Harold was a gloriously goofy brown Labrador Retriever, who came to stay with us for six months. His owners were building a new house. While the construction was going on, they were living in rental digs that did not allow dogs.
Harold’s parents came every Saturday to take Harold out to the local burger emporium for a hamburger.
Eat or be eaten. The law of the jungle. These aphorisms don’t generally have much practical application in the life of the average urban dweller. Well, if you don’t count office warfare.
In the country, it’s a little different, at least in Canada.
Every time a loose dog was found running down our county road, we would be the first place the kind-hearted Good Samaritan would come to make inquiries. We understood.
There are people who will scoff at my use of the word ‘tragedy’ in the context of the story I am about to relate. Certainly these events, involving as they do just a boy and his dog, are dwarfed by the many grand scale tragedies occurring every day, devastating the lives of large numbers of both people and animals. Even in our years caring for dogs and cats in our little kennel, we were peripherally involved in events that would be more deserving of the word ‘tragedy’ as it is more commonly understood.
This was just a small family tragedy. An intimate, human scale ‘series of unfortunate events’ that will never be the stuff of a Shakespearean drama. But somehow it left it deep impression on me.
Until you’ve suffered a dog bite, you can’t really know how it feels.
Not just the pain, or even, in the case of a bite from a little dog, especially not the pain. It’s the shock. Wounds from a knife in a kitchen accident are bad, but they do not compare to the indescribable outrage and disbelief you feel when your body is gripped by a furious entity who is savagely trying to destroy your flesh.
I do not subscribe to what seems to be a widely held view that dog and cat kennels are almost guaranteed to be terrible places, to be avoided at all costs. If you leave your pet at a kennel, these cautionary tales go, you are just subjecting him to crushing loneliness, illness, neglect and maybe even abuse. What kind of horrible person would do that?
Tempy
Someone said that Pugs are living proof that God has a sense of humour. Maybe. This guy, I could believe it of.