months. At the end of that time, he still did not have a reliable sit, down, here or stay. He would bite though but his out was still terrible, and he was willing to bite when he got here and had a terrible out. Here are the pictures complete with frostbit ear and home suture job with sewing thread: Pictures of Dog

I will have you know the dog is now very healthy and loved. The story doesn't end there though! I bought another dog through Steve for a friend who wanted a German Shepherd. Turns out he was never supposed to have sold the dog and the original breeder in Germany was very angry. I have been told for months that the pedigree was sent into the AKC and would arrive anytime. I have learned from the AKC nothing has ever been sent in there is nothing in process or finished. Steve has not returned phone calls, emails, or texts ever since. In fact the one time he accidentally took my call, he hung up on me. Yet there was one more! I helped a friend buy a German shepherd in whelp from Germany through Steve. We had an agreed upon total price for the dog, the breeding and shipping. I paid it by wire. Three months later the dog was still not here. Finally she was bred and the German contact told me he couldn't ship the dog until I paid the shipping (Which I had already paid to Steve) in a pinch my friend paid the additional $1500 for shipping and the dog finally arrived. She is also outstanding, but the whole deal was dishonest from the beginning.

So perhaps the reader will have a much better experience if they choose to do training or purchasing through these other entities. If you would like to submit a story please send it to fraud@familydobes.com

This is how we handle the IRS at Family Dobes :)