I never wanted to own a Dane. I have always loved dogs, big dogs. I think every useful lesson I learned about love was from dogs, dogs who followed me into places they didn’t really want to go, who brought me presents I had to assess in terms of the value of their intention, who managed conflicts (including forgiveness) in a way far healthier than any humans with whom I had contact, and who taught me about being astonished in the wonder of the moment. And who saved my life at moments.
But, I didn’t want a Dane because they have health problems, and they die too young. And then a neighbor found a Dane-mix puppy abandoned at a gas station, and I took him just till we found him a home. Well, all you dog people know how quickly he found a home, but that’s a different story. And he was wonderful, but a bit complicated, and then he saved my ass a few times (including a couple of times that involved the whole I’m not really clear on the “how to identify a rattlesnake” thing but he was, and the “while walking late at night places I shouldn’t have and a man stepped out of the darkness and saw Chester and stepped back”) and he had the best temperament of any dog I’ve ever known, and, well, I was sold on Danes. I named him Chester Burnette.
When Jim and I were in a position stable enough to have two big dogs, we got Hubert Sumlin. When Chester died, and Hubert almost did, we got George Washington (a Shepherd/ridgeback/black-mouthed cur mix—that story is elsewhere) and then took in a foster (Marquis de Lafayette, also a story told elsewhere). When Hubert died, George and Marquis mourned by not barking at the mail carrier for four days (a pretty significant demonstration of grief).
We worked with a big dog rescue group, and asked to adopt a 9 month old Dane puppy. His life had been pretty rough. Although a purebred, and therefore the owner had spent a lot of money to get him, the puppy was neglected enough to get Animal Control involved. This is unhappily common—people are enamored with a big breed, and decide to get one, and haven’t really thought through what a big breed means.
Sometimes they give them up, and sometimes they stick them in a backyard. Duke’s owner was the latter. Of course, a shithead who buys a big dog and doesn’t actually want to own a big dog hasn’t generally done the work of finding a good breeder (see: shithead) so a rescue Dane is often a mistreated dog with a bad genetic line. And Duke was a dog who was so underfed that he had taken to eating everything in the backyard that wouldn’t kill him. A neighbor had repeatedly reported his situation to Animal Control, who, when Duke was nine months, told the owner he had two choices: hand over the dog, or pay a fine. The owner handed over the dog, and a rescue group got him.
The next part is kind of ugly, but I mean no criticism of the sort of people who engage in rescue. As far as we understand, Duke was brought to a really good home with a whole bunch of Danes, some of whom had only recently been neutered (and maybe some who hadn’t yet?) and a female was brought in. She went into heat, and no one expected that. Duke was restrained, and every male went nuts, and he got mauled. So, for the rest of his life, he flipped his shit if he saw another dog and he was on leash.
We went and picked him up, and then spent the hour-long drive home discussing what to name him. We’d named our previous Danes after blues singers, and he was a fawn, so I suggested Delbert McClinton. It was pointed out that would sound like Dilbert, and Jacob suggested Duke Ellington. You just had to look at that dog and see he was a “Duke.” And, of course, he looked so elegant and intelligent. We didn’t really know that was just a pose. So, we named him Duke Ellington.
George and Marquis were wonderful with him, although, having been alone in a backyard for nine months, Duke knew nothing. He didn’t know how to play, and he would watch the two of them play with a heart-breaking confusion. Eventually, George was indulgent enough to rough-house with Duke, and George, being George, managed Duke well and kept him in line in the backyard, but that was because George was pretty near his weight, and had more skill.
So, George did something extraordinary—he got Duke to understand something entirely new, and it had to do with how to relate to another being. I walked Duke through four doggy obedience classes, but between us, neither George nor I taught Duke how to “play” with someone. George taught him to match aggression. George tried, but never managed to teach Duke what play is, when you rely on limits. The difference between play and aggression is that you let someone else win, you hold back, you laugh when you are threatened. Duke played too rough.
Jim took the three of them to the dog park for over a year before Duke’s inability to understand play resulted in his fetching a little dog, and that was that. Then it was walking the dogs, and Duke’s leash-fear was triggered by seeing another dog. We did all the things that you do under those circumstances, and he did get much better, but it always started with crossing the street when you saw another dog.
Here’s the thing: Duke was dumb.
Everything about him has to start there. He meant well, he was incredibly sweet, he responded to love with love, he was frightened by various things, he tried really hard to do the right thing, but he had trouble when a situation had more than two factors to consider.
[This is a trivial part of the narrative, but he made me a better person.]
When we got Duke, we promptly started doggy kindergarten. He failed. The first task in doggy kindergarten is “watch me.” It really is pretty simple. You take a treat, put it at the dog’s nose, say “Watch me,” and pull the treat toward your nose. The idea is that you teach the dog to look at you when you say that. Duke never learned that. I mean, never. He took doggy kindergarten twice, and he didn’t learn it. And Duke was more treat-oriented than any dog I have ever known. He would pay attention to the treat at his nose, and then lose track of it because ZOMGSOMANYTHINGSATPETSMART!!!11!!!
He passed doggy kindergarten because the teacher fell in love with him. And, let’s be honest, every person who met him did that. Because Duke.
I don’t know how to explain it. Jacob said that the dumber Duke was, the more I loved him, and he was probably right. But everyone responded that way. [Except for two assholes at the dog park, but whatevs. They owned the dog that Duke fetched. I ran into them later while walking down the street with George (who loved all dogs) and they were whining that they had to stop going to the dog park because everyone hated their dog, so maybe Duke was right?] Duke managed to get out three or four times and wander the neighborhood and people brought him to us as though we had done them a favor by letting them bring him home. There was a little girl I sometimes saw at the bus transfer station, very very early in the morning, who petted his ears and told me about him—he loved her, and we took a few moments with her when we saw her. I like to think he made her obviously complicated day just a little bit better.
He ate everything. He never got over having been a starving dog in a yard. There are certain things that are native invasives in Texas—native, but they grow whether or not you want them to, and Duke learned to eat them to keep from starving. We learned that we had to give him some food first thing in the morning before letting him into the backyard or he would eat horseherb till he barfed. In seven years of good treatment, he never learned that we would feed him. I empathize with the principle that it is hard to unlearn early lessons about starvation, so I gave him part of a piece of bread every morning as soon as I got out of bed.
He turned up his nose at roadkill, unless it was really, really nasty. Jim would pull things out of Duke’s mouth that even Jim didn’t want to identify because then he might feel obliged to cut off his hand. The rule of thumb was: if Duke wanted it, you didn’t want to know what it was.
Duke was just Duke. He worried about a lot of things. He was terrified of thunder; eventually he decided that trash trucks were related to thunder—perhaps he was right, I’m not a meteorologist, but I’m obviously not a rhetorician enough to talk him out of that belief, although I tried. He came to believe that busses were not really to be trusted either. Again, I think he was wrong, but I failed to persuade him, so I think we can conclude that either he was right or I suck as a rhetorician. Compliance-gaining has never been my métier, but that’s a fairly lame defense here.
As many people have pointed out, Duke’s worries are not unreasonable concerns: thunder and trash trucks are both pretty untrustworthy. Since George shared his terror of thunderstorms, there were a lot of nights of makeshift beds in closets. The little girl at the transfer station noticed his concern about trash trucks, and she tried to persuade him they were okay, but Duke was unconvinced. He did, however, lick her nose, so that made his disagreement pretty polite. I get weepy when I think about how she’ll respond to knowing that he’s died—Duke was like that. A lot of people loved him.
Early on, we had a horrible weekend (emergency vet visit) when we determined that he had Addison’s. After that, Jim was giving monthly injections, carefully moderating Duke’s steroids, and taking Duke in for various tests. There was also the discovery that Duke was allergic to the rabies vaccination (which resulted in additional work for Jim), and the skin allergy issue which meant one more pill in the morning. Jim cheerfully arranged his life around this dog’s medical needs, loaded a hundred plus-pound dog in and out of the car, and philosophically cleaned up evidence that meds were not quite right. I can’t say enough about what Jim did for Duke.
In other words, this was a complicated dog. On the other hand, he was a really simple dog. He had rules. He wanted to sleep by me. He got confused (he never figured it out) when I moved from one side of the bed to the other, but he did compromise by discovering the dog bed on my (new) side of the bed. He liked chasing squirrels. He liked eating things he found on walks—whether those things were covered in fire ants seemed to him a trivial issue. He didn’t like having a massive Addisonian/allergic reaction, but whatevs.
He kept me in the moment. He loved the moment. This horseherb tastes good; the sun is warm; that water is tasty.
When he was dying from pain, he licked my hand. I think he was, even in tremendous pain, worried that I was unhappy. I was.
He had been limping, on and off, and so Jim took him to the vet. They did whatever x-rays they could do without sedating him (not much). So, they said we need to see a specialist. That appointment was for Monday, February 8th. On February 7th, after a normal walk, Duke ran into the backyard (as he did) to chase squirrels, pivoted on his leg, and went down. And then there was a noise that, Jim and I have agreed, if the Lord is merciful, we will never hear (or remember) again.
Various quick decisions resulted in asking neighbors for help, and getting Duke in the car, a long drive on a windy road, and an emergency vet place that was clear how bad it all was. And, so, we said goodbye to a dog who was in tremendous pain, and needed to leave this world. Any desire for more time came from our desire to want this not to be true, and for him not to be in pain. But, just as Duke had always been the dog to say, this is the moment, so this was the moment.
And, now, we go on without him. Without his eating the wrong things, farting more than you would thing possible, telling us that trash trucks are scary, dragging us out of comfortable beds because he needs to pee or bark at something, pointing out that squirrels are probably awful, drawing attention to the beauteous wonder of a mail carrier, engaging in world-class snuggling, getting confused about parked cars and poles, wandering underfoot while I’m trying to cook, taking up a large part of my side of the bed, and saying those squirrels are BAD. And squirrels. Because squirrels. (And the cardinals are pretty dodgy too.)
Dogs teach you that love, in this moment, is what matters. And they’re right. But what they don’t teach you is what to do when that moment needs to go.
