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I had to put this guy down yesterday. I found this picture of him here in one of my albums on PP. He had just turned three earlier that month and was carrying around the gift Santa brought him.
He would have been 16 this December.
A little bit of a "eugoogly" (as Derek Zoolander would put it).
When my oldest daughter (now 19) was two, I was just a year or so out of the Corps, both working and going to school full-time. All we could afford at the time was an apartment. It was around 2003, I suppose.
My daughter wanted a puppy, as must young children do. We told her at the time that we would get one when we got a house. She never mentioned it again.
In July of 2004 of the following year we bought our first home. I was still working and in school, and this is when they were giving out loans to everyone, but I was approved for a VA loan and made enough to afford a small, three bedroom house of our own.
My oldest was about to turn 4 that month and we had added a sister to the clan who was 1, but nearing 2.
Within a week of us moving in, my oldest reminded my wife and me about our promise to get a dog once we had a house.
We were a bit stunned, not against the idea, but that she remembered after never bringing up the subject again.
We contacted a rescue organization and tried out several dogs who just weren't a good fit. They were smaller dogs - not tiny as I wouldn't have one of those - but they were too high energy, had bad manners, and would get up in the girls' faces and whatnot. Not aggressively, just wanting attention, but the girls didn't care for any them.
Then they brought us this patchy, underfed "lab mix" (he's really mostly a combination of a ridgeback and pit).
They told us he lived with a family out in the country and estimated he was about six months old. The family tied him to a tree and moved away, leaving him to starve to death. The neighbors would drive by, see the dog, but never the family. Eventually they called this rescue organization and he was in their program about two weeks before we met him.
So he was still regrowing hair and putting on the proper weight. He was tied to that tree for approximately a month that June and survived, as best as I can tell, because it was an unusually rainy June and he had access to drink the rainwater.
After the higher energy dogs we had tried, he introduced himself and laid himself down on the ground in our living room to relax. The girls thought he was cute and sweet. They snuggled him as he lay and the youngest even kinda crawled on him. He looked like he was in heaven and I remember him making eye contact with me while the girls were all over him. His eyes said, "I'm home."
At that age of six months, he was already house-trained, but still needed to be trained properly. And it was obvious he had been physically abused. I'd I grab a broom to sweep up, for example, and would run and hide.
Sidebar: my dad had a farm growing up. Mostly cattle. We had chickens and pigs when I was younger, but when we moved to the bigger farm, we whittled that down to just cattle. My dad owned his own machine shop as well. We always had at least one dog and an outdoor cat. I was raised to treat animals with respect, but also the importance of training "pets" properly. If you've ever watched that Cesar Milan "Dog Whisperer" show, you get the gist.
For the first 6-9 months we had him, he and I went on two walks a day, morning and evening. His healthy weight is about 65 lbs and he WORE MY SHOULDER OUT as I leash-trained him. But we got there.
His breed makes him aggressive/alpha by nature, but he always obeyed me and heeled, even out in public and off the leash.
From day one he somehow knew that his sole purpose in life was to take care of my daughters as that number increased to four.
On walks with me he was perfectly behaved and didn't care about other dogs around or on the other side of fences as we walked by. But God-forbid if we were taking a family walk. If other dogs even dared to make a noise as we walked by their fence. He would do his darndest to push his way through that fence to tell that dog, "you are not permitted to act aggressively with my girls in the vicinity."
He was friendly with other dogs, but when meeting a new one and they go through their sniffing each other routine, his message was clear: "we can be cool, but if you question my authority, I will put you in your place."
He never started a fight and never bit a person. He was just the top-dog who knew his purpose in life was to protect his ladies.
When he was around 5 he was hit by a van going about 30mph. I watched it happen in slow-motion and the van didn't bother to stop. I lost sight of him as he got knocked past where I could see him. I ran towards him, expecting to find a dead dog, but he had taken the back way down the alley to come home.
I took him to the vet. Nothing broken. I took him home and he just laid around for a few days until he felt better.
My wife and I divorced in 2013. He is my dog, but I felt the right decision was to leave him with my girls.
XW moved to a place in May of 2019 that didn't allow pets, so I took him back.
He spent the last 15 months with me.
I just had my girls for the month of July and he was happy.
The girls went back home this past Friday.
His back hips have been an ongoing problem and several times I thought he was ready to go, only to see him pep back up.
He doesn't get good traction in the house with the wood and tile floors, so I had gotten used to picking him up and carrying him out to the back deck so he could get traction and go wander the grass of the backyard.
Yesterday he wouldn't move.
I took him all the way to the grass, but he would just fall down. His back legs wouldn't work and he kept lying down as if he was giving up.
My vet has a policy that the owner had to stay outside while the animal goes in. I wasn't going to take him there and let him die alone. They wouldn't administer the shot in the parking lot either, but gave me contact info for a vet who would come to my house.
The way I was raised, you just shot the animal and bury it.
Everyone I spoke to thought this was awful, especially my girls, so I paid to have a vet come out to my house and put him down.
Then I went to a friend's property and cremated him Darth Vader style.
He was the best dog ever, and the perfect dog for us.
I am proud of him and I miss him.
