On Sarah.

It has been many days since I handed our sweet maltese puppy mill dog to the rescue.

I am broken.  I was also quite angry.  This is not the first time this has happened and while I swore it would be the last, my husband flaked and left it on me.  I later got an apology (and a pretty sincere one at that) but it seems hollow.  Too late.

Sarah was sugar-sweet.  She just was.  She was also never housebroken.  She was over a year old when we got her, matted from the rescue shelter that took in puppy mill dogs.  Sarah was from a puppy mill, and my social-justice-loving-heart couldn’t resist rescuing a sweet dog who had likely suffered so much.

We tried everything to housebreak her.  Literally everything.

When the animal behaviorist that we hired (who cost us over $500) came to visit, she admitted that Sarah was really not a smart dog.  Being not-so-smart is a huge hindrance in housebreaking.  She left us with a list about two miles long of ways to help her.  So help me, I tried.  Even with several children, other pets, a terrible schedule, and a traveling husband, I really did try.  (Because it mostly fell on me)

And I failed.  I couldn’t housebreak her.  I spent hundreds on every special little thing.  I resigned myself to using puppy pads if only she would go in one spot every time.  We confined her to our family room, relegating our once-beautiful carpeting to her “accidents”.  It wasn’t the first (or even last) carpet we replaced because of her but we hoped maybe, just maybe, we could train her if we kept her in just that room.  She hated it, and I had little children tripping and falling over the gate we kept to prevent her from moving about our house, pissing and shitting in every child’s bedroom or in the hallways or in the playrooms.

I had a timer.  Every hour, she would go out.  Sometimes, I could not follow her out but out she’d go and I would pray she’d do something outside.

Last summer, we had her spend long stretches outside.  The idea was that we were supposed to be outside with her and praise her every time she did anything outside that was even close to a pee or a poop.  I couldn’t always be outside. I tried to teach the kids how to monitor it but it was useless.  And she would cry.  She wanted to be around us, around people.

Because she was sugar-sweet.

And because of our move, and because of so many other things, I had to make the choice (because no one else would) that she had to go to a rescue or family that could help her – or at a minimum, wasn’t imminently moving away and could afford to replace carpet every two years in exchange for a sugar-sweet girl with soft, black eyes.

I drove her in the car as she freaked out (because she hates the car) and I couldn’t find where I was going.  I was crying.  I was trying not to sob.  My tears burned with devastation and also anger.  Why is this on ME?  Why am I relegated to handling this heartbreak?

I held her, and talked to her, and then a woman covered in dog hair came out and tried to talk to Sarah, who was busy smelling the ground and shaking.  And I thought: I can’t give this woman my dog.  I’m going to leave.  I’m going to go back and I’m going to tell the kids that she’s staying and we’re going to leave this place. 

But my feet wouldn’t move.

The woman talked to me, and I heard the sounds of loud dogs barking incessantly in the background.  I knew this rescue.  I knew them to be a GOOD rescue, but I also knew them to be a pitbull rescue.  I immediately thought of the emails I had discounted; emails from rescues all over the place who had reached out to me.  I thought of the rescue that was based 90 minutes away but they said they had a foster family for Sarah and suddenly, I wanted her there. But my feet would not move.

I was crying.  I was petting her.  I was whispering useless apologies.  Yes, I think she is up to date on her shots.  Yes, we just had her groomed.  No, she is healthy, but she isn’t housebroken.

I handed her $100; a paltry donation for giving up a family member.  To help her, I said.  Or to help other dogs.

She thanked me.  Sarah walked on her leash, smelling everything and tugging on the leash.

“I’ll take her,” the lady said.  I paused.  “She’s going to a foster family, right?”

“Yeah, eventually,” the woman casually answered.  “I mean, today she will be in the barn in her kennel.  Probably tomorrow she can go to the foster family, and if she’s good with other dogs, she can even come with me. I have five dogs.”

My hand remained on Sarah’s head.  “I know, but you said she would go to a foster family.”  The kennel area sounded so scary and loud.

“Right, and I think she will, but not today,” the woman replied, sounding a bit exasperated with me.  “But we’re taking the dog, so….”

So what, I thought.  You aren’t really doing me any favors. I shouldn’t be here.  This shouldn’t be happening.  There were a dozen rescues that wanted to help Sarah.  

I signed a paper.  My hand shook as I signed it. I barely glanced at it because I had seen one of these before.  Yeah yeah, she’s not my dog anymore, yeah yeah whatever.  Fuck off.  I put my shaky signature to the paper.

I said goodbye.  The woman took her away.  I entered my car and put my head against the steering wheel and sobbed.  But so what of my tears.  What was sugar-sweet Sarah going through right now?  How confused must she be?  Would she be okay?  She will never understand.  Who will love her?  How could this happen – god DAMMIT how did this happen?

I finally found the strength to drive off by pretending that I was dropping her off at the boarder and we were going on vacation.

My kids were coming home in less than an hour; I had to pull it together.

I gave them the “sunshine and roses” story.  Sarah will be loved and she will be okay.  And we will always love her, but we can’t have her here wrecking our carpet because we are going to move and new people need to live in our house.  And it is okay to be sad, and we are all sad.  This is a very sad thing because animals are family members and we don’t typically say goodbye to our family members.

And then I said the words I shouldn’t have said, and I hated myself for saying:  “Maybe we’ll get another dog someday.”

The body wasn’t even cold! The words just slipped out.  I know I was trying to help my kids feel better but it was stupid to say.  We still have our stupid-sweet pitbull and other animals.  I have a philosophical problem to deal with.  That problem is: I believe in the mantra of “adopt don’t shop” but we are not in a position to adopt another large dog.  And I’ve adopted two small dogs (admittedly both from puppy mill rescues) and they have both been true disasters.  And yet I can’t bring myself to buy a dog from a breeder.

I have beaten my chest with guilt and now I must share some of that guilt with others.

Our first dog, “Henry”, who ALSO had to go to a rescue at some point, was adopted by us through a rescue that specialized in puppy mill dogs.  We were told he was a cockapoo.  He was no sort of a cockapoo at all.  And honestly, breed does not necessarily matter to me.  But why it mattered in this case was that “Henry” was not a sweet, smart poodle/cocker spaniel mix.  Instead he was a mix of shihzhu and pomeranian (an odd hybrid to begin with typically done by backyard, puppy mill breeders) and his temperament was clearly pomeranian.  This presented problems but those were not all of his problems.  I don’t think the rescue lied to us, honestly.  But I don’t think they knew, or perhaps even cared.  They wanted Henry to have a home and we were a home.  We paid $350 to adopt Henry.  We agreed to love him forever, but a few years after we adopted him, he started to show terrible signs of behavioral problems that put our children at risk.  It got so bad that even adults in the house could not safely put him on a leash for a walk.  Thousands of dollars were spent to help Henry, including that behavioral specialist I talked about.  We looked at board-and-train facilities but couldn’t bring ourselves to take him there especially when we read the terrible reviews of some of those places.  Henry had a mental disorder, and attempts at medication only made him sleepy and stupid.  The rescue didn’t do their due diligence but I chalked that up to one single issue.  We found a safe home/rescue that specialized in dogs that perhaps cannot live in families again and they agreed to take him – for $500.  And goodbye Henry.

We told the children that Henry died.  We never expected to be in this position again.

Sarah was a maltese.  The rescue told us.  She wasn’t pure maltese, though.  She was a shihzhu/maltese (another odd mix common for unethical breeders).  Again, it didn’t matter, but they also weren’t clear on her age.  Their vet said she was probably 6 months old.  Our vet looked immediately at her teeth and said she was over a year.  Again, that might not have mattered….except she wasn’t housebroken.  And housebreaking an older dog is HARD.

Why were Sarah and Henry at these rescues to begin with?  They had been relinquished by previous owners who had bought these puppy mill dogs and had given them up.  It is easy, and indeed I even thought this for a while, to paint those owners as evil, uncaring people who cast off their dogs as if they were out of season clothing.  And no doubt, there is some truth to that.  I am quite sure there are people who are just that awful.

But in my experience, I have found that these little “designer dogs” that are so touted by rescues in the “Adopt Don’t Shop” narrative (“Over 25% of dogs in shelters are purebreds!” you hear) are actually very damaged.  Instead of thinking that you are doing a good thing and simply taking in a purebred dog that some evil, terrible owner just threw away, you are probably getting a dog that someone did buy from a terrible puppy mill and that has problems.  I suspect many of those problems are caused by people who think puppies are cute but older dogs are too much work. It’s easy to let the puppy “piddle” on the floor and chew up the furniture – “awwww, but look how cute!” – until that dog isn’t cute anymore.

I remember Henry’s paperwork.  I read the report from the (anonymous) family who relinquished him.  They wrote that Henry was ” too energetic” and they did not have time for him.  But what I suspect was the truth now about Henry is that he was showing signs of aggression; signs that the original family did not deal with.  His “energy” was likely aggression, and when we took him in, he already had a host of problems through unethical breeding and through a home environment not prepared to manage him.  We thought we would just love on a dog that had not previously been loved; that we would rescue a small, sweet, bred dog.  But that is not how it happened at all.

We paid $200 to adopt Sarah and there was no information on how or why she was relinquished.  No one told us that she was anything other than a purebred maltese who was down on her luck.  But we know now she was older than we were told, and whoever had her before us had never housebroken her.  We were handed so many problems, all wrapped up in a sugar-sweet white fluffy package.  We didn’t know.  We were also not prepared.  We thought we were giving a sweet puppy mill dog a chance at a life but what we learned was that she probably can never be housebroken and there is no medical reason why.  It is her behavior.  She can’t help it.  Her horrible start in life coupled with likely terrible breeding gave her a low chance of ever being capable of remaining in a home setting without ruining everything in her path.

I don’t think I’ll ever adopt a small “designer” dog from a shelter or rescue again.  We are not a family that is prepared for the host of problems those dogs bring.  I don’t think I can bring myself to adopt from a breeder, even a highly ethical one.

Our pit bull will stay.  I will never outlive the guilt I feel, both for Henry and Sarah.  I failed them.  We failed them.  Others failed them too, but we were the last stop and we failed them.  There is nothing good about any of that, which is why the guilt I feel is completely justified and warranted.  In the end I make no excuses.  It happened, and I’ve written about it.  That’s it.