In January, our family welcomed a new arrival, a whippet named Carlitos rescued from China, but less than three months later, our beloved greyhound Rosie suffered the tragic loss of her leg, leading me to conclude that many times dogs fare better than humans.
Neither my wife or I are morning people, but our new dog certainly is. Carlitos, a four to five year old whippet, grey and white almost like he’s wearing a jacket, greets each day as if it was the proverbial gift many have claimed over the centuries, launching himself onto the bed as though he’d transformed into a missile and nuzzling himself into whatever is closest. For a dog that weighs about forty pounds soaking wet, the little sucker has surprising strength and he’s not afraid to use it to rouse his pet parents from our slumber. Dogs are known to get the zoomies, where they crouch and leap about; somehow, Carlitos manages to do this lying down, writhing happily across the mattress like a four-legged snake., sometimes completely upside down Occasionally, we can wave him off for a few minutes, though sometimes he’ll just sit there and stare at us accusingly and others he will put his muzzle on my wife’s neck or face, proceeding to practically turn whining into a song, but it’s only a matter of time. Carlitos will not be denied. We will get up. He will get his walk. He will get fed, but then he will repeat the routine in short order because my wife gives him a little sliver of her own breakfast. While he might seem slightly less energetic at the time, the focus in his stare as she eats, usually a bran muffin with her laptop on a pillow in front of her, is all business and only after he licks the plate clean, will Carlitos even attempt to settle down. He might seem a morning person, but unlike his owners, he gets to sleep all day afterwards, so the burst of energy is short-lived, as it frequently is with dogs and their quite lazy lifestyles. At the same time, Carlitos is just getting into his routine. We adopted him on January 27, and he’s still settling in with his new family. Before becoming a member of the Twiste Clan, this dog had a long road to travel, further than many people will go in their much longer lifespans, halfway around the world in fact. Carlitos was originally born in China, where we are not sure, but we believe he ran on one of their many underground racing circuits before being sold into the meat trade when he could no longer compete, or at least that’s what you read on the internet. Regardless, he was rescued by a group called Greyhound Friends of New Jersey, issued the doggie equivalent of a passport, and flown from Beijing to Newark in a crate sometime in January itself.
If only dogs could talk, the stories he might tell. What was this little whippet’s life like before he came to the United States? To begin with, we find it rather difficult to believe he was originally named Carlitos, unless there is some Chinese translation we aren’t aware of, but much more importantly, was he abused? Did he grow up with enough food to eat or was he starving? Was he raised in a kennel, a farm, and with how many other dogs? Were they all whippets or were other breeds in the mix? Did he actually race or are we just guessing? If he did race, was he fast and furious or was he an also ran? Did he have puppies of his own before he was fixed? Did anyone love him, really love him, or was it all business if not actual cruelty? How did he end up in the meat trade? Were they really going to slaughter him and eat him, or was there another possibility of adoption and we just got their first? At what point did Greyhound Friends of New Jersey find him and decide to save him? For better or worse, we will never know, but whatever the case, Carlitos himself doesn’t seem to care. If a human spent the first four to five years of their life like he did, they’d likely be traumatized for the rest of their days, but dogs for all their unique personalities, are much simpler things, incapable of regret or second-guessing. However he was treated and whatever abuses he might’ve suffered, he bears no scars, carries no ill-will, and might as well have been born in our household, especially given the effort he puts into defending it. Though Carlitos is as sweet as can possibly be when it comes to his humans, a mild mannered dog if ever there was one, the deer, squirrels, and rabbits that frequent our yard are another matter entirely. They, at least to him, are the enemy about to mount an invasion, and so he will stand guard at the back door or peeking through a window, tail in the air, and make sure they are aware this is his turf, now and likely forever in his mind. Of course, the great majority of them don’t seem to care either, having the exact same feeling about our yard even if they have no humans to back them up. The squirrels might be a bit skittish, but the deer will stand and stare at him silently as if to say, you lookin’ at me kid?
Sometimes, Carlitos will be accompanied by his older and larger sister, a greyhound named Rosie, or technically Rose in Paradise when she raced in Florida, who turned six in January, shortly before we got Carlitos. For her part, Rosie is not nearly as territorial unless you attempt to move her from a comfortable spot on the bed or the couch, but she seems to view Carlito’s behavior as a sort of game she might choose to play or sit out, sometimes egging him on, sometimes not even bothering to get off the couch. Once upon a time, Rosie had an older sister instead of a younger brother, a coonhound named Lilly who passed away last October, but as it always is with canines, it’s impossible to say whether she has any awareness or memory of this fact. Dogs have memories that can stretch back a decade or more, but they are different than ours, prompted by a stimulus rather than merely a desire to reminisce. In the immediate aftermath of Lilly’s passing, Rosie certainly seemed to be looking for her sister, but by the time Carlitos arrived, she’d long since settled into a routine as the only dog in the household, the princess of her little doggie kingdom, blissfully unaware how radically her life was about to change. Her owners, however, weren’t nearly as blissfully sanguine. The last time we introduced a new dog to the family, when Rosie met Lilly in late 2020 proved disastrous. Lilly had never been an easy dog to begin with, a rescue who was abused before she entered our lives and most certainly bore the scars. She was a loner in general save for her affection for my wife first, me and my stepson second, one of the few dogs I have known with a sense of personal space. She’d sleep on the bed with us, but only in her own corner, almost never cuddled up. She was also fiercely territorial, and aggressive when it came to food of any kind, barking like a seal until she got her way and snapping at anyone that dared to come near once she did. In the final third of her life, Lilly didn’t ask for a younger sister and when one arrived, she certainly wasn’t happy about no longer being the sole queen of her castle. The pair had an incident over a rawhide treat that very same evening, leaving Rosie to hide in a corner of the house for almost three days before she had the courage to emerge. Nor was this the only incident during their time together, but it was almost as if Rosie had learned some kind of lesson in dealing with others and rather than assaulting Carlitos, she welcomed him to the family to the point where the pair would happily lick the same plate, two peas in a pod as they say.
We couldn’t possibly have known it at the time, but Rosie was about to go through something far more dramatic than any incident she ever had with Lilly. About six weeks after Carlitos arrived, she began limping on her left front leg. At first, we thought it was an injury from falling on the ice in the neighbor’s yard, where both of them go to play with another local dog, but when it didn’t get better quickly, we took her to the vet. Initially, they diagnosed the limp as a problem with her neck, likely a slipped disk or something that was pinching a nerve, but when things didn’t improve over the next few weeks, we took her for an MRI last Thursday, only to learn that she had a severe, aggressive form of bone cancer known as an osteosarcoma that affects around five percent of greyhounds and an even larger percent of Irish wolfhounds. Whatever the odds, this cancer was quite literally eating her leg from the inside, right below the shoulder, putting Rosie in extreme pain and her very life at severe risk. Sadly, there are only two options under these circumstances. You can either amputate the leg or put the poor dog to sleep, but amputating the leg is only a temporary pain relief measure and for the dog in question to have any hope of living more than a month or two afterwards, they need to receive chemotherapy. For that to be effective, however, the cancer cannot have spread visibly in her body, requiring another battery of tests including a 3D X-ray of her lungs and ultrasound of her organs. On Friday, we decided we couldn’t bear putting her down six months after Lilly left us and we resolved ourselves to the amputation, but even then, we didn’t know if we’d be cleared to proceed until well into Monday. Rosie was home beforehand, but for how long and what would the end look like? My wife is that rare kind of person who’s incredibly mild of manner yet willed of steel, capable of handling what would crush most people with ease and grace. This, however, proved too agonizing even for her, and when the vet finally called around 2:00 on Monday afternoon, she simply handed the phone to me with a sick look on her face. I tend to be strong in a different way; compartmentalized in my mind to the point of near absurdity. It’s not that I don’t feel things as others do or that I lack emotion. When I learned Rosie might have to be put to sleep on Friday itself, I was as close to crying as I’d been in decades. It’s that I can distract myself easily, avoiding pain and stress, basically anything short of a blind rage, simply by doing something else, but there was no something else after she handed me the phone. This was it. Either we were heading to the vet to say goodbye for the last time, or Rosie had a chance to live for at least a little while in peace. One phone call would decide it all and I was the one who had to take it. If I wasn’t shaken at the thought, I certainly was once the phone was in my hand, my guts swirled and my knees shook in the beginnings of a wave of panic until the vet told me Rosie was all clear and would be operated on later that afternoon. Less than 24 hours from then, Rosie was home, looking something like the Bride of Frankenstein with a monstrous set of stitches from the top of her neck across her shoulder, shaved completely on one side, but beautiful nonetheless, even more loveable if that was possible. Incredibly, this brave and resilient girl was able to get out of the car on her own accord, hop up the few steps from the garage into the house with just a little bit of help, and settle herself on the couch. An hour later, she joined Carlitos in the nightly food ritual following me and my wife around the kitchen after dinner, as though nothing had happened. Last night, she resumed counter surfing, lifting herself up to find something placed to close to the edge, reminding us that even as an amputee we need to be careful about where we place the dishes. To be sure, she’s heavily medicated for pain and far from herself, looking at a recovery likely to take two weeks, but her spirit and demeanor remained present even as her leg was missing.
How would you or I fare under similar circumstances? Forget how much longer it would take to recover from an amputation, how much time would you waste moping about, fretting over all the things that might never be the same again, even knowing you cannot change the past and worrying never solved a thing? As I mentioned earlier, dogs are simpler creatures, but they’re also a lesson about living in the moment, dealing with the world as it is, not as you wish it would be, especially when it’s impossible for those wishes to come true. Rosie will never be the same. Once upon a time, watching her run was a marvel in and of itself, a creature that can hit well over 40 miles per hour with galloping, effortless strides. She was bred to do it for thousands of years. She was born to do it less than seven years go. She will never do so again, but only we are aware of that loss. She’s too busy doing her best to try to navigate this new world, not even knowing what she’s lost or having the means to know in the first place. She can’t look at herself and wonder what happened to her leg. To her, it was never there to begin with. In a different context, Bruce Springsteen once sang that there are things which will knock you down you don’t even see coming and send you crying like a baby back home. Rosie just went through one of those things, but her owners were the ones that were almost knocked down. For his little part, Carlitos experienced the opposite, from potentially ending up on a dinner plate to finding himself in a loving home. While we have no idea what he did in China, he treats every day afterwards like the gift it truly is even though has no idea what happened, either the miracle to him personally landing in a loving home or his sister. There is, however, no doubt he loves us all in his own doggie way. While Rosie can’t make it up the stairs – we believe she will when fully recovered – he’s been spending the night beside her rather than in the bedroom. What better lesson is there?
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 