On having a dog put down

Last night, when the rain returned and the light from the robots leaked into the slick dark streets, the dog took a turn for the worse. She was vomiting, her abdomen was distended; she balanced on trembling legs, her hind limbs extended like awkward props.

“This dog needs medical attention,” my mother said. I phoned up the Fourways Vet to find out what time they closed. We’re open 24 hours, they said. So, that was it. Either the dog was going to be deemed treatable, or this was it: the ritual that all pet owners dread.

It didn’t look promising. Victoria the dalmatian was 15-years-old and running out of second and third chances. My ex-husband’s dog, she had lived with my parents since shortly before the divorce. How she had kept going was a bit of a mystery to me, but she still loved her food, which promptly emerged from the other end of her alimentary canal in quantities that seemed to be greater than what went in.

There’s nothing more depressing than an old dog. They are an echo of our own decay, and a reminder that all the scientifically formulated diets in the world can’t prevent the creeping indignities of age. In their decline we see what is in store for us.

We got Victoria into the car and headed for the vet. On the way we discussed our options. “What if she’s just sick?” my mother said. I was more hardnosed. “She’s fifteen,” I reminded her. “How much longer does she have anyway? At what point do we say enough?”

At the vet, the decision became a little more clearcut. Victoria was not capable of walking, so we carried her in — me with the front legs, my mother with the back — and laid her on the floor in front of the reception desk, where she stared blankly into space. An assistant carried her through to the examination table. The vet, a no-nonsense woman, took one look and said, ‘I’m not giving you any option here. This is it.’

She inserted a catheter while my mother stroked the dog’s head and I turned away, finding it too hard to look and feeling ashamed of the tears stinging in my eyes. I hate crying in front of strangers. To distract myself, I wrote a mail on my phone and sent it to my ex-husband in Australia. He had long since indicated any interest in the welfare of the dog, but I thought he should know.

The vet kept a running commentary of what was happening. The heart has stopped, the movement of the legs is a reflex, the breathing centre is one if the last to go. This dog had heart failure, she concluded. “Thank you for bringing her in and not letting her suffer,’ she told us more than once.

Then we returned to reception and I paid the R950 it costs to kill a dog after office hours. We walked to the car. Across the road was Pineslopes and Billy the Bums, the preferred pick-up joint for northern suburbs 20-somethings. It was 10.00pm now and I wondered if people were arriving yet, whether the first Patrons had been downed. Here i was driving home in the rain after having a dog put down, one of the last hangovers from my failed marriage, and the party was going on. The symbolism was all a bit too Sundance Festival.

I cried again when I got home. The last time I’d witnessed a dog being put down was when I was 17 and Tristan the German Shepherd took three attempts to go down, howling all the way. This was genteel in comparison; she hadn’t even made a sound.

Besides, I didn’t even love this dog. She was a difficult animal to form an emotional bond with, too food-focused, too indifferent to individual humans. Some animals are like that. She was my mother-in-law’s dog more than anyone else’s, and when Kaye had died with the house full of paramedics and anguish, the dog’s only interest was where her next bowl of food was coming from — in fact, she was excited and happy because there were visitors. She never showed the slightest hint that she had noticed the absence of the woman who had fed her and walked her for years, and that decided it for me. Irrational or not, I expect some kind of loyalty from a dog.

But it’s hard to watch an animal die, and not to be reminded of everything else that is dying with it. Even the bad dogs, the dogs that chew mud flaps and poo everywhere and destroy furniture: even those dogs prompt a period of mourning.

As for the other dogs, I don’t know if they noticed anything and if they did, whether they cared. When we walked into the front door on our return from the vet, we were greeted by Xian the mad chow, still wearing his cone of shame and Monty the border collie. He had lost his bed for several months to Victoria, and now he had reclaimed it. He seemed quite pleased that she was no longer there. So life goes on. Still more rain seeps into the sodden soil, and the cold leaches into our bones, and winter approaches.