You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
No good deed goes unpunished, RIP Violet
People ask me why I don't go to the city for the day. They roll their eyes when I say I can't leave the dogs for 10 hours alone. The bus is 3.5 hours to Hermosillo if things go smoothly, round trip 7 hours and cabbing around to go to stores and collect items. If I can't find castor oil, tshirts, shoes, a chair---I gotta catch the bus back anyway as there's only one. If that bus doesn't leave or I miss it, I'm spending the night in Hermosillo without a car and needing a hotel. Life has shown in the past few years that things can be unpredictable. I'm realistic about how things can go sideways in Mexico. Or anywhere. But it's a special kind of sideways here.
Just leave them food and water they say. They'll be fine. Like I'm worried about them starving in my absence. Spoken like a bunch of people who don't know shit about dogs.
No, I'm worried about them choking on a stick, getting their collar stuck on a branch, getting trapped under a chain link fence. Playing too rough and losing an eyeball. These are just things I've discovered and saved OTHER dogs from in the past. This is what crates are helpful for (we don't have any) Years ago, my Georgia neighbor's chocolate Lab somehow got his lower jaw stuck inside his loose collar and was stuck like that and panicking and I had to cut it off of him before he broke his neck. Brady has gotten more sideways sticks, bones, birdwings stuck in the roof of her mouth than I can count. I designed a special safety collar after all the ways I saw dogs getting trapped. The dogs I foster here don't wear collars or harness unless we're going for walks.
Monday around 730am, I left with 4 of the dogs for the first round of walks. Just the leash training early group. No beach runs, not off lead, just normal exercise. Not far. I only go a block or two and round the corner and then back down my street or through the park and basketball court near the military yard. A sniff walk. As I rounded the corner, I started to hear the dogs in my yard barking in a weird higher than normal pitch. When you live with a pack of dogs 24/7 for 2 years you know their voices. This sounded like a coyote pack when it celebrated a kill. Oh geez, did they get a cat? A bird?
No, they were attacking old Miss Violet and ripping her from limb to limb.
It's impossible to know what triggered it but inside were feral female Andie, young female Brindle, dopey Niles, goofy Suzy. Violet could push buttons as she felt healthier, stealing food and growling at any dog who sat on her bed. I'll bet she was a scrappy dog in her day. She didn't survive this long without some street smarts. She could have provoked someone like Andie and without an Alpha like Brady (or prison warden like me) to stop it from escalating everyone piled on. Hive mind, pack mentality. Like a bar fight, no one even knows what the fight is about but they swing fists anyway.
She did not survive her injuries. There is no vet in town. I spoke with the mobile vet and we all knew that it was a desperate situation. "Give her a tramadol if you want for the pain, clean the wounds"...his voice trailed off. I'm sorry, he said. There's nothing you can do but wait. So I sat with her and she did her seal bark every 15 minutes like she was reliving the attack in her mind. Trauma cycling. If I left her side she'd chirp and I'd go back out and say, I'm right here, you're gonna be okay. They didn't go for her neck, they went for the legs and hit that femoral artery on the back leg. She lost a lot of blood. She was in shock. They broke her legs.
I wish I could unsee, unhear and unremember what I saw. It felt like forever to get my key out of my pocket to get inside that day. Shut the door behind me, get my leashed dogs inside but keep them from going out back to make it worse. Keep myself out of the fray and do the bear growl yell and grab a water bowl and toss it on them and get them to release their shark grips. A lot of shaking had gone on and her old flesh ripped easily. They drug her out into the dirt. Hair and blood was everywhere. I needed to collect her but be mindful of her adrenalized state She didn't have many teeth but one canine fang remained. Tie off the attackers so they didn't come back for more. Andie cannot be touched or tied off but she flipped out at my anger and ran for the gate, I let her go.
I feel like now is a good time to mention that I am not a professional dog trainer, or K9 cop dog handler. I don't have special gloves or tools. I'm just a woman who has had dogs in my life for 50 years and I have an affinity for them, think they're amazing creatures and started rescuing and feeding and caring for all the orphans in this town. But as the starving orphans get bigger and stronger and have different personalities it's an exhausting full time job to watch their play so it doesn't escalate, separate into groups for exercise and training, feeding time can be a bit of a fool's errand and of course remember to not leave any personal items, shoes, clothing, food or otherwise any lower than 6 feet high or in a locked room or you'll never see it again.Despite all that, it's a mostly peaceful pack. There's a pecking order but it is respected. I know that every dog brought into the fold isn't always going to work.
Everything is fine until it's not.
A kooky friend of mine is famous for telling me, "No good deed goes unpunished, don't get involved with shit!" and he's not wrong. I really got involved with shit here. How could I not? it was like night of the walking dead, zombie dogs edition when I got here. Missing legs, missing eyeballs, starved, covered in ticks. What IS this place? But I thought, and was assured by others that if I used all my resources to save the dying and fix them all up and get them spayed, people would happily adopt and that's just not the case. A few have been adopted but the dogs have run away, gotten run over, come back here immediately or been tossed out or worse. People here hate dogs or want a puppy, a pedigree, a Pitbull or Malinois and they have neither the time nor resources to care for an animal. And so here I sit for over a year with 12 dogs. Violet was unlucky 13 and maybe she figured they had to go or the others took the opportunity to get rid of her in my brief absence. I'll never know what really happened.
I paid a guy to bury her outside of the "panteon" (cemetery) next to the dump. I spent the next day crying and eating buttered noodles and wondering what I did wrong. But the show must go on. The others still need care and feeding and exercise and clean up is necessary whether you like it or not. I have some decisions to make about aggressive unadoptable dogs. Doc Ramon said, 'you think about it but also know that if something happens with a kid or another dog it will be an awful situation'. He'll be here on Saturday (tomorrow) and then likely not for another month.
I used to be teased for being the self appointed General Manager of the Universe and now I want no responsibility for these or any decisions. Will Brindle be aggressive in a home with fewer dogs? Will she be good with kids if they're her family? If she gets out will she be a neutral chill dog or is she going to chase and nip and be a mountain Cur hunting dog that needs to live out on a huge safari property? I do not know. And increasingly, my crystal ball is foggy.
While typing this, Cookie the tiny black pitmix has come up and vomited on my foot. Despite not eating for well over a week, and getting antibiotic injections she has volumes of liquid that she cannot contain. She may need to be euthanized this weekend as well. Pedro started honking like a goose on Wednesday night in that all too familiar Kennel Cough sound, which quickly went to Rocky, Frasier, River. Doc Ramon said it's running through town like wildfire---they are all on doxycycline which I can hide in ground beef. Cookie is getting injections and she is of course nipping at me. One handed shots I am no good at. I tried to make a muzzle with paint tape. Her snout is too short. A fail. She is losing weight at an alarming rate. The vet is stumped at what it is, she's too old for Parvo he says, I'm not so sure. She has no fever. It looks like internal bleeding. Was she poisoned? I can hand feed her ground meat some days but nothing stays down. She stares at me and sleeps on my pillow and I'm watching her fade away.
In a place with no professional services I am forced to watch and participate in all the ugly from a front row. The slow progress of untreatable disease of feral dogs, treatment resistant infection, weird new illnesses that spread rapidly in a place like this...I don't really have words to describe the emptiness.
A car drives past blasting the Eagles. "Welcome to the Hotel California, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."
copyright 2023 Michele Niesen
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