A Punishing Death
During the Zoom memorial one phrase was repeated with slight variations, but with the same, clear meaning: “She was the kindest person I’ve ever known.”
I did not know her, but I recognized descriptions of an angel from all those who eulogized her. We shared a very good friend in common from our respective spiritual paths, and that was also how I came to know of this particular dog rescue. They were located on the other side of the state, but in the same town where close friends live, and I had a phone conversation with the rescue founder a couple of years ago.
This woman, the Angel, had been a volunteer at the dog rescue for eight years. She had rehabilitated and rehomed, “hundreds,” of abandoned dogs, according to those who knew and worked with her. These are dogs that have been dumped, like so much garbage, in the Florida Everglades, having first been subjected to God knows what sort of cruelty and neglect at the hands of dangerously ignorant humans. They are dogs left to die terribly in alligator and boa-constrictor infested swamps, so they are often irreparably damaged, not only physically but also emotionally. But many of these forgiving canine souls can be brought back from the edge.
Dog rescue is dangerous, however, and all the more so when the dogs have been abused, left in the wild, are often disparaged breeds, and completely unknown to their rescuers. The people who care deeply, and work with unfailing commitment to give these dogs another chance, put themselves in harm’s way regularly. Some of the dogs are small and starving and weak, and others are big and frightened and angry. (But even a small dog can do significant damage to a human when afraid.)
This dog was over a hundred pounds — one account said a hundred and twenty — and beautiful, I thought, from videos shown on the news. She had been rescued some weeks before and the Angel had been working with her.
On that Thursday, they had just come back from a walk and re-entered the shelter, when something in the dog disconnected. Something broken reared it’s evil head and she snapped. She leaped for the Angel’s jugular, and it was immediately too late for them both.
The Angel died within minutes and the dog was, of course, euthanized. Lives were forever changed and those of us in dog rescue, even just on the periphery of this tragedy, have been in a kind of shock and disbelief. How could it have happened on a sunny, balmy day, that just returning from a stroll with the dog she’d been helping this woman was mauled to death within minutes? Could it have been prevented? Why did the dog go mad after doing well for many days leading up to this tragedy? Why this gentle, loving woman, wife and sister, aunt and beloved former teacher? What changes at that rescue and others will go into effect as a result of this? Why, in God’s name, why?
One of the striking elements of this story is how, presumably, the human(s) who abandoned this dog will never know the staggering, appalling outcome. They will probably never know that the gross irresponsibility of their actions led to the violent death of an innocent.
Those of us who rescue* dogs clean up the irresponsible tangles and messes and sorrows and expenses of those who have turned their backs, and some of whom will never know — or care — what hard work and despair and in this case death they have caused. Some dogs are surrendered due to the ill health or financial crises of their humans. Some are abandoned because their human died. But some are shoved out of vehicles because a human did not want the responsibility. As a dog rescuer, I struggle daily not to leap to judgement and blame. But I’m not at all sure that those totally irresponsible humans who throw away dogs like this one can ever be rehabilitated or re-homed.
If only someone with a terrifying lack of empathy had not left this dog to die in a swamp, an Angel would not have been killed and her loved ones devastated.
And over and over I’ve asked myself the question to which there is no answer: Why does an Angel die a punishing death?
*rescue - I do not rescue dogs in the dangerous way that many people, often volunteers, do. My foundation places homeless hospice dogs that have already been found, taken to a shelter or rescue, vetted medically and evaluated behaviorally. But still, there are no guarantees.
