Pony Girl was one of those small dogs whose company I had really started to enjoy. Her name was a tip of the hat to S. E. Hinton's
The Outsiders
, her character Ponyboy, and lines like “Things were rough all over, but it was better that way. That way you could tell the other guy was human too.” In this case, the other guy was a girl and canine, though it still made sense to us.
Pony was a late summer arrival, a half-Greyhound, half-Chihuahua mix that added up to a total mess. She'd been beaten and broken so badly that Joy's long-stated goal with severely mistreated dogsâgiving them a few memories of the human species that don't involve pain and fearâwas a tall mountain to climb. For her first three months with us, Pony's memories were of the back of Joy's closet. She hid beside the shoes, beneath the jeans, only her doe eyes still visible. There was no disguising those eyes. How to comfort a terrified dog at the back of a closet is the kind of question rescuers love to answer. Joy talked to experts, to other rescuers, to anyone with an idea. The discussions covered canine ethology, pet psychology, cognitive neuroscience, folk remedies, and best guesses. Joy's best guess turned out to be conversation. She devoted forty minutes a day to sitting at the front of the closet and talking to Ponyâthe weather, the world, how the Lakers were doing.
Around Christmastime, possibly because the Lakers were doing well, Pony came out of the closet, across the living room, up onto the couch, and into Joy's lap, and we drank plenty of champagne that evening. Our celebration didn't last. Less than three weeks later, Pony stopped eating. Then she stopped walking. Joy took her to Doc and Doc found cancer. Pony's pain was considerable, problematic because another of our main rescue goals was to relieve suffering, not prolong life. That meant immediate surgery or immediate euthanasia. The surgery was expensive, as was the dilemma.
Economics was the problem. No one was hiring freelancers. Back in LA, if things got tricky, someone was always looking for a word slut. Movie studios, advertising agencies, and PR firms all needed help. But the farmers who lived near me needed nothing more than what John Deere could provide. We had enough in the bank to cover two months of mortgage payments and maybe some bills. The surgery would cost all that and then some, so saving Pony's life meant risking our rescue. This might be the kind of crisis they made after-school specials about, but it was nothing I'd ever dealt with before.
The night Joy broke the news I got so frustrated I picked a fight with her just to buy myself some time to make a decision. Our phone was working again, so I used that time to call a bunch of people I hadn't talked to in a long while to ask for advice. That advice was unanimous. Everyone thought putting Pony down was the best thing, the right thing; some couldn't even believe it was a real question. During all those conversations, I kept finding myself getting wildly angry. Friends would talk softly and suggest euthanasia, and I would talk loudly and suggest they go fuck themselvesâwhich is how I discovered I was going to pay for the surgery.
Ever since Joy had first suggested I go visit a shelter, I'd been trying to keep some emotional separation from the dogs, just enough distance to stop me from making exactly this kind of fool decision. But between Leo and Chow and Gidget and Otis and the gay dogs and the altruistic dogs and the island living and the infinite games and whatever, I had crossed that line. Truth be told, we didn't even feel like a pack anymore. We felt like family. And if I had to risk my house to save my family, apparently I was willing to risk my house.
In the end, I didn't have to risk the house. Joy called Elise, and Elise got on the fund-raising path and found a medical sponsor willing to cover the procedure. The surgery was a success, but the cancer was worse than expected. Doc told us it was only a matter of time until it came back. “You've got a lot of old dogs,” she said. “This is what happens with old dogs.”
And that's when it hit me: we were playing for keeps. I had managed to avoid this particular realization for quite some time. But hearing it from Doc, well, what I took away from the entire encounter was not the wonderful fact that Pony had lived, rather the absolute certainty that sooner or later one of our dogs would not. Right about then I realized that dog rescue is actually a game of death. And right about then I began to wonder if this was a game I was cut out to play.
State Road 76 is an exigent twist of blacktop that runs east from city of Espanola through the town of Chimayo before threading deeper into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The road is lousy with blind corners and tight dips and drunk drivers. At least once a week, it's possible to hear the screech of tires and the crunch of metal that results from heavy machinery encountering blood alcohol levels at high speeds. Rio Arriba County, where all of this takes places, usually ranks first or second in the state tally of DWI-related deaths and, because of the amount of heroin trafficking that also takes place around here, usually two to three times above the state average for murder. Back in the late 1990s, when the Chimayo drug wars were national news, the papers would report dead bodies dumped by the side of the roadâand 76 was usually the road.
In Mexico, as in New Mexico, tradition holds that the souls of the dead linger in the spot of their death until proper tribute has been paid, with proper tribute usually being an assortment of flowers, candles, and Virgin Mary paraphernalia set in a bowl beneath a larger cross. Which is why local directions often involve taking a left at “the fourthâno, wait, the fifth crucifix on the left.” Beside the crosses, the other thing that litters 76 are dead dogs. Some began as erring pets, some as strays; a lot get turned loose because their owners suddenly find themselves unable to afford the cost of both drugs and dog food. Drunk drivers do the rest. It's hard for animal rescuers to ignore any kind of cruelty, but when that cruelty involve entrails spread across tarmac, it becomes even harder to overlook.
But overlook them we hadâat least until that first winter arrived. Unlike most of New Mexico, Chimayo is not a desert. The Española Valley serves as the main drainage for the southern flank of the Rockies and the eastern flank of the Jemez, so the influx of snowmelt keeps things lush and green during the summer months. But come winter, after the trees drop their leaves, the valley loses its charm and the once hidden became visible. Without the foliage to hide the carnage, we began to realize just how many dead dogs were piled along the side of the road. Too many to even count. Before I left California to hunt houses in New Mexico, Joy had asked for only one thing: a place where the dogs would be safe. When the trees dropped their leaves, I started to wonder if I'd broken that promise.
The other thing those leaves were hiding was poverty. With the trees bare, we could suddenly see into other people's yards, and really, there wasn't much to see. In her book
Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade
, local author Chellis Glendinning describes the neighborhood this way:
I will begin by telling you that RÃo Arriba is “Third World” rural. According to the 2000 US Census, only 34,000 people inhabit a county the size of the state of Massachusetts; 73 percent are Spanishs or Mexican-American, 14 percent have Native American roots, and 12 percent are European American, while three-quarters of the people speak Spanish or native tongues like Tewa, Diné, or Apache. The county is also “Third World” poor. During the 1990s the average household income was $14,263âin many villages per-capita income was under $5000âand each year at the time snow dusted the valley between the Sangre de Cristo and Jemez mountains, unemployment swelled to 20 percent.
Alongside unemployment, the other thing that swells in the winter is violence. The
Rio Grande Sun
was chockablock with horror stories. A local gang war broke out, kicked off by a series of firebombings. The Box-and-Mail was burned down because the owners were the wrong color. Then a couple of trailers went up in smoke; the residents escaped, but their dogs didn't get so lucky. I tried telling myself that this was accidental, that people didn't take grudges out on animals here. Then some kids doused a cow in gasoline and lit it on fire. A poisoning competition erupted next. Tainted meat was being thrown over fences and more pets were dying. A place where the dogs would be safe was all Joy had asked for. Uh-huh. Absolutely, I'd managed to keep that promise.
The neighborhood now scared us enough that leaving town became a topic for discussion. It was a short discussion. With the economy in tatters, our house was worth less than we owed the bank. So selling wasn't an option and moving wasn't an option. The heavy snows that fell in early January didn't help much. By late January, temperatures were near zero, and for a couple of ninnies from California no amount of clothes could keep us warm. We were sleeping with ten dogs in the bed and three down comforters by early February. By middle February, because neither of us had worked in months, there wasn't enough money to heat the whole house. We both knew there was only one way to save money: we had to shed dogs.
Up to now, this had been difficult. Dog rescue is a networking game. If you want to find homes for dogs, it helps to know lots of people who know lots of people who know lots of people. Being new in town, we didn't know lots of people. And New Mexico rescuers aren't as organized as California rescuers, so there wasn't a previously existing network we could plug into. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and we both started talking up our dogs to everyone we met.
In February, Joy met a woman at the gym who had just lost her dog to old age, and while the woman didn't know if she was ready for another, she heard tell of Leo and agreed to meet him. As much as we needed to shed dogs, I hated the idea. Why couldn't we get rid of a dog that I hadn't spent a month sleeping beside on the porch? Why not, um, a Chihuahua? I understood that Leo ate as much as six Chihuahuas and we were trying to save money, but I had become really attached.
Joy set the meeting for the coming Saturday and thought maybe I wanted to tag along. Not a chance. Instead of tagging along, I spent money we didn't have to spend and left town, hoping her matchmaking efforts would fail before I returned. They didn't fail. Leo got a new home while I was gone. Joy was thrilled. After eight months of trying, she'd finally managed to place a dog. I was not nearly as happy. I missed Leo. Then I really missed Leo. Then I couldn't believe how much I really missed Leo.
Then Wookie went. He was a shih tzu who'd showed up at the Española shelter in October. Normally, we would never have considered taking him on. Joy likes the “worst of the worst”âthe dogs that wouldn't stand a chance otherwiseâbut there was nothing wrong with Wookie. Plus he was a purebred, and purebreds are always in demand. But it had been so long since Joy had actually found a home for a dog that I told her to adopt him anyway, just so she could have an easy victory. But the economy was a mess, and even with a purebred like Wookie, there were no easy victories to be had.
So he stuck around and I grew attached. He was furry and friendly and just my type. After a couple of months the fact that we couldn't find him a home was just fine with me. But purebreds are purebreds, and Joy had posted his picture on a couple of California rescue websites. A few days after Leo left, a woman called from San Diego. She was a shih tzu fanatic, willing to drive across the Southwest to adopt Wookie.
“That bitch,” is all I had to say about that.
And once he was gone, I missed Wookie almost as much as I missed Leo. I was petulant. I walked around the house muttering “Dog rescue sucks” for days straight. It was the truth. Both of these dogs had abandonment issues. I had spent months convincing them they wouldn't be abandoned againâonly to abandon them again. Certainly they were going to great homes, but they didn't know that, and the look on Wookie's face when he left was the saddest I had ever seen. I felt like I had betrayed him, to say nothing of how badly I missed him. From my end, placing a dog felt like falling in love and getting dumped and falling in love and getting dumped, over and over again. As I said, dog rescue sucks.
About a week after Wookie left, I was still so down and out that I asked Joy to stop finding homes for our dogs.
“Just for a little while,” I said. “Just until I feel normal again.”
That conversation took place on a Sunday. The next day I felt a little better. Just the knowledge of temporary reprieve was enough to lift a weight from my chest. By Tuesday, I was almost happy, which turned out to be just another way of saying I hadn't a clue what was coming next. Next was Wednesday, the day that Ahab's legs gave out. He was doubled over by Thursday, diagnosed on Friday, not that it mattered by Sunday. His insides had rotted out, a blockage backed up, and his intestines had gone south. On Monday, not even Doc could save him. Ahab was dead before he left the operating table. By then it was clear. It was gonna be a long, long time until I felt normal again.
Freud said that the process of grieving “involve[s] grave departures from the normal attitude to life.” Well, chalk one up for the old master. In the weeks after Ahab's death, I found myself unable to complete the most mundane tasks. My memory was shot, my mind not far behind. I lost my ability to sleep, write, exercise, talk on the phone, or visit with friends and instead spent my time sitting in a old rocking chair on our porch, wrapped in blankets, staring at bare trees and a winter that would not end.
Despite the plenitude of such stories, for much of last century most psychologists thought the grief that resulted from pet loss too silly to treat, while those who disagreed could get no funding for research. But anecdotes continued to accrue and after a while so did a few hypotheses. Researchers tried anthropomorphism and emotional transference and various surrogate offspring theories and nothing quite stuck. In the early 1980s, they got serious. Psychometric instruments such as the Pet Loss Questionnaire, the Pet Attachment Worksheet, and the Lexington Attachment to Pet Scale were developed specifically to examine this form of bereavement. Hundreds of studies have now been done, the conclusions well summarized in a recent paper by Canadian psychologist Annique Lavergne: “An overview of these results clearly demonstrates that grief following the loss of a companion animal is an undeniable and omnipresent reality.”
Well, no shit, Sherlock.
Along the way, older notions, such as those who suffer worst from the loss of a pet are women, the elderly, and individuals living alone or without children, have been called into question, with the newer thinking being that pet death affects everyone equally, regardless of background. And those effects are significant. Psychologists use the terms
uncomplicated grief
and
complicated grief
to differentiate between the most common bereavement states. Uncomplicated grief is the kind you get over quickly, while complicated grief is the technical name for not being able to move from a rocking chair on the porch. One of the things now known is that pet loss triggers complicated much more than uncomplicated grief. In fact, grief resulting from pet loss often exceeds grief resulting from the loss of a human companion, including close family members.
In 2008, UCLA psychiatrist Mary-Frances O'Connor shed some light on why this happens. O'Connor used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the brain-firing patterns associated with complicated and uncomplicated grief. She did this by recruiting test subjects grieving the loss of a loved one and showing them photos of their deceased while snapping pictures of their brains. Photos of strangers' brainsâwho had not suffered a lossâwere used to establish a baseline. What O'Connor found is that the photos of loved ones produced activity in the brain's pain centers, but those suffering from complicated grief also had action in their nucleus accumbensâa group of neurons in the forebrain that play a central role in the brain's reward system.
The reward system is a group of neuronal circuits that let us know when we've done something right by giving us a squirt of the feel-good neurochemical dopamine. To give you an idea of how good that feels, we need only turn to cocaine. Bolivian marching powder causes dopamine to be released into the brain and then blocks the receptor sites that allow for its reuptake, much in the way Prozac blocks the reuptake of serotonin. Fifty years ago, when neurobiologist James Olds put an electrode in the nucleus accumbens of a rat's brain, he found the animals would pull a level to stimulate it without pause. They would neglect all other activities, including eating and drinking, for the pleasure. Rats would rather starve to death then walk away from dopamine. And humans aren't much different.
Humans learn by association. Every time we associate a new fact with an old idea we get a dopamine reward. This is the brain's pattern recognition system at work, and O'Connor discovered that it backfires during complicated grief. “The idea is that when our loved ones are alive, we get a rewarding cue from seeing them or things that remind us of them. After a loved one dies, those who adapt to the loss stop getting the neural reward. But those who don't adapt continue to crave it, because each time they see a cue, they still get a neural reward.” And this is what makes complicated grief complicatedâit's like a forced detox from a bad coke habit.
O'Connor's work also explains why the grief associated with companion animal loss can exceed the grief triggered by the death of another human. This happens because many of us spend more time with our pets than we do with other humans. Ahab was with me most of the day, thoroughly embedded in my pattern recognition system, linked to just about every environment I passed through. And every time something in those environments reminded me of him, since my brain was unable to stop craving the “reward” of his company, I was instead reminded of his absence.
And I was not taking these reminders well. When it become clear the “tears in my beer” had moved from hillbilly cliché to morning, noon, and night, I decided there was strength in numbers, and since my numbers were disappearing, it was time to bring in some help. I started, like most grown men would, by calling my mother. As these things go, my mother is a lovely woman, sweet and supportive and unable, for the life of her, to understand what her son is doing with so many dogs.
“They're making you miserable. Joy says you haven't gotten out of that rocking chair in weeks.”
“What kind of reasonable mother believes her daughter-in-law?”
“You can barely work.”
“You don't think this is work?”
“I think you can't pay your mortgage, but you spend five hundred dollars a month on dog food.”
She had a point there, but I wasn't giving in so easily.
“And don't forget I start most days by stepping in dog shit.”
“For the love of God,” she said.
So I moved on to calling my father, my friends, and just about anyone else I could think of. While everyone agreed that finding a life that meant something was a noble cause, none thought it was worth losing my mind over.
“This is just dogs you're helping, right?” said Joshua.
“It's not like you're saving refugees,” said Michael.
“It's not like you're saving orphans,” said Micah.
“You're upsetting your mother,” said my father.
Which is about the time I realized that if I was going to solve my animal problems, it might help to talk to people who worked with animals. I had an ex-girlfriend who was a zookeeper in Texas, and an old roommate who once saved whales with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. The ex-girlfriend wasn't speaking to me, I couldn't find the roommate, and anyway, my mother wasn't wrong. I was miserable. It was time to bring in the big guns.
Patricia Wright was a big gun. Currently a professor in the department of anthropology at Stony Brook University of New York, a member of the National Geographic Society's Conservation Trust, and executive director of the Institute for the Conservation of Tropical Environments, Patricia Wright is one of the world's leading conservationists and primatologists, recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius award,” and most famous for discovering two new species of lemurs on the island of Madagascar and then devoting her life to the creation of Ranomafana National Park, which now spans 161 square miles and became a World Heritage Site in 2007, to protect them. Which is to say that in the world of animal rescue, where status is measured by devotion to the cause, Patricia Wright is flat out royalty.
Over the course of my career, I've written a couple of articles about Wright and we've become friendly enough that I can still call her up with the occasional questionâthough my new question was something else entirely. I started by mentioning the recent stories about “Leakey's Angels,” Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall, and Biruté Galdikas, the trio of women sent by the anthropologist Louis Leakey to study primates in their natural environments. In the past few years, we learned that Dian Fossey had lost not only her life trying to save mountain gorillas, but most of her mind as well. Then Linda Spalding's
A Dark Place in the Jungle
alerted us to Galdikas's plight: that she had gone to Borneo to save orangutans and found that the only way to do so was to keep eighty of them trapped in her house under a kind of last-chance martial law. And, apparently, Jane Goodall was now throwing her weight entirely behind educational programs for children because she had lost faith in the world of adults. Wright's accomplishments are often listed as parallel to these women's, yet somehow she's managed to both save animals and stay sane, while these other women had not. It now seemed important to find out why.
I reached Wright at her office in New York. It didn't take her long to answer my question.
“That's any easy one,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“It worked. If it didn't, I'd be a lunatic for sure.”
“What worked?”
“Ranomafana, all the rest.”
I asked if that was the extent of her advice. She thought about it for a moment, then said: “Work with animals and there's going to be heartbreak.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You take it, that's what you do. You just take it.”