So My Dog is a Cat Murderer

I should mention that I am absolutely what you’d call a “dog person”—a predilection rooted, as I imagine is the case with most animal lovers, deeply in a childhood inability to form meaningful connections with my own species.  Like many who’ve chosen to make a living in the creative professions, memories of my early years consist less of gettin’-inta-mischief-with-Tom-Sawyer-and-the-gang, and more of me-reading-Mark-Twain-alone-in-my-room-wondering-why-nobody-wants-to-hang-out-with-me.  I think I would have benefited tremendously from a show like Glee growing up… something to reassure me that I was not alone in my weirdness.  But I was instead left only with Saved by the Bell’s Samuel “Screech” Powers as vision of what lay ahead: doomed to a life of being crammed into lockers, unending rejection from Lisa Turtle, companionship only in my robot, Kevin, and a Sisyphean hell of never, ever, ever leaving secondary school (except for one ill-fated College Year).

So you can appreciate how amazing it was when I was nine and we dogsat our vacationing family friends’ golden retriever, Katie, for a week.  For seven beautiful days, I had a teammate with whom I could keep up in sports, an audience for my impromptu bouts of conducting Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony from atop the ottoman, and a best friend who never grew tired of watching me build Micro Machines empires.  When Katie’s owners returned and drove off with her in the back seat, I sobbed on my hands and knees in a manner familiar to Italian widows who’ve lost their husbands of fifty years.

It then took me seven years to convince my parents to get us a dog of our own, Penelope, by which time I had transferred schools, befriended some brilliant and hilarious fellows with whom I remain close to this day, and, thanks to them, actually started to believe those motivational posters hanging above the lockers about reaching for the stars.  Penelope was, I’m convinced, the most loving rottweilier in the world.  She came with papers, an American Kennel Club champion’s lineage, and an inability to distinguish the concept of “poop-friendly patch of grass behind the wood pile” and “kitchen floor.”  Still, she made up for her lack of decorum with a kind of love best encapsulated in the philosophical notion of agape—its highest and purest form, as God might have for His or Her or Its creation, if you’re into that whole thing.

Penelope thought nothing of plopping her 110-pound frame atop my 98-pound aunt in order to cover her face with happy licks.  Nor was it unusual for her to curl up on the floor beside her flannel dog bed, so as not to disturb the cat napping in its center.  Penelope loved bonking her face with her chew toys and panting and smiling at us as we watched The West Wing, seeming to agree with its cautious optimism or maybe just enjoying the stench of our feet.  When we finally had to euthanize her due to cancer last Christmas, I sobbed for the first and only time of my adult life.

If those stories aren’t enough convince you about my borderline unhealthy passion for dogs, I’ll share end with this: when we go to the dog park, I’ll spend hours playing with other people’s dogs.  Hours.  Playtime usually comes to an end when I realize I’m starting to get the kind of looks from the dogs’ owners pedophiles do at playgrounds.

So, by now I’m a more or less adjusted adult (if you count still being on my parents’ family cell phone plan as adjusted) with a group of creative and fun-loving friends, a passion for the outdoors, and a great new girlfriend.  Lauren and I fell hard for each other, and six months later we decided to cohabitate.  Despite Sophie’s obvious high energy, I was pretty psyched to be moving in with the girl of my dreams and to be getting a dog in the process.  I fancied myself a Dog Whisperer type, believing that with enough time, I could turn Sophie down from an 11 to a comfortable 4 once we lived together.

Which is when Sophie massacred Lauren’s mom’s cat.

It was as awful as it sounds.  We were packing up some old cookware in her mother’s garage to bring to the new apartment when we heard Maggie, Lauren’s mom’s Labrador Retriever, barking like mad from inside the house.  We ignored her.

The thing is, we’d seen Maggie bark at specks of dust floating in the corner.  We’d seen Maggie bark at a footstool that’s been in the kitchen for ten years.  This was less “boy who cried wolf” and more “boy who cried weapons of mass destruction.”  So we ignored her barks for a minute… two minutes… three minutes… until we finally decided to investigate, and walked into find Sophie attacking poor Libby, Maggie barking her head off nearby.

You see, Sophie always goes crazy when she sees squirrels, birds, rodents… basically anything smallish and furry that makes the mistake of being alive.  Knowing this, Lauren and her mother had always kept Sophie and the cat separate, but that day we hadn’t realized Libby was inside the house when we headed out to the garage.

Once we saw what was going on, I bashed Sophie with a pillow, separating her from the convulsing Libby, whom we rushed to a nearby emergency veterinary clinic.  To our relief, they were able to get her in stable condition that night.  A couple of days later, however, she died from organ failure while still in their care.  I look at our plastic soup ladle sometimes, the one we were busy packing in the garage, and wonder, was this worth a life?

That horrific night at the emergency clinic, we asked the vet if we ought to put Sophie down, Lauren tearfully prepared to do so.  To our surprise, he told us that his own dog had done the same thing and he hadn’t euthanized it.  That, in fact, good dogs killed cats all the time.  Coming from a guy who’s supposed to be, I don’t know, in charge of animals, this felt a bit like asking a priest if cheating on your spouse means you’re going to hell, then him inviting his tranny hooker out of from the under the desk, saying these things happen.

As aghast as we were at Sophie’s actions, we decided that ending another life that night was not the answer.  We moved into our new apartment a few days later, vowing never to let Sophie out of our sight and spending a lot of time apologizing to Lauren’s mom for something which the words “We’re so sorry” fall pathetically short.  The fact that she forgave not only us, but also Sophie, should make the source of Lauren’s insane level of decency clear.