The woman walked up and down Main Street carrying a beautiful 5-month-old black Labrador mix in her arms. The dog was resting on the woman’s shoulder like a baby, gazing helplessly at the pedestrians, cars and shop windows. I was sitting at an outdoor table at the local coffee house with my husband, Alex, and we watched the comical, but endearing, scenario with curiosity.
On her third pass by our table the woman asked, “Can she say hello?” The woman, we soon found, was acting as a “foster mother” for a local rescue organization, and had the puppy out to desensitize her to street noise.
We were animal lovers — pet people with three cats and a dog at home along with our two children — so yes, of course, we obliged. The puppy — her name was Nina — immediately curled at my feet, under the protection of my long summer skirt. Alex and I asked, Is she good with other dogs? With cats? With children? She was, the woman said.
We lived in the country, our house butting up against a 30-acre preserve. Many of our neighbors and friends had similar homes brimming with kids and pets. Our pets were always adopted, and were loving and trustworthy companions. I grew up with several cats, and as a college student I worked at the Bennington County Humane Society, in Vermont. Our Rhodesian Ridgeback, Gemma, adored other dogs, and enjoyed a special relationship with our cat Addie, a docile tortoiseshell. They often slept next to each other, and Addie would stand on hind legs to kiss Gemma’s muzzle.
Before adopting Nina, we spoke at length to her foster mother, and also to the woman who ran the small-scale rescue operation.
Our children met Nina, walking her on a leash and playing with her, and she seemed sweet and smart, though shy. She was intensely fearful of loud noises, but with love and training she appeared poised to blossom into a lovely family dog.
But things became complicated when we brought Nina home. She panicked in her new environment, tearing up the stairs to our bedroom. Like an alpha-male guard dog, she leaped onto the middle of the bed and growled with bared teeth. Clearly, she was terrified.
As she growled at me from my bed, I thought, This is bad. I felt a rush of regret and a terrible intuition that this dog was something different than she first seemed. But by bedtime we had calmed her down and she snuggled in bed next to us. A call in the morning to the rescue group assured us that Nina just needed time to adjust to her new home.
Nina bonded quickly with Gemma, and was loving with our kids. She barked at everyone who came to the house, and chewed everything in sight. She gave kisses and was easy to train, listening attentively. She was our “googly, mixed-up puppy.” As fans of the dog trainer Cesar Millan, the “Dog Whisperer,” we believed in giving her a loving but disciplined environment.
Then, one night while I was cooking with a friend and my daughter, Nina suddenly — with a flash of teeth and a high-pitched screech — jumped up and snapped at Addie as she leaped up, terrified. I quickly blocked Nina from attacking Addie, and Nina bit me, pinching the skin on my hand into a red streak, without drawing blood. My friend and I were shaken, my daughter in tears. I put Nina in a bedroom, and shut the door. I cradled Addie, relieved she was fine.
Next, I did something I never thought I would do. I called the woman who ran the rescue group and told her, “I don’t think Nina is the right dog for us. We have two children, and their friends visit. We love our cats.”
It didn’t make any sense, the rescue woman said. Nina had lived with cats with her last foster family here, and with another foster family down south. She loved cats and kids. The woman agreed to send a trainer, and pay for it, to get to the bottom of Nina’s strange behavior.
The trainer had seen “these dogs” before, she said — dogs trucked up the East Coast, traumatized by the journey and moved from shelter to shelter. We were told to throw Cesar Millan’s advice out the window: no “calm-assertive” discipline allowed. We had, she said, inadvertently brought out Nina’s aggressiveness. From now on, it would be gentle time-outs, and treats when anyone came to the door.
Even as we followed these instructions, we questioned them. We cringed when we saw pet parents and human parents alike coddling their little monsters despite their bad behavior. Then again, who were we to argue with experts? After decades of cats, we’d only ever had two dogs, both gentle and well behaved. Perhaps we’d just never had a “real” dog before, one who chewed everything in sight, right in front of you, as you said “No!” Maybe most dogs needed constant discipline, and couldn’t be left alone for two seconds.
Maybe if we were better dog parents, the trainer implied, Nina would be a wonderful and consistent family dog. As for her lunging at Addie, the trainer said there was probably a food issue between them that I was unaware of, and feeding Nina separately would solve it.
In the months that followed Nina made strides; she was affectionate and playful. But at times, out of nowhere it seemed, she would snap at me or Alex and, once, at our son. She would suddenly cower and growl. It was like a switch flipped, yet we couldn’t figure out what had done it.
One day, Addie ran away. We looked everywhere for her, and after three weeks, she appeared in the meadow behind our house. I put food out and called to her, and she’d call back to me in her sad, yodeling cry, then run back into the thicket. It was February, and she was cold and hungry, but she refused to come home. Finally, as if relenting reluctantly, she came inside. But why had she even left?
Three months later, I took the kids to New York City to visit friends. That night, I couldn’t reach Alex on the phone and felt something was wrong.
It was. Alex had come home from work to find Addie dangling from Nina’s mouth, dead.
Alex described the awful scene to me when he finally called back that night: Nina laid the cat down and looked at him as if to say, “Look what I did.” Gemma sat trembling, up on a chair, the other cats alive but hiding. The kitchen and living room were like a crime scene, the whole house imbued with violence and death.
A friend agreed to take Nina temporarily, and Alex arrived in the city, where we told the children that our beloved cat was dead, and that they would never see their puppy again. Grateful to be surrounded by friends, we tried to focus on the visit. But we knew we had to go home to an emptier house, having lost two once-loved family members, a scene of gruesome devastation.
The hole left by Addie’s death was palpable. On my phone’s home screen, her face peered out at me, her light green eyes wide and questioning. Photos of Nina, too — her soulful expression and floppy ears — were on every device we used.
As each blanket Nina had damaged was pulled from the shelf, my heart jolted with grief. The corner of my pillow had a jagged hole, feathers leaking from it as though it were a mangled bird. At dinner, a napkin unfolded held the very image of Nina’s jaws, a reminder of our missing dog and — in the same instant — of our sweet cat, Nina’s teeth around her throat.
I felt enraged at the rescue woman, foster mother and trainer. Two family members had been taken from us in one horrifying act, one that would never have happened had we not kept Nina. But we had kept her. We took pity on her, and let ourselves believe that beneath her quirky, strange behavior resided a good dog. A friend who fosters animals for a local shelter, who has dogs and cats of her own, said to me, “Some dogs are just too damaged, or not right to begin with, and they’re just not adoptable.”
What she said helps, and I believe she’s right. On the outside, I appear detached, not wanting to discuss Nina, or what will happen to her (she is with another foster family, with little chance for adoption). But I have to admit that I feel terrible guilt and sadness about her.
Many months later, Alex and I are relaxing, watching a detective show, our one dog curled next to us. In this episode a family discovers that their older son has murdered their youngest son. It is a crime mixed up with family dysfunction and childish jealousy and also the horrible detachment of a boy not quite realizing what he has done. At the end, a policewoman asks the mother if she would like to see social services — to give up her son — because how can she live with her other child’s murderer? “No,” the mother says. “Who else will love him now?”
Erica-Lynn Huberty, a writer and visual artist, is the author of “Watchwork” and “Dog Boy and Other Harrowing Tales.”
Source: New York Times
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