Readers and writers blog

Buried amid the trash were two female greyhounds, their bodies emaciated and covered with ticks. One was barely conscious, her skull having been bashed in with a hammer. The other, a breathing skeleton, cried softly. Humans had done this to her. Yet when she saw the face of her rescuer, the dying dog wagged her tail.

That paragraph is one of the most effective I’ve seen in a newspaper story. It was written a few years ago by an old friend and coworker, Nancy Shulins¹, then a national feature writer for the Associated Press, reporting on retired racing dogs that literally had been thrown away by their owners.

That 56-word paragraph, following a short lead, uses only four descriptive adverbs and adjectives. And yet, if you have even the smallest feeling for animals, you don’t need adverbs and adjectives to be moved by the last gesture that a dog neglected beyond hope could manage — an instinctively hopeful greeting. To someone who would have to help her die.

The other day, as I was looking at two of our cats in their various activities, I had that strange feeling I have every now and then, a feeling that occurs when I take notice that there are animals living in and around our house. Not pets. No, animals with fangs and claws and their own realities.

How seamlessly they work their way into our lives.

Now I suppose I’m an animal lover. But I’m not nutty about it. I don’t fawn over our animals, and I don’t expect them to fawn over me, which they don’t. And, as I’ve written earlier in this weblog, I’m not attracted to other blogs that are plastered with pictures of family dogs and cats.

It’s like anything personal. You have to know them.

So let me introduce you to our three cats — two who live indoors and one who has his own separate door in and out. No, the greyhound pictured above is not one of those in the story, and it’s not our dog². Our dog, Emily, died in August.

Emily was a good, non-fawning dog — a small yellow street dog from Savannah, Ga., who a few days before she was to go back to the pound jumped in my truck and came north with me. She was quiet, unobtrusive and went about her business of being a dog. She charmed my wife-to-be (I never could have done it without that dog), and the three of us, plus three cats, all moved in together.

At age 17, Emily developed lymphoma, and after months of having steroids shoved down her throat, stood one morning looking at my wife and me with hollow eyes, unable to eat and barely able to move. She still was able to wag her tail a little, which she did just before I picked her up and the three of us made her final visit to the vet. She’s buried in our back yard under a marker that holds her leash and food dish.

I think seeing that marker in the snow the other day is what got me thinking about writing this.

So anyway, one of our indoor cats is named Nothing. A stray barn cat, she came to me from a coworker whom I asked what she had named the cat. “Nothing,” she said. Nothing is a tricolor cat, mostly dark, with white cheeks and neck and a splotch of tan on one side of her mouth that looks like a half-mustache.

The other indoor cat, Blackie, is a longhaired cat who is, well, black. She originally was named Something. I got her from an animal shelter because Nothing was lonely and I wanted to get her something (get it?). That joke quickly wore thin, and my wife renamed her Blackie.

The third cat, the outdoor one, is named Guy, pronounced the French way (’ghee’) because he was named after one of my favorite hockey players, Guy Lafleur. Guy is all gray, so my non-French inlaws next door call him Smoky.

All the animals I’ve ever had — make that ‘lived with,’ because most of them had me — were strays or from animal shelters, the latter because I visited a lot of them over the years as a newspaper reporter doing features about adopting animals and often couldn’t leave without taking one.

And as I left those shelters — an official at one of them told me a dog’s chance of survival by adoption is about 50-50, a cat’s chance only one in five — I often thought about people who breed animals on purpose, despite the overpopulation in shelters, and how much I would like to see the breeders spayed and neutered.

Not to mention guys who leave greyhounds, still not old but no longer able to run as fast as they once could, lying beaten, starved and dying in a dumpster.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. Nancy Shulins is author of two books on love and marriage — Every Day I Love You More: (Just Not Today) and its sequel, Every Day I Love You More: Lessons in Loving One Person for Life — published by Warner Books.

2. The greyhound photo is an image from the website Metroblogging Chicago.