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.

*****************************

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.

****************************

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.

*******************************

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.

*****************************

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. 

******************************

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.

********************************

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.