Dog.

I have always had mad drawing skillz

When you think about it, keeping an animal in your yard is a pretty weird thing to do. We are, as far as I know, the only animals that keep other animals as pets. Except maybe monkeys, don't put anything past monkeys. Farming animals is a thing that makes sense. You can understand why ancient peoples were like, “wait, instead of running after the damn things, why don’t we get ourselves some boy ones and some girl ones and just see what happens?” It makes a lot more sense, sustenance wise, if you don’t have to chase after everything you want to eat. But at what point did people start thinking,  “Let’s not eat this one. Let’s call it Buster and treat it like one of our kids”? I’m sure someone actually knows, but to be honest, I don’t care, all I want is a damn puppy.

When I was 3, I went to see The Wizard of Oz. And not long after, my mum bought me a puppy from the pound. I rather imaginatively named him Toto. He didn’t look anything like Toto from the play or the movie, but he was small and white and I loved him. Toto was a mongrel, but I’m pretty sure he had some sheep dog in him. Because damn, did that dog love to herd things. The main things he had in his life to herd were chickens. He would gently herd our chickens into certain corners of the yard, and then watch them all day. When our neighbour’s chickens jumped the fence he would not so gently tell them to fuck off.

In both the houses we lived in during Toto’s life, we shared a fence with a horse paddock. And Toto had an unfortunate habit of running off to hang out with the horses. It was unfortunate, because horse paddocks tend to have paralysis ticks in them too. If you’re lucky enough to have never encountered one, probably don’t do a Google image search. They are awful little creatures that latch on to an animal, and then suck blood until they are so fat they fall off. The other thing they do is release a poison into their host that causes slow and horrific paralysis. Starting in the hind legs, the paralysis, if left unchecked, will spread and eventually take over the lungs and heart, causing, you know, death.

That’s not how Toto died. Toto got about 10 of these in his life, and every time, we’d see him dragging his back legs, find the tick, take him to the vet and wait. The vet would remove the tick, give Toto some anti-venom, and return him to us, sore, sad, shaved, but ok. The last time he got a tick, I was 15, and my mum told me just how much that anti-venom cost, and explained that unfortunately, this time, we just couldn’t afford it. I wasn’t mad, I completely understood. And I sat in the driveway and held my puppy and sobbed. He just lay there and let me hold him. He’d never been one for that, but I believe he understood that I was distraught, and just let me cry into his fur.

We took him to the vet, they kept him overnight, and he was bloody fine. The bastard had developed a tolerance to the poison.

Actually now that I think about it that might have been one of those lies my mum told me. She may well have bought the anti-venom anyway. It’s like that time she told me she hadn’t seen my budgie, when in fact; she’d seen him pecked apart by magpies 10 minutes earlier. Mum, remember how you told me about the pecking a few years’ later? I don’t want to know if this one was a lie. I want to live in this reality where he overcame that tick on his own. Ok? Good.

Three years’ later, I was 18, on a train in business clothes, packed in like a sardine when my mum called me. “Toto’s got a tumour, in his stomach, it’s massive. The vet said we should say our goodbyes”.

“Wait, how long does he think he’s got?”

“Two weeks? Maybe less?”

We put him down 3 days’ later. He deteriorated quickly; I think the vet had accidentally burst the tumour or something. It happens. And it wasn’t ok to keep him around for us. I will never forget the final drive to the vet. Toto in the back bit of the commodore, with me in the back seat, just patting him, looking backwards at things I knew he would never see again.

When they put a dog down, there are two injections. One that makes them go to sleep, and dream some pretty wild shit, and one that puts them “to sleep”, where there’s no more dreams at all. We sat with Toto after the first injection for a while. His eyes went crazy behind his eyelids, and I’ve always wondered what he dreamed about in those last few minutes. After the second injection, we had to leave him there to be cremated. We didn’t get his ashes back or anything. I’m pretty sure they do it in bulk. You’d probably get something that was 1 fifth Toto, 4 fifths cats.

Not long after, mum bought a new dog. He’s a nice enough animal, and he’s grown on me. But he’s not mine. I moved out not long afterwards, and he is very much my siblings’ dog. In fact my sister was a very similar age when Greg (oh yes, Greg – I much prefer Gregorius) came along to what I was when we got Toto. I hope she doesn’t have to deal with any of this ‘til she’s a lot older too. I just wasn’t ready for a new dog.

But I am now.

The puppy over the back fence and I are in love with each other. She stands there and waits for me all the time, and whimpers if I don’t pick her up and cuddle her. I want to steal her away. But I can’t because 1 – she already has people and 2 – my house can’t have dogs in it. But I’m going to get a dog sometime soon, right after I’ve gotten a new house. And it might herd chickens, or it might not, and it might get ticks, or it might not, but we will love each other and be friends, and I’ll forget to ponder why it is humans think it’s ok to keep animal friends because everything will be dog, and nothing will hurt.