Things to Do in Albuquerque When You’re a Dead Dog

The fundamental problem with stories about dogs is that so often they end, tearfully, with the subject dog expiring in an excruciating death scene. That won't be the case with this story. In fact, this story begins with the dog, in this case, Lyric, already dead, having passed away peacefully in her sleep at the ripe old age of 15. Adore her as I did, this story isn't about Lyric, per se, but about her earthly remains and their disposition.


Personally, I believe almost all of the rituals and traditions associated with death are insane. Of course, the remembrance of deceased loved ones sustains us, but the physical remains are just that, remains, of someone who once was, but who now exists only in our memory. If anything, it seems to me, ritualistic display, handling and disposal of the corpse of either dog or human is an affront to who they were before they became a corpse. Every dog or cat we had who died after Lyric was disposed of in the county dog hole, and I think that's as it should be.

The county dog hole is just that, a big pit for dead dogs and cats. I suppose it has a real name, but I like to think of it as the dog hole. It's loaded with corpses, then lime is poured, then it's loaded with corpses again. Lather, rinse, repeat, until you need to finally dig a new, or deeper, dog hole. Thinking about it, dogs and cats aren't lonely and scared in the dog hole, and they're with their own kind. If they insist on being dead, I frankly can't think of a better place for them to be than the dog hole. If there were something like a dog hole for people, I'd sign up, right away. Karen felt just as I did, and after her death we donated her remains to the New Mexico Museum of Anthropology. But when Lyric died, we were far less callow, and felt certain things needed to be done to the remains. So we tried to do them.

Before I get to Lyric's bodily remains, let me discuss her hair. Lyric was a long-haired German shepherd, and Karen brushed her thoroughly for the twelve years she was ours. During that time, she saved all of Lyric's hair, in white kitchen garbage bags. When we moved, we'd move the bags of hair with us. By the time Lyric died, we had more than thirty.


I will argue that Karen was not clinically insane. She actually had a reason for keeping Lyric's hair. Granted, it was a half-baked and ultimately stupid reason, but it was a reason, nonetheless. From the time she met Lyric, Karen had the fantasy of saving Lyric's hair, and one day having it spun into yarn and made into a sweater. It wasn't until after Lyric's death that Karen bothered to look into the feasibility of this plan. 


Karen consulted artisans, and learned this. You can make things out of dog hair, but you probably shouldn't. There's a reason we don't make things out of discarded pet hair. Apparently, anything made of the collected hair of Lyric would not only be hideous and overly fragile, but would also stink of wet dog all the time. Ultimately, the thirty-plus garbage bags of hair went to the dump.


Then there was the matter of Lyric's bodily remains. Naturally, we'd meet Lyric's spirit again at the Rainbow Bridge, but Karen was crystal clear as to what she wanted done with her body. She wanted Lyric cremated, and wanted to sprinkle the remains at a particular location in the Sandia foothills that Lyric had loved. It was a location we always imaginatively referred to as "the place." It was just a bit off a path, with a small stream, and it was pristine, and rugged and magnificent. It's where we wanted to let Lyric's soul fly free.

We hiked to the place, and I carried Lyric's remains in a canister that resembled an extra-large coffee can. My big girl felt so light in that can.


Once at the place, we sent our last earthly love to Lyric, and prepared to sprinkle her dust to the New Mexico winds, where it would be lifted and flown far and wide, so all of the Sandia mountains, indeed, all of the American west, would be imbued with Lyric's sweet essence. I don't remember, but I'm sure some beautiful words were said. Then I opened the canister so Karen and I could toss the fairy dust into which our girl had been transformed into the breeze.

What was in the can was not at all what we expected. It was black, and rocky, and had recognizable chunks of charred dog in it. Somehow, this relatively small can held a massive amount of matter, and though the can had felt light, the "cremains" were dense. There was going to be no letting Lyric float away in the wind. As we each tossed the first handfuls of her into the air, the charred mass dropped straight to the ground, as if it were iron filings and the earth were a giant magnet.

We were near the small, babbling, creek. We had imagined many of her remains would persist near the creek she had loved and romped through. What we didn't expect is that by the time the third and fourth handfuls of the black matter had been removed from the can, the stuff would begin to, literally, dam the creek. What had been intended as the liberation of a sweet, beloved, soul, had suddenly turned into an illegal biohazardous dumping with serious environmental implications.


We still had half a can of Lyric left. We dumped it into some foliage, and got out of the place, before some park ranger came up and arrested us for despoiling the foothills.


We laughed then, and I laugh now, remembering this. What was in that canister was no more Lyric than the bags of hair were a sweater, or what's in some drawers in a museum in Albuquerque is Karen, or whatever's buried in the cemetery is your grandmother. Whatever happened to the black sludge damming the creek that day, my Lyric will always be beautiful, always happy, and always on the arm of her Mom.


© 2009, All Rights Reserved, Rich Sands
ScottsdaleDogMan.com
ScottsdaleDogMan.blogspot.com

Karen

In my case, at least, I didn't become a dogman on my own. I had a co-conspirator who collected dogs and cats with me, my wife, Karen who passed away from breast cancer in January, 2002. She remains alive, not only in my memory, but in a number of the stories that come out of the den. In order to tell you enough about Karen, I would need to write a book, which I may ultimately do. For now, though, allow me a slight diversion from dogs and cats to tell you just a little bit about her.



Karen and I met in college in 1979, when she was still Karen Frerichs. She was memorable in that she was the only blind student at the university. You never would have known she was blind from a distance, and, except for one eye that was sort of misdirected, you wouldn't have known up-close. She was a psychology major, beautiful with long, chestnut, hair, and dating my friend, Jeff. We were nothing but friends for the first year and a half we knew each other.

Then Karen and Jeff broke up. I read her The Catcher in the Rye one January. According to international law governing the behavior of hot blind girls, once a guy reads Catcher in the Rye to one, they are obligated to fall in love with him, or, at very least, sleep with him. Don't complain to me about this. I didn't  draft the law, I just benefited from it.

Once Karen and I were together, we were spiritually married. The real marriage would take place sometime later, in a dog park, of all places. As soon as we got our first apartment we got our first dog, who we named Holden, appropriately enough. Then Karen got her first Seeing Eye dog, Lyric, and it was a whole lot of dogs and cats ever after.

Karen went to the University of Illinois College of Law. Though I read her curriculum to her, and her dog, Lyric, got her around campus, the accomplishment of graduating, and then passing the bar exam in New Mexico, belong entirely to Karen. Law school's hard, and the bar exam is harder, for those who can see. A blind person could get through law school on charm and pity, but there's no way to influence the bar exam. It's a two-day test from hell, and having to take it with someone reading it out loud to you seems incomprehensible.

Karen was also frighteningly funny and easy going. She was a hard drinking and smoking gal, and she loved to swear.  Making prank phone calls was a kind of specialty. Once, I was working at a personal injury firm, where I met my good friend, Rick. We did intakes about injuries sustained by people who had seen our firm's commercials on T.V. It wasn't much of a firm, and we didn't get many calls.


One day, Rick got a call from a lady downstate. She spoke in a thick accent, that sounded like that of black people from southeast New Mexico and southwest Texas. She talked to Rick for over an hour about her injury, supposedly sustained at the pet store she worked at, when a crazed chimp (who wasn't even supposed to be there) bit her on the face. Now she was worried that the chimp's owner, the caller's boss, was going to maliciously sic the chimp on her, and Lord help her if that happened!


Of course the caller was Karen, and the three of us laughed for months over it. I just got an e-mail from Rick about the call that brought the whole thing back and had me laughing, hard, again. I have no doubt that Rick was laughing as he wrote it. I could give a million examples, but, suffice to say, she was a very funny woman.

She played piano, and sang in cocktail bars, and could do "Me and Bobby McGee" in a way that would do Janis Joplin proud.


She originally got a job as a prosecutor at the D.A.'s office, but had to leave over ethical issues. She learned that the D.A. encouraged, no insisted, that his lawyers be dishonest with the court on occasion. After she was ordered by her supervisor to tell a judge she has witnesses ready for trial, when in fact she did not, Karen chose to do the ethical thing and resign from the D.A.'s office. 

She became a criminal defense attorney, and she never lost a single case she took to trial against the state, and continued to find it a very rare occasion when the state prosecuted their cases in an honest and ethical manner. I went to work with her as her assistant, and she and I both believed that only with strong, ethical, defense attorneys, would prosecutor's office's operate within the bounds of the law and fundamental fairness.

She always used guide dogs and loved the independence and safety they afforded her. She loved all dogs, and if there was a stray dog or cat within a five mile radius, it would find her. We had a chicken coop in the back of our old Albuquerque house, and Karen insisted we fill it with chickens, and a rooster, named Buff.

Karen had a host of medical problems, the main one being, of course, her blindness, which had a mysterious cause, with an onset just prior to puberty, and no cure. She also had early, pre-cancerous, incidents, where, in every case, the pathologist would eventually shake his head, and say, "These cells aren't cancerous, but I'll be damned if I know what they are!" 

She had migraines, and she got banged around a lot. I'd yell at her, urging her not to move around like an idiot like she could see, but Karen figured the occasional egg-sized knot on her forehead was a small price to pay for normalcy.

I'd been with Karen just under 20 years when she died, after fighting breast cancer like she'd fought everything else throughout her life. She had to fight society to be allowed to be a blind girl in a public high school in the 1970s. Not only did she attend, she was a cheerleader.

She had to fight the Department of Rehabilitation to get any help through college and law school. She had to fight discrimination, first for being a woman, and then for being a blind woman. She had to fight for her clients, and fight for the truth. 

She would have just as soon not have fought so often and so hard, but she wasn't going to back away from any fight that was just and necessary, and she would fight to the death, if that was required. What really sucks is that she died fighting cancer, which isn't just and only questionably necessary. Karen always wanted to live, but if she had to die, I wish she could have died fighting an adversary, not a stupid, random, epidemic disease which, if malignant enough, can't be beat.



I never knew Karen not to love a dog or cat (or horse, chicken, etc.), and I never knew a dog or cat not to love her back. She was a true dogwoman. 

There's a lot more to say about Karen, of course, but the main thing for now is Erica, Levi and I miss her a lot, and you need to know who she was to fully appreciate some of my recounting of things that happened to us.

© 2009, All Rights Reserved, Rich Sands
ScottsdaleDogMan.com
ScottsdaleDogMan.blogspot.com

All Dogs' Eyes Are the Same Size!

The Seeing Eye breeds all its own dogs, and keeps meticulous record of any genetic defect that could affect a dog's fitness for work, such as hip dysplasia. Although Vinnie was perfectly healthy, his bloodline had been stopped because of a hereditary retinal defect. Since the Seeing Eye had a definite interest in making sure none of their dog graduates went blind, they arranged for Vinnie to be checked, annually, by a veterinary ophthalmologist.



Even in this age of specialization, it's difficult for me to imagine what it is that makes someone get on the path to become a veterinary ophthalmology. Before Vinnie had to be checked, I had no idea such a specialized vet existed, and was apparently busy enough to have a thriving practice in a smallish city such as Albuquerque.

I bring this up because this doctor, whose name I can't recall, told me something I've never been able to forget. He told me all dogs eyes are the same size.

Initially, I didn't understand what he meant, so he explained. "If you scooped out the eyeball of a Great Dane and a Chihuahua," the vet told me, "And laid them out on the table, the eyeballs would be the same size." What can you say when you're given a piece of information like that?

"Oh."

"The eye is the first major organ to develop in a fetus," The doctor explained. "It's a series of genetic switches being pulled, or not being pulled, as the dog develops, that determine what kind of characteristics they have. A small dog, for instance, has genetic switches for growth flipped to the 'off' position, sometime early during gestation. A giant dog, like a Newfoundland, never has those genes flipped off."


"But all the variation you see in dogs, size, color, temperament, all the variation, takes place on the genetic level after the eyeball has developed. That's why small dogs often seem to have bulging eyes. Their skulls are holding the same size orbs as their gigantic brethren."

The vet allowed that there were minute differences in eye size, and that disease, or bad genetics. could result in an eye larger or smaller than usual, but, all things being equal, all dogs have the same size eyeballs. 

I've refrained from scooping any dog's eyes out to compare size, but as I look at dogs I know, I'm fairly confident the vet was right.

I can find no confirmation, or denial, of this "fact" on the internet. I once spoke to another vet, this one a general practitioner, who adamantly denied the assertion. So I don't know, for sure, but, as is my habit, I go around repeating it as fact anyway. After all, a veterinary ophthalmologist told me. Why wouldn't I believe it? You, on the other hand, are being given this information by some lunatic on the internet. Believe it or not, the choice is yours. I'm simply truthfully sharing what I was told.



I'll say this. What the doctor said makes sense. Little dogs do seem to have enormous eyes, while bigger dogs can seem to have a beadier countenance, and I choose to believe what the specialist contracted by the Seeing Eye told me. It squares with my understanding of neology and dog evolution and development. Mainly, though, I choose to believe this because, in any situation, when the room falls silent, and no one knows what to say, this is guaranteed to cause some sort of reaction:

"Hey, did you know that if you scooped out a Great Dane's eyeballs and a Chihuahua's eyeballs, you could put the Dane's eyes back in the Chihuahua, and vice versa, and they'd fit?" 

If that doesn't start the conversation up, it's probably time for everyone to just go home and go to bed.



© 2009, All Rights Reserved, Rich Sands
ScottsdaleDogMan.com
ScottsdaleDogMan.blogspot.com

Vinnie Goes to the Zoo

One fine autumn afternoon in Albuquerque, during the mid 90s, Karen and I decided to go to the Rio Grande Zoo. 

We had been in Albuquerque several years, but Karen's guide dog, the German shepherd, Lyric, was getting older and becoming a bit dysplastic, so a long afternoon of needless wandering around a zoo seemed like something she might no longer enjoy. In her younger days, though, Lyric always found zoos exhilarating and interesting, by and large.



Karen and Lyric had been to the Brookfield and Lincoln Park Zoos in Chicago, and found their traffic-free, wide paths, to be a great place to both work and enjoy themselves at the same time. Lyric also used to go to the Miller Park Zoo, in Bloomington, IL. 

At the time, at least, the Miller Park Zoo was pretty pathetic, but they did have a tiger, who was kept in an inappropriate (to my mind) habitat. It was just a big cage, not the type of stimulating enclosed environment better zoos strive to provide.

The tiger in Bloomington was also quite close to the public. We would go to the zoo, and the tiger would see Lyric. I think it was the only time the poor creature ever bothered to get up. Then, unmistakably viewing Lyric as potential prey, the tiger would begin stalking, back and forth, with ever increasing rapidity, in his lonely cage, giving Lyric the death-gaze that only a massive cat can pull off on a German shepherd. 

When this happened, Lyric would turn her back, and staunchly refuse to believe that there was a 500 pound, predatory, cat behind her, who wanted to prey on her. We only took Lyric to that zoo a couple of times, because she began to get too upset about the tiger, and its obvious single-minded desire for her flesh.



Were we in any way being cruel to the tiger, teasing it with the prospect of a Lyric lunch? I would say not. The life of a tiger really sucks in a zoo like that, where they have no companions or environments with which to entertain themselves. Seeing another animal  a predator as well, but one small enough to be his prey, had to be nice for the tiger, in that at least it was something different.

And let's be honest here. The tiger would have happily eaten any of the slack jawed children who stared at him day after day. Seeing a dog was just a break from the monotony for the tiger, and if it wouldn't have upset Lyric so much, we would have gone more often, just to entertain the big, lonely, cat.

When Lyric retired, and Karen got her new guide dog, Vinnie, a black lab, we decided to go the Rio Grande Zoo in Albuquerque, which we had been told was beautiful. Karen put the harness on Vinnie and we went out to the zoo. That's when the ticket taker told us, "No dogs."



Karen patiently went through the whole "this is a guide dog" explanation, and produced her and Vinnie's I.D. issued by the Seeing Eye. Again, the word was, "No dogs."

Wrong answer.

Guide dog users had their own civil rights struggle, that lasted years, to enact state and federal laws guarantying them the right to use their dogs anywhere the public was invited. There was a good deal of public resistance, coupled with widespread disbelief that a.) a dog could safely lead a blind person around and b.) that blind people in fact needed to get around. After all, they're blind. 

If you're blind, such reasoning goes, what difference does it make whether you are in a nice restaurant or eating the same food at home. You can't see the difference.Such attitudes did (and to a much lesser extent still do) further stigmatize the blind, discouraging educational and vocational integration, and in a sense using a Seeing Eye dog, as opposed to a white cane, can be a political statement, saying, "I may be blind, but I participate fully in all aspects of life."

There's a sappy, but still good, Disney movie on the subject called, Love Leads the Way, starring Timothy Bottoms, Susan "Laurie Partridge" Dey, and the remarkable Ernest Borgnine as the twisted villain, a Senator who has a psychotic and unexplained hate-on for dogs. It's definitely worth watching, if not worth seeking out.

The point is, though, starting in the 1930s, thousand of guide dog users had to fight guys like Ernest Borgnine to have their dogs accepted as necessary, so they would be allowed in restaurants, theatres, hospitals, and, yes, even zoos. They take their hard-earned right seriously, and a guide dog user such as Karen, who was also a lawyer, took this right especially seriously, and felt strongly that with such a right came a corresponding responsibility, to herself, and others, to see that the law was not allowed to be randomly abridged by the prejudiced and ill-informed, whether they wear the cloak of expertise or not.

Karen was more assertive than most guide dog users. It would be wildly unfair to call her the Rosa Parks of guide dog users, but I'm going to do it anyway. If Karen's rights were going to be challenged, there was going to be a big scene, right then and there, and if that scene didn't ultimately result in admittance and an apology, it was going to be followed up by legal action. 

Sometimes the action was commenced through the city's human rights commission, which provided statutory fines for denying guide dogs admittance. Things at the zoo, however, were more serious than that. In this situation, because the zoo was under the city's control, it was the city itself who was discriminating against her.

Karen had recently been admitted as an attorney to the bar, and been hired as an assistant district attorney. As the victim of a violation of the law, and as an officer of the court sworn to uphold the law, Karen did the only thing she could. She called the cops, and insisted they make a report of the incident.


She wanted to storm the gates after the police report was filled out, and force the zoo personnel to physically interfere with her, thereby committing a serious violation of federal law, but, for once, I was the calmer head, and convinced her not to take that path. The police dutifully wrote out their report, but had no idea what to do next. Short of arresting the zoo itself, we had no idea either, so we all went home to figure it out.

Then we called the media, and though we got a lot of coverage in the newspaper and on TV, we were disheartened to see the other side's view presented as if it were reasonable. To state it as affirmatively as possible: The zoo's position was wholly unreasonable and arbitrary. 

Karen was by no means the first guide dog user to go to a zoo, and the laws regarding guide dog use had been well established in all 50 states for half a century. 

The director of the zoo (the late John Moore, as played by Ernest Borgnine) was making statements to the press to the effect that guide dogs would cause the zoo animals to panic and break their necks, fleeing into brick walls, and cause other species to eat their young. He maintained Vinnie would spread parvo to the zoos rare canines.

Just to be sure, we did additional research, and we couldn't find any other zoo in the country that didn't allow guide dogs. We also made sure the "breaking neck, eating young, getting parvo" argument was in fact utter nonsense and was not supported by any scientific, or even anecdotal, evidence. 

Karen then obtained permission from her office to represent herself in this matter, and informed the City Attorney, and the media, that she was now bringing a federal civil rights case against the city, if this wasn't taken care of immediately. He asked for one month to cool down his zoo-keeper, and true to his word, the illegal ban was lifted.

Finally, almost a year later, we could go for a nice stroll through the zoo with Vinnie. Karen harnessed him up, we bought our tickets, and went in. I was immediately attracted to the monkey and ape area, and directed Karen and Vinnie to follow me. We passed a lot of animals on the way, none of whom panicked or ate their young, and none of whom vaguely interested Vinnie. He preferred looking at the children. Especially the children with food that might drop to the ground in his path.

At the gorilla exhibit, there was one of those things where you sort of go underground and then can see the animals through glass windows. We were in luck, because a large male gorilla was sitting right in front of one of the peepholes, eating some leaves. I was looking at the gorilla, telling Karen about it, when, suddenly, Vinnie looked up.

The gorilla's face was squarely in front of the glass. He and Vinnie , mere inches away, made eye contact. The ape looked surprised for a moment, and then went back to contentedly eating his leaves. I started to tell Karen about it, but suddenly, she was gone.


Vinnie, with no direction from Karen, against all Seeing Eye training rules, pulled her out of the ape tunnel at warp speed, and didn't stop until they were 20 feet into the fresh air. 

Vinnie was shaken to his core, having just seen what he had to have imagined to be the ugliest, most deformed, horrific-looking human being ever! This person was so grotesque he had to live in an underground lair, and Vinnie, who had to endure a lot in the name of being a working dog, absolutely was going to have no part of this freak show. Further, using his professional judgment as a Seeing Eye dog, he decided mom was going to have no part of it, either.

Vinnie was so shaken up we had to leave immediately. Our victory over the zoo had been Pyrrhic. Vinnie got to go, but, unfortunately, couldn't stay, so neither could we.

Even though he was a lab, and a silly boy, and an eater of anything, who cost us a fortune at the vet due to his persistent "dietary indiscretions," Vinnie did most definitely have a sensitive side, and this was simply too much. Facing off against hairy monsters in underground lairs was not part of the job description provided him by the Seeing Eye.

After that, we were much more careful about exposing Vinnie to potentially traumatic or frightening situations, and, with the exception of one other monkey, and a group of pirates, we were fairly successful. He scared us a time or two, but those are stories for another day, along with plenty of stories where Vinnie isn't scared.


© 2009, All Rights Reserved, Rich Sands
ScottsdaleDogMan.com
ScottsdaleDogMan.blogspot.com