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We received this
from Fred Lanting, dog man extraordinaire, who thought our readers might
enjoy it and we asked readers to let us know who wrote it. The
consensus is that it may have been penned by
ii
Vicki Hearne who wrote
"Bandit: Dossier of a Dangerous Dog" and who had Airedales.
The Dick Koehler to whom the writer refers, might be
Koehler, head trainer for Walt Disney Studios and Orange Empire Dog
Training. Koehler is thought by many to be the greatest trainer ever
lived.
ABOUT
LOSING OUR CANINE FRIENDS
Author Unknown -
November 2011
In California, in a harsh
inland desert, he developed a calcium deposit on his upper spine, did my
good Airedale Gunner, and it would hurt him to track, so Gunner and I
stopped tracking, stopped retrieving and jumping, not because he
wouldn’t have gone on if it were up to him, and awhile after that he was
very ill with cancer, and after a time of that, too much of that, I had
him killed, and he became one with the dust and that violent, hot
landscape.
Gallant Gunner, brave
Gunner, gay Gunner. Once, late one evening on a beach in Malibu, he took
down a man who was attacking me with a knife. The vet had to patch
Gunner up some, but he didn’t turn tail the way my assailant did. Brave
Gunner. Harken to Gunner. Twenty-four hours later, bandaged, he clowned
and told jokes for the kids at Juvenile Hall, performing for the annual
Orange Empire Dog Club Christmas party. Oh, rare and dauntless Gunner.
Even his hip, broken
when a prostate tumor grew right through the bone, did not stop the
courage of his gaiety, but I did. My friend Dick Koehler said, “He is
lucky to have a good friend like you,” to encourage me, you see, to get
on with it, kill him, and Dick was right, of course, right, because when
there is nothing much left of a dog but his wounds, you should bury
those decently.
Until he died, he was
immortal, and the death of an immortal is an event that changes the
world. That is all for now about Gunner, because what it does to you
when such a dog dies is not fit to print. "Der uture groß,”
writes Rilke, “Death is huge."
But various
psychologists deny that it is as huge as all that when it is an animal
that is mourned. I have read statistically studded reassurances that
mourning for a cat lasts at most one month, for a dog three. I have read
that when an animal dies there are no regrets, no rehearsal of the wail,
“If only I had,” and also that the splendid thing about animals, what is
said to make them so convenient to our hearts, like anti-depressants, is
that when we mourn them, we are only mourning a personal loss and not
“the loss of life and potential,” according to Professors Beck and
Katcher, authorities on all of this at The University of Pennsylvania.
That is the way
psychological authorities talk. “Eventually an animal can be
replaced,” they write in their books, but this is not how the experts
talk. (I realize that psychologists and such like are generally
understood to be experts, but I have met none who were experts in the
various ways my good Gunner’s work with scent developed, especially when
he started scenting out the human heart.)
But I am just a dog
trainer. I learned my thinking, such as it is, from the animals for whom
happiness is usually a matter of getting the job done: clear that fence,
fetch in those sheep, move those calves, win that race, find that guy,
retrieve that bird. The happiness of animals is also ideologically
unsound, as often as not, or at least it is frequently wanting in
propriety, as when your dog rolls in something awful on his afternoon
walk, or your cat turns off your answering machine.
In over a quarter of a
century of training I have never met an animal who turned out to be
replaceable, and Dick says, “Hell, even trees are irreplaceable, but we
don’t know that, and that is our loss.” The loss the dog trainer
has in mind is the loss of eternity, for, as the philosopher
Wittgenstein put it: “Denn lebt uture, der in der gegenwart lebt.”
(So he lives forever, who lives in the present.) And this is how the
animals live, in the present, which is why the expert’s difficult and
apparently harsh advice—advice they occasionally take
themselves—is, “Another dog, same breed, as soon as possible.” Not
because another dog of the same breed will be the same, but because that
way you can pick up somewhere near where you left off.
In a children’s book
called Algonquin: The Story of a Great Dog, there is a quarrel
between two brothers, old men they were, grandfather and great uncle to
the boy who tells the story. Grandsir is angry because Uncle Ovid is
going to take on the training of the grand young Pointer named
Algonquin; he is angry because he wants no more of the “grief and the
rage and the ashes.” He shouts at his brother, “Do you know what it does
to you? Do you know what it does every time one of them dies?” but Uncle
Ovid just says, “Don’t tell me. I am an old man and it would not be good
for me to know,” and he trains that Pointer who turns out to be
something else again at the field trials. Mr. Washington says, “I think
sometimes that he would pity his bracemates, were he not enough of a
gentleman to know that they would rather die than be pitied,” and
Algonquin wins and wins and wins; and then Algonquin starts to get a
lung disease and can’t work well, is distressed therefore, because he is
losing his work, his happiness, and Uncle Ovid sends him out on his last
run and shoots him while he is on point, while there is still something
more to him than his wounds.
At the end of that
story, when Grandsir suggests that it is time for the boy who has been
witness to all of this to get another dog, he says to his Grandfather,
“Irish Setters don’t win field trials, do they? I mean, you are not in
much danger of getting a great dog?” Grandsir purses his lips and
agrees, “Not much.” The boy says, "Then, an Irish Setter would be nice."
There exist mighty
dogs, the dangerous kind who take hold of your heart and do not let go.
But avoiding the great ones does not get you out of it. If, like the boy
in Algonquin, you already know what a great dog is, then the
knowledge marks you. If you do not know, then you are still in danger,
for if you give her a civilized upbringing, every Collie is Lassie in
propria persona, killing that snake in your heart, driving off the
cougar that lurks there, sending for help. This is not because all dogs
are great dogs but rather because all dogs are both irreplaceable and
immortal; and as Rilke says, "Der uture groß."
One day I talked about
death with my teacher and friend (for these are synonyms in the
trainer’s world), Dick Koehler. I had told him about results obtained at
the University of Pennsylvania. “Dick! The news is out! There are no
regrets when a dog dies. "And Dick said, “Oh, then my several thousand
students who say to me, ‘If only I had done what you said, Mr. Koehler,’
or ‘If only I had worked with her more,’—they’re all hallucinating,
right?"
“Must be,” I reply,
“for it says here that dogs are replaceable, and grief for them lasts no
more than three months,” and right there on the telephone from
California to Connecticut. Dick Koehler starts sounding a little funny;
he startles me. He is thinking of Duke, dead several decades now.
Hallucinating that Duke had been irreplaceable. Duke was a Great Dane,
one of your great dogs, too. Duke was a movie dog; some of you may
remember him from The Swiss Family Robinson.
“What was so
irreplaceable about Duke?” I asked.
“Well, it’s not every
day you find a Great Dane who thinks a 255 pound tiger is a kitty cat.
Not every day you find a Great Dane who will hit a sleeve and go through
a second story window, not just once, not just twice, but seven times
and it was as good the last time as the first time.”
Soon after Duke died,
there was Topper, of The Ugly Dachshund, and various TV series.
“Topper paid the rent for about three years there,” said Dick. “I mean,
he did all the work on that series.” Topper died like this: the great
dog and his son were playing, horsing around after a day’s work, and his
son slammed into him and ruptured his spleen and Dick realized it too
late for the vet to fix things up, and so had him put down. That was
over two decades ago, Dick’s most recent Great Dane.
Dick talks about Duke
and Topper and the thing starts to happen to me again, the merging of
all of the elegies, all of the great dogs. “There is nothing left but
his name… but there never was a dog like Algonquin.” Or, “It’s all
regrets,” or, “After he got in his car and drove away I dug a grave and
lined it with the bright fallen leaves and there I buried all that could
die of my good Fox.” Or, “He was allus kind to the younguns and he kilt
a rattlesnake onct.” Or, one of my favorites, the passage in The
Sword in the Stone: The great hound [lymer] named Beaumont is on the
ground, his back broken by the boar, and the expert, the Master of
Hounds, William Twyti, has been hurt also. Twyti limps over to Beaumont
and utters the eternal litany, “Hark to Beaumont.
Softly,
Beaumont, mon ami. Oyez à Beaumont the valiant. Swef, le douce Beaumont,
swef, swef.”
Then he nods to Robin Wood, and holds the hound’s eyes with his own,
saying “Good dog, Beaumont the valiant, sleep now, old friend Beaumont,
good old dog,” while the huntsman kills the dog for him: “Then Robin’s
falchion let Beaumont out of this world, to run free with Orion and to
roll among the stars.”
What next, though? The
narrator of Algonquin decides to go for an Irish Setter. But that
is not what the experts say to do. They say, “Another dog, same breed,
right away.” It takes courage—courage that Master Twyti seems to have
had, for he rose from beside Beaumont’s wounds and “whipped the hounds
off the corpse of the boar as he was accustomed to do. He put his horn
to his lips and blew the four long notes of the Mort without a
quaver.” He called the other hounds to him.
Another dog, same
breed, right away. Or a pack of them, and not because there were any
replacements for Beaumont in that pack. The other hounds were all right,
but there were no Beaumonts among them, and there is no point in saying
otherwise. I don’t mean by that that there are not plenty of great dogs
around. “There are a lot of them,” says Dick. Yeah. They’re a dime a
dozen. So are great human hearts; that’s not the point. We are by way of
being connoisseurs of dogs, some of us, but one falls into that, and a
dog is not a collector’s item, not for Dick Koehler, anyhow, whom I have
seen risk himself in more ways than one, over and over, day in and day
out, ever since I met him when I was nineteen and he straightened out
Stevie, a German Shepherd cross I had then, who was charging children
but was a nice dog after we took care of that, who lived for twelve
years after Dick showed me how to train him, who shook the ground just
as hard as Beaumont did when he died.
My teacher and friend
Dick Koehler is a maniac for training dogs instead of killing them. Deaf
dogs, three legged dogs, dogs with chartreuse spots on their heads. He
hasn’t gotten around to getting another Dane, though there have been
other dogs, of course. Of course.
But “Master William
Twyti startled The Wart, for he seemed to be crying,” and this book,
The Sword in the Stone, is about the education of great hounds and
of a great king, King Arthur in fact. Immortal Beaumont, douce, swef,
swef. And immortal Arthur, douce, douce, harken to Arthur, they would
say in time about him: Regis quondam regisque uture. The once and
future king. Which is to say, this is all of it about the education of
any hound and any boy.
“But won’t it hurt?”
my student asked me recently when I gave that advice: another dog,
same breed, as soon as possible. “Won’t it hurt my daughter again?”
Oh, it hurts, especially when, as is so often the case, you have a part
in the dog’s death. Perhaps because you were careless and he got run
over, or because, like Master Twyti, you gave the nod to the vet or to
the huntsman with his falchion.
There is the falchion,
and then sometimes you must speak abruptly into the face of grief, for
grief gives bad advice. Grief will tell you to throw your heart into the
grave with the dog’s corpse, and this is ecologically unsound. The ants
will take care of the corpse in a few weeks, but a discarded heart
stinks for quite some time. Two days ago that student of mine called, a
call that sent my mind away from Connecticut, to California, to the
England of Arthur’s boyhood. She had gotten a new pup for her
eight-year-old daughter, and at a few months of age the pup had died
because left in her crate with her collar on, and the collar got caught
on the handle of the crate. “My daughter is so upset, my husband says it
would be too bad to get another dog and have something else happen. What
do the experts do?”
I said in tones of
vibrant command, “Another dog, same breed, right away.” Nothing else,
for wordiness is not in order when you are discussing, as we so often
are, the education of a queen, even in, or maybe especially in, late
twentieth century Connecticut.
A decade, and a move
across country, went by between the death of Gunner and the purchase of
the new Airedale pup. That was as soon as I could get to it, what with
one thing and another. Now he and I are in a new landscape, one
dominated by gentle greens, and not the harsh and dramatic one of the
inland Southern California desert. But the gods who arrange for animals
to be irreplaceable are as stern and implacable in this friendly green
place as they are anywhere.
XXX
http://www.thedogplace.org/PROSE/Losing-Canine-Friends_Unknown.asp #1111
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