Susan Edwards

This is a tale of two dogs, one of them small, one large. One of them is purebred, the other a mutt. One of them is at the beginning of life, the other at the end. Both of them represent a paradox of affluence in life.

My husband, Jeff, and I met Hank on a Sunday afternoon as we drove home to Mississippi from a friend’s wedding in Birmingham, Alabama. Both os us love to tour sites, and this day was no exception, though being Sunday in Alabama, nearly everything was closed and our tours mostly consisted of viewing the outside of buildings and memorials. We made our way back to Goodman in a fifteen-hour trip that normally takes less than four hours. Our arc through beautiful Alabama took us to places such as Montgomery, Selma, and Georgiana, the boyhood home of Hank Williams, Sr., one of Jeff’s favorite singers. We arrived at Williams’ home in the early afternoon and proceeded to walk around and sit in rocking chairs on the wrap-around porch. We spent a few minutes pondering the universe and taking photographs. There was no sign of life, except for birds, anywhere nearby until a mother and daughter drove up to look around. After they left, we decided to move on to Gee’s Bend to see the relatively remote hometown of the famous quilters. As we left the parking lot of the Williams house, I decided to turn left, because it didn’t matter which way we went, and there was a squirrel in the middle of the road to the right. After we turned, I looked in the rear view mirror and noticed that the squirrel was chasing our car, and it looked suspiciously more like a small dog than a squirrel. I stopped and got out of the car, and the little dog ran under the car to the shade of the wheels. Jeff, apparently used to weird behavior on my part, continued to read the map in the front seat. I knocked on the window and asked him to please help me get the dog from under the car. He is wonderful with animals and, before we knew it, this tiny puppy who had run toward our car as if his life depended on it was in Jeff’s hands and drinking water from a bottle we had in the car. Leaving the car in the middle of the deserted road, we went back to the rocking chairs on Williams’ porch to consider our options and to share some pretzels the Holiday Inn had given us two nights before as we checked into our hotel in Birmingham. Before I could crunch the pretzels into small enough pieces to feed the puppy, we had decided we could not leave him. His ribs were showing, his tail had been broken, and he was desperately hungry and thirsty.  He was just too small, and there was no food or water around that we could see.  We weren’t even sure from where he had materialized. So, the puppy, quickly named Hank, rode with us to Gee’s Bend, Selma, Uniontown, Bellamy, Meridian, Jackson, and north to Goodman. Nine hours of site seeing, and Hank was good the entire way. Part black and tan hound, part greyhound, part chow, and likely many other varieties of dog according to our vet, Hank is now a bonafide part of the Edwards household.  Six weeks later, Hank is three times the size he was when we first met him. We had planned to find a good home for him, but things just didn’t work out that way. Suffice it to say Jeff is quite kind and sentimental, and Hank knew precisely who to charm.

Exactly a week after Hank arrived in Goodman, I noticed a large dog on our front porch. She was, or at one time had been, a beautiful purebred hound. It had clearly been a long time since she had eaten. She was skin and bones, the skinniest dog I had ever seen, and she appeared to have mange. I ran to get some food and water for her. She was  a bit timid, but more hungry than afraid, and clearly used to humans. She ate the can of food I had brought and then another. Jeff brought a bed and blanket for the dog we named Lucy, since the little hair she had left was bright red. For the next two days Lucy stayed with us, and we spent time petting her and letting her know as best we could we would help her. On Tuesday morning when the vet’s office opened, Jeff brought her in for a check up to see what we could do to make her well. It turned out Lucy did not have mange, but rather a likely allergy that was making her scratch to the point of loosing her hair. The black spots that made her skin look like she had mange were, in fact, healed burn marks. The vet said Lucy had likely been bred to the point she could no longer have pups and at some point had been abused. This gentle dog who, despite what she had been through, had been nothing but gentle and sweet with us, had had to endure torture and hunger that made her look as if she had emerged from a concentration camp.  Sadly, the vet concluded there was nothing we could do to restore Lucy’s health. Jeff called me, and together we made the decision to euthanize her. She died in Jeff’s arms half an hour later. It broke our hearts. Lucy’s ashes are home with us now as we look for a beautiful place to scatter them that will honor her. Not a day does by that we have not thought about her and been grateful to know her, albeit briefly.

Americans love dogs and cats. More than 63%, or 69 million households in this nation  have pets. There are somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 shelters in the United States alone where 6-8 million animals are brought each year. About half of them are adopted.  Animal overpopulation is not only an American problem. The number of homeless animals worldwide is, practically speaking, incalculable. If not spayed and neutered, cats, according to Pet Overpopulation Estimates, cats theoretically produce 420,000 offspring every seven years, and dogs can theoretically produce 67,000 offspring every six years.

Given the economic downturn, there have been more dogs and cats left to fend for themselves in Goodman since Hank and Lucy arrived. There are really good people in this community college town who adopt as many animals as they can and work to find homes for others, but the numbers are getting larger as people either find they can no longer care for or no longer want the animals.  Goodman is not alone.  This scenario has played in many communities. Southern cities have more animals in shelters than they can care for or for whom they can find homes. This is true despite the fact that there has been a trend in the North toward spaying and neutering as well as adopting pets from shelters and a shortage there of dogs and cats for the people who want to offer them good homes.  Southern shelters, particularly since Hurricane Katrina hit and displaced so many people and animals in 2005,  have been transporting animals to shelters in towns where the demand has been greater than the supply. Still, there is little or no room in no-kill shelters for animals like Hank and Lucy. There are simply too many of them there.

It is a paradox of affluence that in a society that loves and domesticates animals to the degree we do, that there are so many who need good, loving homes who don’t have them. All animals, human or otherwise, deserve a chance for healthy and happy lives. Leaving them to fend for themselves, even in a college town where a dog or cat is almost always likely to meet a kind person who will feed it, may be well-meaning.  The reality, though,  is domesticated animals left to fend for themselves have very short lifespans. There is no shame in bringing a pet to a shelter if you can no longer care for it. At a shelter, there is not a 100% guarantee everything will be okay, but  there animals can be spayed or neutered and put up for adoption. It gives them an opportunity to have happy and healthy lives.

This was a tale of two dogs, Lucy and Hank, both of whom, as it turned out, are loved. Lucy’s footsteps, to paraphrase Charles Dickens, died out forever, but we feel she was however briefly part of our family and deserved better than what she got in life. Hank is a charming, fiesty fellow who fits right in with our menagerie. Their tales are the tales of countless dogs and cats and other aminals like them who deserve the same chance at happy lives and often need help from humans to make that happen for them.

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