Dog Torture at 30,000 Feet

(Over the next several days, I'll be telling a more sustained story than I normally do. My goal for this site has always been to have every story stand on its own, independent of anything previously published. The chronology of the next four or five days entries will be sequential, comprising a larger narrative, though at the same time I hope they will each stand on their own merits, apart from the larger arc.)

It was late spring of 1984, and it turned out that Big Brother wasn't in charge after all. Ronald Reagan was. To a couple flaming liberals freshly graduated from college, this wasn't necessarily preferable.

Karen and I were living in Bloomington, IL, the town we'd gone to college in, with Karen's first Seeing Eye dog, Lyric, and Holden, a generally worthless cur whom we nonetheless adored irrationally.

For reasons too convoluted and stupid to go into here, we decided that it would be a good idea to move to Los Angeles to begin our adult lives together. We didn't have jobs, didn't know a soul there, but with Randy Newman's, "I Love L.A.," echoing in our obviously hollow heads, we knew without doubt that it was going to be the Promised Land for us.


We just had to get there. We were working on a tight budget, so we had to get there as efficiently and economically as possible. It was decided that I would drive from Illinois, in a Chevy Malibu stuffed with our belongings, and find us a place to live, and then Karen, Lyric, and Holden, would fly out.


Because this is a web site of dog stories, I'm going to skip my nightmare solo trek across the continent, involving major engine trouble in Denver. Bad as my trip might have been, it was nothing compared to poor Holden's.

Karen and I always considered the dogs to be ours, jointly. But Lyric was Karen's first Seeing Eye dog, so there was a special bond, and Holden was my special boy, because…well, because Holden needed to be someone's special boy, didn't he? Not every dog can be a Seeing Eye dog, or handsome, or smart, or consistently housebroken. I won't argue that Holden had any intrinsic or objective worth, just that every dog, A.K.C. champ or lowly cur, deserves to be someone's special boy or girl.


Initially, we considered me driving to L.A. with Holden. The difficulty there was Holden was a terrible traveler. He was alternately carsick and disruptively buoyant, with a hound's howl that he could keep up for hours when he was unhappy, and at that stage of his life, car rides made Holden unhappy. Obviously we knew he wouldn't like the experience of flying more than driving, but at least it would be over for him much more quickly.


We had used acepromazine successfully on Holden before. Acepromazine is best described as knock-out drops for dogs. If you wanted to date-rape a dog, acepromazine is what you might want to slip it. I know now that acepromazine is not absolutely safe for all dogs, but our vet at the time said it was, and none of our dogs has ever had an adverse reaction to it. One little white pill, and Holden would sleep peacefully for a two-hour car trip. Two pills, and we had the bio-equivalent of a dead dog on our hands. For his cross-country voyage, it was decided that Holden would have four acepromazine tablets.

As a Seeing Eye dog, Lyric was, of course, entitled to not only fly in the plane's cabin, but to board first with Karen. As a worthless mongrel, Holden was lucky the airline let him fly as a piece of luggage. A special crate had been purchased for Holden, and furnished with his blanket and Myron, a pink, stuffed, pig that was Holden's favorite toy. He had been given one acepromazine for the two hour drive to the airport, and slept like a contented baby for the entire ride.


Upon arrival at O'Hare, Holden's sweater was put on him, he was placed in his crate, and given the rest of his tranquilizers. Karen reported that he was doped up to the gills. Then Karen brought the crate to the guys who would load Holden onto the plane, and extracted promises from them to be extra careful with him.


The second Holden was transferred to the custody of the airport crew, he woke up and began to scream. His screaming got louder as he was carried away from Karen and taken to the plane.


I wasn't there, so I'm not sure how Karen did this, but after she and Lyric boarded, she had a chance to ask a crew member how Holden was doing.

"He's making an awful lot of noise," she was told.


Five or six hours later, the plane arrived in L.A. Karen and Lyric were the first to disembark (ah, the perks of being sightless!), and we hurried to the area where we were to pick up Holden. We were there waiting as the crew member carried Holden in his crate out of the baggage area. We knew it was Holden because we heard the screaming as soon as the door to the luggage area opened.


The crate was set down in front of us, and Holden grew quiet. I was on the floor, opening the crate to let my poor boy free.


Holden half crawled, half staggered, out of his crate. His eyes remained on the floor.


"Holden, my good boy!" I exclaimed, petting and hugging him. He continued to look at the floor, and turned away. He didn't seem to have any idea who I was, or Karen and Lyric, for that matter. Never a bright bulb, the light behind Holden's eyes was completely out.


Holden ultimately recovered, mostly, but he was never quite the same dog again. At the risk of sounding ridiculous, his innocence was gone. Before his flight, he still had a puppy's outlook on life as an invariably joyful place. Then he'd been drugged, put in a box, taken away from his mom, and put in a small, cold, noisy place, alone, for hours. The dog that got off the plane in L.A. wasn't a puppy anymore. His flight had been a rite of passage, a journey into the existential void from which one can never fully return.

Meanwhile, the whole family had entered an existential void from which we were lucky to ultimately escape; we were the four newest citizens of America's Wasteland, Los Angeles.

© 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

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