Beagle of Mine
I stopped into a dog show yesterday. The air was thick with the smells of fur, pee and hope and the mutts big and small were groomed to within an inch of their little lives. The serious looks on the faces of their handlers was almost amusing – reminiscent of the movie Best In Show. But this is serious business, baby.
I immediately noted a small Beagle-ish beast, looking healthy, shiny and beautiful and her soulful eyes meeting those of her human show partner, almost pleading, “just tell me what to do to please you!” She reminded me so much of wee Sammy, the troubled Beagle who messed up my life and brought me so much joy at the same time.
If you weren’t reading here for the Sammy years, I’ll give you the short-haired version. Sammy was a rescue, intercepted en route to a medical laboratory where she no doubt would have stoicly taken any atrocity that would have been meted out on her. I saw her photo on the internet and fell in love. One long drive up north later and she was ours; a stinky, underfed, frightened little sack of bones I came to nickname the “love sponge.”
She destroyed window ledges. Her separation anxiety was one of the worst cases ever seen by the experts we consulted. She was too smart for the conventional treatments. It was a struggle to stay sane and keep on an airtight schedule in attempts to train her out of her panic attacks and Tazmanian Devil traits.
Late in his life, Lee Roy the Border Collie sustained a deep wound in his ear. $1100. later we were left puzzled by its cause and assumed he had been pounced at the dog park in a fraction of a second when no one was looking. Fast forward more than a year. I entered the house and found a scene out of a horror movie. Blood splattered the walls down the hallway. The carpet was bloody and drops had even hit the ceiling. Sammy bounded toward me, her mouth soaked in blood. When I found the cat, it was clear whose blood it was. Stanley was wounded and terrified, trembling under a bed. The behaviorist said this was the hardest thing to cure and since this dog wasn’t improving in two years… well, you can imagine the rest of this story. It was a very dark chapter.
I have no regrets. Sometimes in life you have to admit that you’ve done everything you possibly can, in fact, more than most people ever would have done, and you have to do what’s right, not what’s easy. But seeing that sweet little Beagle yesterday, proudly performing for its owner, opened a floodgate of feelings that spilled over into a half hour of tears. These little critters work their way into your heart easily and even years after they’ve gone, they haven’t worked their way back out.
