Fifteen years ago, my wife and I set out to get a “medium-sized” dog that would play with our young son. The occasion was the death of our last Chow, a sweet tempered creature who, nevertheless, refused to have anything to do with our Offspring. We had kept Chows for years before his birth, but as anyone who has ever had a Chow knows, they are better at channeling the temperament of the lion statues at the New York Public Library than they are getting frisky with a child.
So after our chow, Timmy’s, death, we toodled off to the pound to search for Mark’s Perfect Dog.
Anyone who has ever searched for an animal at a shelter will tell you what a painful, heart-wrenching, and frustrating experience it is. Row upon row of sad, neglected, shy, despairing, angry, eager, desperate, bewildered animals. Our son finally picked out a handsome adolescent puppy that was, ironically, part Chow. In the meantime, my wife spotted another animal she wanted to “interview” in the little room where prospective owners meet new dogs. Due to a miscommunication (I gave the attendant the wrong cage number), instead of the dog she wanted to meet, we found ourselves confronted with The Largest Keeshond In The World. A mix of Kees and God-only-knows what else (something huge and wolf-like), “Mieka” was five and, before we adopted him, had never been inside a house. In spite of his bad manners, he had bonded with one of the staff, and when she brought him in to meet us, it was clear that she was a Goddess. He adored her with that Keesie adoration we later came to know so well.
We had visited the pound on Friday after work, when my wife and son found these dogs. I didn’t like either, particularly, and so we went home that evening without a dog. Mieka’s age, size, and health (he had kennel cough) meant that he was going to be put down Monday if he wasn’t adopted that weekend. The shelter is a county-run facility, and while it wasn’t particularly high-kill, there is only so much they can do when they have an unsocialized animal with kennel cough the size of a Buick.
Well I remember that evening. My wife spent it talking about the dogs with a Japanese student living with us trying to learn English. Her vocabulary got considerably expanded by Julie’s descriptions of this large, loving dog. It finally got to be too much for me, and I reluctantly agreed to adopt both dogs. Julie (my wife) burst into tears, and Yuri (the Japanese student) did also, though it was probably out of Japanese manners more than agreement with the decision. Maybe it was just relief that the sturm und drang was over.
The next day, Julie, Mark, and I went back to the pound and adopted the two dogs. At the time, we were as poor as church mice and were driving as our only car a Hyundai sedan. We put the kid, the Kees mix, and the the chow-mix puppy in the back seat where they proceeded to imitate brownian movement until we arrived home. I don’t think I ever managed to get all the dog slobber off the back window. The kid survived, however.
To make a long story short, it took the Kees mix, Mieka, two years to “get happy.” He had been turned in to the pound after a divorce, and with his Keesie personality, was devastated by the abandonment. He peed on every doorpost in our house; he bit all of us at least once; and Julie was ready to turn him back in to the pound. By that time, I’d fallen in love with him. My response was, “No, if we can’t make this work, we’ll put him down in a loving way. This dog has been betrayed so badly that he’s not going to be betrayed again.” I renewed my efforts to convince him that he wasn’t the alpha male of our particular pack. We continued to be firm with him, and after the first year of sullen depression and the second year of “just existing,” about the third anniversary of his adoption, he suddenly decided to “get happy.”
Mieka miraculously turned into a bouncing 130-pound Keeshond puppy. Every Kees trait came out in spades. The laughter, the sense of humor, coupled with some very strange “wolfie” traits from his other ancestors.
He began to howl. We live across a creek from the police and fire departments, and during the summer when our windows were open, every time the sirens went off in the middle of the night, the dog would howl in his sleep. He would emit these sepulchral moans from the foot of our bed in the middle of the night that would wake Julie and me from sound sleep and we would find ourselves sitting up in bed with atavistic chills running up our spines.
The little red dog.
He also taught the Little Red Dog (our name for the chow-mix we adopted with him) how to howl. Shoot, he even taught our friends’ dogs how to howl. You really haven’t lived until you’ve watch a well-behaved senior standard poodle learning how to howl to the sound of church bells during a barbeque, with the poodle’s “parents” bewildered by the sounds their dog is emitting.
“Oh, my! I’ve never heard Roxanne making that noise! Did someone feed her a chicken bone?”
“No. Mieka is teaching her to howl.”
Turns out that, once her pipes were freed, Roxanne the poodle enjoyed her new-found talent and started howling at everything (in a mutated poodle ”yip-yip glug-glug moan” sort of way). It caused something of a strain to our friendship with Roxanne’s parents, but they’re sort of new-age people, and once Julie convinced them that Roxanne “needed” to howl, they accepted her new found talent begrudgingly.
Mieka, with all his talents and new-found joy, went to the Bridge too soon. The Little Red Dog shockingly followed him not long thereafter from cancer, and we were left bereft of dogs.
That was when we contacted Peak To Peak Keeshond Fanciers, who specialize in rescue. We live in the Denver area, and found PPKF over the internet.
Any time an unknown person approaches a rescue organization, the organization must take precautions to make sure that people wanting their dogs are suitable and equipped to deal with the quirks that may pop up–particularly with a breed that bonds so strongly with its people. Through PPKF, we adopted a young female Kees named Murphy. We were her third permanent home, and (in our opinion), all her quirks have to do with abandonment. We were told that Murphy was turned in to rescue because of a ”failure to bond.” Former owners had reported that she was “stubborn.”
The first morning after we had Murphy, after a stressful night when she barked at just about anything, she came into our living room looking lost and worried and exhausted, and I sat down on the rug. She came over and leaned against me. “It’s OK,” I told her, and scratched the special place on her chest. “Everything is going to get better.” And it has.
My family has learned a lot about adopting “difficult” dogs. They come to you wounded, but still on their own terms. They have unassailable integrity: They can’t deny their nature, even if it would make being with you and loving them easier. Sad dogs have infinite joy inside of them–and infinite love, and infinite delight.
Finding that and freeing it is a gift and a joy beyond reckoning.
