How our dog is no longer with us: a Very Sad Story

This is your one warning: maybe you shouldn't read the below story.  It's the type of sad story where the dog dies at the end (or, really, closer to the beginning).  It's the type of story I needed to put on paper because telling people face-to-face is a nearly impossible burden right now.  If you decide to read, read the whole thing before you come to any conclusions.

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The short story is: my wife and I rescued a terrier mix puppy from a shelter in Philadelphia last October, as a joint wedding gift for ourselves.  We named him Indiana, we fed him Blue Buffalo dog food because we felt it was the best food, we dressed him up for different holidays, and we gave him lots of love and training and play.  My wife took approximately 1,495 pictures of him, because he was adorable.  Sometimes, before things went south with Indiana, I brought him to my office, and (at least as a puppy, before his issues started) he seemed to like that.  And now, he is gone.

After months of socialization and obedience classes, in-home training sessions, hours upon hours of research and study, and multiple doctor's appointments, including our final visit with what we feel is our state's foremost veterinary behaviorist, we made the decision to put our dog down.  The decision was made with much thought, many tears, and a ton of agony.  He was 11 months old, which is an incredibly tragic age for any dog's life to end.

Our veterinary behaviorist was an angel of mercy for us; she helped us greatly in making our decision.  Based on her opinion of the severity of Indiana's aggression, combined with his very bleak prognosis for improvement, we felt we owed the responsibility to the children of our neighbors and our friends (not to mention our own future children) to keep them safe.

I'm writing this in an emotional shell, so it's possible that my words seem robotic and vacant right now.  I can't process in my head, at this point, what all of this means - these were feelings we were supposed to have around age 40, or 45, given our ages when we purchased the puppy.  Dogs are supposed to live about a dozen years, or more.  Our future children were supposed to be old enough to be sad by this dog dying; they were never supposed to have been saved by this dog dying.

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Here's what happened (if you've been to our house or spoken to us over the past few months, you know part of this story already):

We knew Indiana was slightly "off" from the time we met him, but it was impossible at that time for anyone to determine the severity of his adult behavioral issues.  At the time, he presented simply as a nervous puppy, which made sense given what we knew of his early life (he was found malnourished and chained to a pole outside the shelter in a heat wave last August).  He certainly had difficulty warming up to, or trusting, other people, even though we tried to introduce him to as many of our friends and family as possible.

Throughout the time he spent with us, Indy was a smart and obedient dog, as long as he was in his increasingly-smaller "comfort zone."  With only April and me in the house, he was quiet and would obey dozens of commands.  He could name and fetch each of his toys on command.  Further, as long as we were the only people in the house, he was easy to manage, too.  He would mostly sleep through the night (even until 7:30 AM), wouldn't bark at the lawn mower, and even managed the vacuum cleaner pretty well.  In the car, he would immediately sleep and behave the entire time.

But when almost anyone else (save my mother) entered the home, Mr. Hyde would leave and Dr. Jekyll would emerge.  His fear and defensiveness were extreme and, according to our behaviorist, extremely abnormal.  As Indy grew older and stronger, he began to direct severe aggressive behavior toward strangers.  Managing Indy became a long and winding ritual in and of itself - we would introduce strangers to him in a way that (in theory) should have counter-conditioned him to associate strangers with treats (not fear).  This was largely unsuccessful, though, and our lives became more sequestered, as friends and family shirked away from visiting our home in fear of Indiana.

By the time of this writing, he had nipped three people strongly enough to draw blood (one bite, on my father, was almost enough for stitches - thankfully it was my father, who would never press charges against us), and tried to attack/would have attacked countless others, if not for the leash and our intervention.  At the vet behaviorist's consultation, the behaviorist at one point brought out a doll the size of a three year old girl and started dancing it around Indiana.  He sat quietly and then within a millisecond's time, jumped up and attacked the doll.  Had that been an actual child...

We live on a street with dozens of small children.  Many of our friends and family have children, and one day we plan to have children, most likely.  (The silver lining in all of this bullshit is that I finally realized that one day I want to be a parent.)  After the doll incident - and about six other severe aggressive moves Indiana made in the vet's office, while on leash, thankfully - the behaviorist started to mention our options.  She said there could be several, but in our case, there were only two.

The first was to keep Indiana, try to manage his behavior with the addition of Prozac, which we would start with an aggressive mid-range dose given the severity of his problems.  The behaviorist said that some dogs react very well to Prozac, and in the very-best-case scenario, he might be able to be introduced to children, starting at a park from a large distance, and wearing a muzzle.  In this very-best-case scenario, Indiana would need to wear a muzzle around children for the rest of his life.  Additionally, we would need to monitor his behavior around strangers vigilantly for the rest of his life, rewarding him with treats when he ever managed to relax around friends and family.  This was the very-best-case scenario.  She felt it much more likely that even with Prozac, Indiana would continue to be a dangerous dog that displayed abnormal and unpredictable aggression toward people.

To us, this option posed several serious issues.  Is it morally right to put a known aggressive dog around anyone's children, let alone our own?  What does it mean for the dog's quality of life that he would have to be muzzled all the time?  Could we ever have a child while having this dog around?

"You could almost certainly never have a child with this dog around," the behaviorist told us. 

Nor was sheltering Indiana an option; we mentioned a no-kill shelter as an option we'd been thinking about, and the behaviorist dismissed this, again for a number of reasons.  She felt that if relinquished to a shelter, even a shelter that refused to kill dogs, Indiana would probably stay there for a very long time, and she cryptically mentioned that anyone who would take him from this shelter "may not be as nice as you two."  (I took that comment to mean that any future adopters would be fairly likely to abuse and/or fight Indiana.)  That aside, she told us - and we agreed - that shelter life is terrible life for a dog.  Combine this with the large number of non-vicious dogs that currently cannot be placed into homes, and sheltering Indiana would be the equivalent of passing off his death sentence to someone else.

So, the second option was euthanasia.  I had anticipated this might come up during our meeting, though April had been more optimistic.  Still, when we saw the direction she was going, we both immediately broke down crying.  The behaviorist said that, with cases of aggression as severe as Indy's, and given the undesirability of our remaining options, "it would not be wrong to put him down and simply say, this is not the dog for us, for our lifestyle."

She insisted that we not make a decision the day of the meeting, so we didn't.  We agreed that starting Prozac while we made a decision would be a good idea, in case we decided to keep him.  I asked the behaviorist what people tend to decide when dealing with this type of aggression in their dogs, and she replied, "It depends a lot on whether children are in the picture.  When a couple has no children in the house, or no plans for children, many of these people would give Prozac a chance before euthanizing the dog.  But when a couple has children, or plans to have children, often euthanasia is the decision."

This made it a judgment call for us; we didn't yet have a child, but knew we wanted one in the future.  Keeping Indy until we had a child seemed like postponing the inevitable, and sheltering him was a death sentence.  His chances for improvement, even with the most significant intervention, were slim.  I knew immediately that every possible decision was a terrible one to comprehend.  But only one decision gave us the freedom from our constant fear of our dog hurting a friend, family member, or child.  Having witnessed Indiana's attack on my father firsthand, what we saw was a chemically imbalanced and unpredictable dog with the strength to inflict serious injury.  I could never see that happening again to anyone else.  April needed more time to process our options, but eventually she told me on Sunday afternoon that she agreed with the decision.  We had agreed that Indiana needed to be euthanized.

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In advance of our vet behaviorist meeting, we filled out a thirty-five item questionnaire describing past attempts to control Indiana's behavior.  At the close of our meeting, after the Kleenex box had emptied, I asked the vet whether anything we had done could have caused this.  "If you had done anything wrong, I would have told you.  You did everything you could - this behavior has a huge genetic predisposition."

We still blame ourselves, even though we probably shouldn't.

We know nothing of Indiana's life before he was found at the shelter in Philadelphia.  Given his relatively smaller size and the fact that he wasn't a pure "pit bull" type dog, I do not think he was bred to fight, but I could be wrong about this.  He might have been inbred and his owners, knowing what happened and also being the type of assholes who would leave a malnourished four month old dog chained to a pole in a heat wave, simply gave him up to the next owner. 

Regardless of his breeding, there's no doubt he was under-socialized and there is no doubt he was severely chemically imbalanced.  The puppy socialization window closes at three months - it's very important to introduce a puppy to at least 100 unique people before he or she is three months old.  Indiana may have met fewer than five people (maybe only one, and if so, not a nice one?) during that window. Our vet behaviorist also suggested that something akin to human schizophrenia was at play with Indiana, as well.  "Think of Indiana as a special-needs dog.  If he were a human," the vet behaviorist said last Saturday, "there would be institutions for humans like him.  These institutions don't exist for dogs."

I like to think that we gave Indiana as much love and training and care as we could, and that this was a gift for a dog that never really had a fair chance in the world.  However, there are people who might disagree fundamentally with what we did.  (Just look at PETA to see what level of insane, blinders-on zealotry exists in this world with regard to animals.)  Disagreeing with us is fine, but know that we exhausted every option and spent literally thousands of dollars over the past seven months trying to solve this problem.  Eventually, a reasonable minded person needs to reach their wit's end.  If you still disagree, I'm actually going to ask you to disagree in the most polite way, namely by keeping your opinion to yourself.  This is such a sensitive issue that your opinion will only serve to piss us off.

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I don't blame the shelter at all for giving us Indiana, nor do I blame the very kind people who worked with Indiana before we purchased him.  I know, however, that we are personally very unlikely to consider rescuing a dog again.  This is not a value judgment on rescuing dogs - there are many wonderful adult dogs out there that need a home, and people who are emotionally and financially fit to rescue, and want to rescue, absolutely should rescue.  But our experience with rescuing was so terrible that it's unlikely we'd ever do it again.  We are too shell shocked.

Certainly, in our opinion, rescuing puppies has greater risk than rescuing an adult dog.  And certainly, given our experience, I would never recommend that a friend ever rescue a puppy from a shelter.  With an adult dog, what you see is what you get, for the most part.  Predicting a puppy's future adult behavior is extremely challenging, and many shelters are not well enough equipped (assuming that anyone outside of a breeder is well enough equipped) to make these judgments.  We understand now that issues related to under-socialization, as well as chemical imbalances, are hidden in puppies and pop up in adolescence or early adulthood.  There is no "cure" or "magic pill" to make them better. 

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At some point, once the pain and tears wear off and we can get back to being newlyweds, we'll consider another dog.  It may be a long wait - dogs often bite toddlers, so that would be something we'd need to think about - but a smaller, calmer and purebred dog could definitely be in our future.  We love dogs, we love the love they give, and we love the work that goes into training a dog.  We don't think we were the problem with Indiana, and the best way to prove that to ourselves would be another dog.

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I debated whether to write this but decided that my friends needed to see this argument for why we had to make our decision.  (I think argument is the proper term here.)  Please know it was a terrible, horrible decision to make, easily one of the toughest of our lives.  That being said, it was the least awful of any number of awful decisions.  Hopefully you can see why; hopefully, you don't blame us.

19 Random Notes on our European Vacation

First and foremost, we had an absolute blast on our honeymoon.  Every day we saw at least one breathtaking historical sight, and every day we had at least one fantastic culinary experience, which was exactly what we wanted.  There will eventually be pictures of what we saw - the very best of them may end up on Facebook, but we're both sensitive to the fact that most people care very little about what photos other people post on Facebook, so we'll be careful about that.

In case you're curious about how the trip to Europe went, though, you can read the following:

1. We chose a Mediterranean cruise because we thought of the trip as a scouting expedition for further vacations.  It's impossible to spend only one day in Rome, or in Barcelona, and do much more than scratch the surface of what there is to see.  Future trips to both of these cities, at some point in our lives, are definitely in order.  We also wanted to explore the ports where we knew much less (such as Tuscany or Marseilles, France) to give them a taste, as well.  Tuscany turned out to be awesome - I'll get to that later - but Marseilles was a little boring (I won't say much about France on this post).
2. Our cruise ship, the Norwegian Epic, was indeed Epic.  It carries about 4,000 passengers and 1,700 crew members on board, and stretched a quarter of a mile forward to aft.  It included so many restaurants that, had our cruise been two weeks instead of one, we would have still not exhausted our meal options.  There were many activities, as well - a ridiculous number of bars and shows (we hit up Howl at the Moon three straight nights, and also saw the Blue Man Group, but skipped on Cirque du Soleil because April and I both find that stuff weird), in addition to a rock climbing wall, outside pool, and a casino.
3. They call the casino on the Epic the Epic Casino, and this was fair.  As soon as the ship hit international waters (about thirty minutes after leaving port), the hundreds of slot machines and dozens of table games opened.  All of the blackjack tables with minimum bets of less than $25 had automatic reshuffling machines, so it was impossible to count cards.  The dealers varied in their level of competency (on one memorable night, I might have called a blackjack dealer an asshole - this would have had me kicked out of Atlantic City, but on a cruise ship as a paying passenger they couldn't throw me overboard.  So I had that going for me, which was nice).  In general, April and I played a little bit every night and ended up even, but that was thanks to...
4. ...Let It Ride.  My God, how did I live 29 years of my life without playing Let It Ride?  It's a really fun game, and really social, as well.  Perhaps a bit more luck oriented (vs. skill oriented) than I'd prefer, but still, April and I both had much honeymooning luck playing the game.  I had a natural straight flush and natural trip-nines during the trip, and April (I think) had the same - my memory of this is slightly fuzzy, all I know is I left the table to smoke a Cuban cigar and came back to see my wife holding a bunch of $100 chips in her hand.  This is always a fun sight.
5. We made friends with fellow honeymooners on our cruise, a really awesome couple from Ohio with whom we did some fairly serious partying and who generously let me borrow 50 Euro for a few hours when my credit card wouldn't swipe for the tour bus in Barcelona.

6. Speaking of malicious incidents in Barcelona, their city buses need more warning signs.  The sliding glass door of the bus almost took off the fingers of my right hand, which was stuck between the door and the bar I was holding onto for dear life while standing.  I was able to escape this bus version of a lobstrosity (really random nerd reference here, but this happened less than a day after I finished reading The Dark Tower series and I needed to make the reference) only by relaxing and letting what was sure to be a bleeding cut on my knuckles happen.
7. After these two unfortunate events happened, I managed to have a wonderful day in Barcelona - one of my favorite cities on the trip.  What a beautiful city, and everyone should see the Sagrada Familia if they're interested in architecture.  What a Gaudi-ish structure.
8. The Tuscan countryside - and our visit to a Tuscan winery for lunch and wine - was another of my favorite days.  After exploring Pisa for a few hours (yes, we both took corny photos of us "pushing" the Leaning Tower), we went to a vineyard on the outskirts of Lucca.  Here, we went on a winery tour and had a traditional Italian lunch - this started with a small Caprese salad and cold antipasto plate, followed by bread and homemade olive oil, which was itself followed by a light homemade pasta dish.  If you're reading this in the United States and are wondering what one change you can make to your pasta to make the end product more authentic in nature, consider this - use less sauce.  For Italians, the harmony of flavors is between the homemade pasta, the olive oil, and whatever cheese you decide to include.  The amount of sauce is very minimal.  If all of the ingredients you use are tasty, you don't need mountains of tomato sauce to cover anything up.   Anyway, after the pasta we had more cheeses and meats, followed by homemade garlic bread, which was followed by dessert.
9. Each of these courses was paired with unlimited quantities of the vineyard's homemade wine.  And when I say unlimited, I mean everyone at our table got pretty drunk and rowdy with lunch.  We were sitting with our honeymooner friends (together, we were maybe the only ones under age 40 on the excursion) and about six older folks who I assume really wanted to party with us.  We made very good wine-fueled friends with everyone at the table over lunch.  At one point, of the older folks, upon learning about our honeymooning status, got up and announced our honeymoon to the entire vineyard (about four tour buses' worth).  Getting that applause was pretty cool.
10. Europe moves to the beat of a different drum than America.  You know some of this already; Europeans care less about timeliness (we were almost never on time for anything we did in Europe, and nobody cared) and European men love to wear form-fitting bathing suits.  I can't decide whether this is because Europe appreciates the male genitalia more than America does, or whether European men simply lack shame.  All I know is that I never want to know, when looking at a dude by the pool, what his junk looks like.
11. Barcelona and Rome are, respectively, the numbers one and two cities worldwide with regard to petty theft (e.g., pickpocketing).  We were both nervous about this in both cities, and made sure to distribute our funds and passports across multiple pockets.  But I think the key to not getting your pocket picked is staying vigilant.  The men and women who pickpocket are very cautious and they want to make sure their mark is both oblivious and vulnerable.  I tried to look like an asshole from New Jersey who would be fast/bold enough to chase a pickpocket down and tackle them free safety-style.  April held onto her pocketbook for dear life.  Whatever it was, it worked.
12. In addition to some generally amazing ruins, our walk through Pompeii included both an ancient whorehouse and casts of skeletons that died in the aftermath of the Vesuvian eruption.  We found both aspects of the tour fascinating (and took many pictures of each, including one piece of ancient pornographic graffiti so profound and disgusting that decorum prevents describing it here).  But many others found them controversial, perhaps because of their values or some shit.  People need to get a grip, take it easy, and enjoy the ride like Europeans enjoy the ride.
13. We were on Floor 13 of our cruise ship.  Many American hotels skip Floor 13 because they think it's bad luck.  I don't get this.
14. Speaking of enjoying the ride, Europeans allegedly drive like crazy people.  I don't know.  What I saw was a different set of social customs that included comparatively little speeding, compared to New Jersey, and driving was done at very low speeds compared to America.  The roads were, obviously, much older than American roads, but much safer and better maintained.  I was almost never worried while being driven around in Europe.
15. ...but that may be because I am not a stoopid Ameri-CAN (read that in your best French accent).  The most annoying aspect of riding on tour buses in Europe was hearing some old man or old lady from the South complain loudly about how European people drive.  Okay, okay, I get it.  European drivers don't care about stop signs, they don't yield, and traffic circles at least superficially seem to involve a modicum of taking your life into your own hands.  But the system works for Europeans - they were raised in it, they know it, and they'd have no clue how to handle driving in America just like you'd have no clue how to drive in Europe, so leave them the hell alone.  
16. I feel like the point I'm trying to make here is hidden between the lines, and it strikes me at this point that it may actually be a political point (though I'm not trying to be political here at all).  It certainly supports people shutting the fuck up and not imposing their culture on the culture that they're visiting.
17. My favorite meals on the trip were, in order: (1) the aforementioned Tuscan vineyard lunch; (2) incredible homemade mozzarella at a farm outside of Sorrento, which was much harder (but in a good way) than the mozzarella served in America; (3) a simple ham and cheese sandwich, combined with a traditional Spanish lager, at a food truck in Barcelona (the lager was served in a brewery glass, even though it came from a food truck); (4) a medium-rare ribeye and lobster bisque at the cruise's steakhouse.
18. Even though our we delayed our honeymoon for seven months after we were married, I didn't regret waiting for this trip at all.  I think we waited in order to do this the "right way" for us.  This has a little to do with me getting a throat infection right after the wedding (it would have made an immediate trip less fun) and very much to do with our state of mind.  The work's not finished right after you get married; you have lots of stuff to organize, gifts to put away (or, sometimes, return), thank you notes to write and many other tasks that I've probably forgotten.  I feel like by waiting a few months, we were able to do all the post-wedding stuff beforehand and just enjoy the trip.
19. Finally, two quick recommendations: when researching your cruise ship, go to one of those websites beforehand that lists people's minor complaints with the ship.  Had we done this, we wouldn't have been surprised to learn that, on the Norwegian Epic, cabins do not really have a private bathroom.  There is simply a frosted glass door that only serves to amplify the sounds inside (let's just say the wife and I made very strict bathroom rules for our trip).  Second, never use a travel agent unless you're absolutely clueless about your destination, and even then, do not use a travel agent.  Travel agents add about as much value in the year 2012 as soothsayers.

That's all, folks.