The Unkindest Cut

There is evil and there is evil. Most dogs, when they are puppies, are such a funny mixture of affection, self-absorption, and mischief that it is funny thinking of them being moral beings, boddhisattvas, at all.

Take mischief. Beau has always been the sort of dog who, if he sees something he wants, he goes after it. As a puppy he was forever knocking over the trash and rooting through it for something aromatic. He would snarf down any Kleenex or paper towel, especially if there were some horrid treasure wadded up inside.

But it wasn't until the sticks of butter that I had to admit there was a problem.

Our family isn't one to stand on ceremony. We don't dine on fine china, and when the meal is over, we have no rule saying the butter must be rushed to the refrigerator. Barring a heat wave, we leave it out on the dining room table, for the convenience of any family member who may appreciate a dab of delicious butter on a cracker or slice of bread.

It was an honor system, and that was why, when the sticks of butter began to disappear, it shook us so.

I lined the family members up and read them the riot act, demanding of each where he or she had been at the time of the disappearance. All seemed to glance nervously -- guiltily, it seemed to me -- around the room. "Make no mistake," I told them, patting the dog's greasy head, "I will use geometric logic and I will get to the bottom of this."

My dog is a thief, and from the evidence I've been able to accumulate, he always will be. Just as the great thieves through history have been specialists -- some fancying pearls and jewels, others targeting fine automobiles, or objets d'art -- this thief focuses on food items. Butter was just the beginning. He has eaten at least two dozen sticks of the stuff now. But he has other interests -- chicken bones, cold cuts, whole hamburgers, spaghetti sauce, bacon fat. Coffee grounds. Pumpkin pie. French fries. He has eaten whole bananas. Peel and all.

I can reproach him, scold him, rub his nose in the coffee filter, lock him out of the kitchen, and let him know in every way I can that stealing food is bad. But he keeps stealing. He bends down low and pretends to be ashamed when I yell at him, but it's a ruse. I didn't get through to him, and the next chance he gets he will be up on the table feasting on leftovers, or shoulder deep in a tipped-over wastecan.

I brought this up with his breeder, Brigitte, on one of my many forlorn visits to her house in Dellwood, seeking advice on how to curtail his campaign of evil.

"Oh, he will never stop doing that," she said. "His father was the same way. He is a villain, pure and simple."

I paused, wondering whether it was a good time to remind her of her promises about him when I bought him from her. ("He is like an angel. He is kind. He wants to be a good boy for you.") I decided to let it pass for now. "Is there anything else I should know about him?" I asked.

"Well," she said, tentatively at first "-- when you are out with him do you carry a club?"

"A club? Why would I carry a club?"

"To break up fights," she said, looking at the floor.

I turned to go. This was nonsense. My puppy loved other dogs. He was not about to get into fights with them. "You point the stick right at the other dog," she called to me as I headed for my car. "Don't swing it like a bat -- shove it, and twist it, like a poker. Dogs hate that."

So it perplexed us when he began to show signs of turning anti-dog. Instead of rejoicing when he encountered other dogs on the sidewalk, Beau would emit this low, hostile grumble. Where once he had yipped and barked enthusiastically, he now regarded other dogs with a cruel, curled-lip sneer. His dominant streak was beginning to widen. His father's aggressive demeanor was beginning to show up.

I was at a pet food warehouse store, the kind that let you take dogs on leashes through the aisles. Beau always loved going shopping at these places, and I think perhaps he thinks all stores are pet food stores, because those are the only ones he has been in. Occasionally he has committed a faux pas against this delicate system, lifting a leg to urinate on a bag of premium dog food. When he did this I glanced at the assistant store manage in alarm, as the yellow pool formed around the base of the bag. But she knew what I didn't, that Beau was not the first dog to mark that spot. Indeed, he was merely adding his two cents worth to an ongoing conversation.

So I'm dragging Beau from aisle to aisle. As usual he's interested in everything that moves: goldfish, crickets, ferrets, the works. But around the corner comes an adorable white husky puppy. Beau greets him with a horrible snarl and strains to move forward and get him.

Stunned by the display, I make a joke of it to the puppy's owner: "That must be a really evil dog you have there."

She accommodated by saying that, yes, it was an evil puppy and my dog was very discerning to see that.

As a puppy, your dog will nip you and you will laugh it off, or wince, and tell yourself he is just teething. Or it is a mistake -- his little sharp tooth just happen to catch the web between your thumb and index finger, and tear a painful gash in it. It was your fault, and you promise to be more careful in the future.

Lurking in the back of your mind is the awareness that you have taken something derived from a wild wolf into your home. How thin the membrane is between his amiable doggy nature and the feral side, you're never quite sure. You've heard tales of dogs who could never overcome their lupine side, and bit people, or were forever getting into scrapes with other dogs, and had to be destroyed. But not your dog. Not after the way you raised and trained him.

A friend told me just today of how a group of dogs, huskies and shepherds, that had lived together for ten years suddenly turned on the oldest female, whom they had honored and respected all that time, and killed her as a group. And afterward they were the same playful, goofy animals, chasing a rolled-up sock while their friend lay dead beside them.

Something happens in the dog/wolf brain that we just don't get. It is incredibly upsetting when you see it starting to happen in a dog you thought was unalterably kind.

At six months, Beau's dominance began to kick in. He began putting his paws on the other dogs' shoulders. Gently at first, like he was giving them a word of friendly advice. But then less gently, as the games wore on. Eventually he took to clutching the other dog and mounting her or him from behind. If the dog didn't like that, teeth were bared and gnashed. As often as not, Beau would toss the other dog on its back and put its throat in his mouth, growling all the while.

All this would usually happen while the other dog's owner and I would be chatting amiably about the local sports team or sewer assessment. Suddenly we would be aware that my dog was threatening his dog's livelihood. It was embarrassing. I would leash Beau and ask him a series of ridiculous questions ("How are you going to have friends if you do that?")

What was going on? I racked my brain trying to explain it, and make it go away. I scolded him. I choked him. I whipped him with the leash when he would do these things, during the moment of flare-up. My actions confused him. He didn't seem to find anything objectionable about his behavior, and everything objectionable about his victims' behavior. In short, he was nuts. And my plan for raising him to be free and wild was failing.

I did not appreciate that dogs do fight. Part of the wildness in them is the maintenance of a social order via emotional brutality. The pack stays strong when its members are on their toes, alert to the possibility of violence. Violence within the pack, like puppies rolling in mock combat, tunes the pack for violence outside the pack. Predictably, a few members are dishers-out of violence. They are endowed genetically with naturally dominant personalities.

When Beau was with us for one day, and began humping our legs, he was not being sexual. He was asserting his ownership of us. It was an infantile expression of dominance. The ferocious face that his father presented when he met Beau, was now becoming Beau's face. There was nothing I could do to change that.

The dominant encounter can be expressed in terms of transactional analysis. Remember that a dog's identity is comprised of three parts -- puppy, dog, and friend. Dominance is a chip that is always balanced on certain dogs' shoulders. It is when the puppy in a dog makes it want to become known to another dog. But as soon as that dog asserts himself, the two dogs have a problem -- they have no agenda except establishing pecking order.

Violence occurs, I believe, because they don't know what else to do with one another. Their instincts override their training, and they scrap. Both dogs begin in puppy mode, demanding attention. Then both switch to dog mode, parental and disapproving. It is the dogs, not the puppies, who actually fight. Puppies lose focus, but dogs maintain focus. They quickly see they are intolerable to one another. Like two gunslingers whom no town can contain, there is only room for one top dog. A mere show of ferocity -- snarling, teeth, growling -- may resolve the discrepancy. Or true violence may be necessary.

Fight don't just erupt, but they can develop very rapidly. I think it is a matter of guardedness. Take two dominant dogs and put them together. Each animal approaches the other with the possibility of peace. But it is a corrupt peace because both dogs are too dominant to provide the token of submission necessary to grease the peace. With no token offered, the guardedness of each increases. You can feel it increasing. Nothing is said, but if it were, it would be something like: Oh yeah? Well, Oh , yeah? Oh, yeah! Yeah!

The submissive dog will knuckle under immediately, and all will be well. The most painful situation is when two submissive dogs get together. It is like watching Laurel and Hardy take ten minutes to enter a door. After you. No, I insist, after you. No no no, I am unworthy. To the contrary, it is I who am unworthy. You unworthy, why compared to you, I am .... And so forth.

A moderately dominant dog can be made more submissive simply by beating him in a good clean fight. But a supremely dominant dog like Beau won't admit he is beaten. The idea of the other dog being better, even though he weighs three times as much and has spikes on his collar and gets his haircuts off the rack, is an unthinkable thought to him.

Then there is the question, that if you could teach your dominant dog by force to bow down to others, would the others comply by not fighting? A few will. Some bullies simply need propitiating, and then they are meek as does. They have the will to lifting their guard, provided the token is submitted. Then they are all pals.

But some won't. they attack and harm you anyway. These non-reciprocating dogs, just like nonreciprocating people, ruin it for everyone because they make it unwise to let down your guard. They make disarmament impossible.

The Unkindest Cut

The step most people take to curb dominance and fighting between males is neutering.

Neutering is a clinical procedure. First, the dog is placed under a mild general anesthesia. Then, using sterile technique, the surgeon makes an incision in the area just in front of the scrotum. Blood weeps immediately from this incision. The dog's testicles are removed through this incision, and the blood vessels that connected them to the dog are ligated (tied off). Then the surgeon sutures up the incision, using dissolvable sutures. Once the dog is fully awake and mobile, he is free to go home. Since the sutures are dissolvable, the dog doesn't have to return to have them taken out.

What could be simpler? Indeed, what kind of owner would resist such a benign procedure? And everyone wants you to do it. "Neuter him," the world seems to be whispering to you at every turn. All the dog books tell you to do it. People who've had the procedure done on their dogs swear it's harmless and effective. People whose dogs your dog has attacked are especially in favor of it.

Neutering is necessary to prevent fighting and roaming in makes. It helps reduce the chance of cancer of the testicles. Plus, it's birth control – with all the millions of unwanted puppies in the world, why does your dog deserve the experience of procreation?

This is what they tell you.

Still, I had a dreadful time with the concept. I count six reasons.

One: Beauregard was a pedigreed dog. His value resided in his loins. His father was a breeder, a stud dog. He was a blue poodle, for pete's sake. God gives you a feakish gift like that, and you snuff it out like a flaming birthday cake?

Two: Beau and I were both males. I knew in my squeamish bones that this was not a pleasant procedure. The very thought of a knife going in there and slitting the sac, snipping the connecting thread, and sewing the animal up again without his essential parts, caused me to seize up.

Three: I was responsible for Beau, like a parent is responsible for a child. Parents are not supposed to sexually mutilate their children, and I didn't feel right doing it to Beau.

Four: Dogs are supposed to be man's best friend – what kind of best friend castrates you?

Five: I had a problem with creating happiness with a knife. A bodhisattva dog should be able to overcome hormonal urgings and behave. I was a teenager once, I settled down eventually. Beau should be able to, too. Self-control is all that is needed.

Six: Is manageability a suitable excuse for mutilating an animal?

I suspected that everyone, dishing out this conventional wisdom about neutering, was simply wrong. Or that they were duped by the sinister crypto-veterinary establishment, which was running up huge bills for unnecessary surgeries. It reminded me of the stories that circulated about pot in the '60s – that you would end up in a madhouse and your children would have flippers.

If on the one hand you have all the forces of control urging that you clamp down on your dog's special purpose, there are also people to support your intuition that castration is a drastic step. I found an essay on neutering on the Internet that holds that dogs are out of control not because their testicles are throbbing with antisocial urgency, but because they are frustrated as a group by the disappearance of purpose from their lives.

That purpose, the essay maintained, is hunting. Find a happy dog and chances are that dog is doing his job of hunting in some way -- either as an actual hunter or via any of a dozen pack behaviors or hunting surrogacies -- fetching, chasing, herding, even guarding. In each case the dog engages in a kind of predatory behavior which is healthy -- the prey instinct channels sexual aggression into acceptable forms. Let me quote you a sample:

"When the prey instinct is given the time to work its subtle magic, a free flowing sociability is the rule with intact males as well even more than between females because testosterone supports a more open and malleable sexuality. Play sessions are a good illustration of this phenomenon. In one moment one dog assumes the predatory role and then in the next he acts like the prey thereby initiating a chase. The game progresses to the extent that its participants can readily switch from one "modality" to the other. The higher the game escalates, the greater the pleasure and the deeper the bond that is engendered.

Reproduction is not the primary reason for those testicles, Behan says. Their primary use is provide emotional power to fashion the pack into a disciplined fighting organization -- an army platoon -- so these relatively small creatures, working together, can run down and kill moose, bison, elk, musk ox and the like.

"While it may be difficult for the modern dog owner to reconcile his pet's "loving" disposition with the violent mandates of hunting, the connection is undeniable and the predatory heritage passed from the wolf to the dog made the later domestication possible. A strong hunting drive produces in dogs a pronounced sociability and this is then consummated via the sexual instincts, either through such obvious expressions as when dogs mount but more often through more subtle clues as when dogs give paw, roll over, lift their legs, rub their hips and shoulders against people, other dogs, or even against inanimate objects such as the ground, bushes, sofas, etc.

I found this persuasive because it fit well with my yearning for a boddhisattva dog, a dog that radiated altruism and consciousness from its own soul or nature -- not because a veterinarian amputated all its unpleasant parts.

I am always beguiled by the "natural" approach to dog-raising -- but I am unusally unwilling or unable to put it into practice. Beau was a solo dog, a lone pet in a human family, cut off from his poodle pack. I wasn't about to adopt a bunch of other dogs on the off-chance Beau would not only not attack them, but somehow create a hunting practice in our urban neighborhood of Merriam Park, a place devoid of elk and musk ox but full of cats and little children.

Meanwhile Beau's testicles were reaching critical mass. His solitariness made him less a soldier in a platoon than a lone gunslinger. Something had to give.

Dogfight

I knew I should place the call to the vet's and schedule Beau to be neutered, but I just didn't pick up the phone. Call it denial, call it a dogman's hope that he won't have to have his best friend castrated – destroyed in order to be saved, as we said of villages in Vietnam.

One day, just before Thanksgiving, things came to a head. Beau and I had made a couple of trips down below the Lake Street Bridge separating the Twin Cities. There was a University rowing club down there, until an arsenist burned the great boat barn to the ground. But there is not much else, and Beau and I walked a finger of sand running alongside the Mississippi.

One thing I did find one day was a beaver lodge. Right smack dab in the city, right under the bridge, amid all the honking and pollution, two beavers had made a home for themselves. At least a fourth of the timber on this narrow strand – hundreds of young trees, and a dozen large ones, including a mighty cottonwood -- had been gnawed to the ground by them, and dragged toward their lodge.

For city folk, the beavers were not shy. The male was often visible, cruising the shore. If he sensed our presence, he would dive down with a loud sploosh – I think to draw attention toward himself and away from his mate down below.

I told my family about the beavers, and they agreed it would be a nice place to visit over the weekend. So the Saturday after Thanksgiving, we all trekked down under the bridge. I cautioned everyone to be quiet as we neared the lodge. But we must have been too noisy, because the beavers did not put in an appearance. It also occurred to me that the beavers might be gone, or dead. The water going through the city is not the cleanest.

Walking back, we hailed a man with a Doberman-Rottweiler mix on a leash. As soon as I saw them, I clamped a leash on Beau, to avoid embarrassment. But the dogs seemed to want to be with one another, and the man and I did a "shall we?" to one another, and unleashed the two dogs.

It was the mistake of a lifetime for Beau. Within seconds he was confronting this stolid dog, baring his teeth and issuing horrid growls from deep inside him. The Dobie-Rott seemed less passionate than Beau, but unafraid of a scrap. I was fumbling with the leash trying to slip it back on Beau when the fight began. I was caught right between them, and the collision was violent.

A poodle is classified as a soft-mouthed animal, bred to retrieve a bird without mangling it in his maw. A Dobie-Rott, by contrast, can probably crunch concrete with his teeth. It was an utter mismatch

Though the battle only lasted three seconds, it was different from the other confrontations Beau had forced. In the others, I had a clear sense that Beau was putting on a show of ferocity, and other dog complied with a show of his own. Here, he looked and sounded truly awful. But it was a bad miscalculation, because the other dog wasn't putting on a show, and didn't take Beau's antics as theatrical. Swiftly and efficiently, he lunged toward Beau, took the poodle's throat in his jaws, and bit down.

Beau fell down dead, blood leaking from his side. He was still growling, but now it was with an eye to ending the conflict and not being bitten again. I finally snapped on the leash, and noticed I too was bleeding. There was a three-inch cut on my calf, that felt more like an abrasion than a bite. I believe it was caused by the Dobie-Rott's collar rubbing against me.

The man and I looked at each other. He was scared, and I was in shock. I mumbled an apology – it was Beau's fault, after all – and moved to get Beau out of the area. Blood was pulsing from his neck and foreleg, and he was shivering and confused. We had a choice between walking a half mile upriver and following the paved path, or climbing the cliff and getting more quickly to the car. With my bad knee, I couldn't carry the dog, and neither could Rachel or the kids. So I knew I had to coax the stunned animal to follow as best he could on foot. Up the path we went, a drop of blood marking every step.

I believed Beau was going to bleed to death. My hope was to get him to the car, and race him to the vet's.

We rushed Beau to the vet's, and I decided in the car that, if we could save his life, as seemed increasingly likely -- he had not lost consciousness and was sitting calmly with the sock-turned-tourniquet tied around his shoulder -- that he would be the beneficiary of two operations that day, not one.

In the receiving room, Beau continued to lose blood, stepping into the puddles and smearing them along the tiled floor. But he was compliant when I lifted him onto the examining table, and patient with the doctor, who slapped on a bandage and stopped the immediate bleeding.

"Doctor," I said, "I think it's time I had him neutered."

She agreed. And as they led Beau away to his confinement pen, I caught one last look at him being dragged through the door, his eyes locked on me as the door closed. I think I know now how Judas felt as Jesus was led out of the garden.

When I returned for him the next day, I was afraid. I was afraid he would remember my betrayal, and sense his diminished capacity. I had ordered the end of his sexual life. How could it not affect our relationship?

But when they brought him out to me, I felt bad for a different reason. His face, neck, and leg were shaved. A big bandage, containing an internal drain, bound up his left elbow. They put a plastic collar on him, to prevent him from biting and licking his wound. The collar could not fit through the half-opened door, and he banged is face and shoulders against it violently -- because he saw me, and wanted to get to me, whatever the cost.

Without Testicles

I realized that, in his eyes, the bad thing I had done wasn't ordering the neutering. It was leaving him overnight with strangers, who did all these things to him, including the clown collar. He wasn't mad at me. He was delirious to see me. I hadn't left him in these people's hands forever. Hell for him was me being away.

The surgery and aftercare for his bites wound up costing about $150. The neutering itself was very cheap, under $100. The price is kept low to encourage the practice and keep the dog population down. The attitude about the procedure itself is blase. The vet summed it up for me thus: "He won't know about it, it won't hurt, and he won't care."

In plain sight of the staff, I unhooked the collar and gave it back. When Beau made to lick his wound, I told him no. He looked at me with a trusting expression and turned away from the wound. In the week he would wear the bandage, and during the two weeks afterward that it healed without the bandage, I didn't see him lick it once. It was an act of submission such as I had never seen in him.

The vet was right. Though his recovery from the bites was gradual, his castration seemed a matter of blithe indifference to him. Where he once sported two hairy black walnuts, now all he had below his penis was a wrinkled seam. He continued to give himself the usual licks in this area, but I never had any sense that he wondered what became of his testicles.

Beau has been a better dog since surgery. The neutering had only a slight effect on him -- it made him seem more childish at times, engaged in puppy antics. He is as active as ever. He is still dominant, and I still must be careful when we meet other dogs. But he seems to understand that, and waits while I clasp the leash on him. He knows I am on his side, and will protect him if I can. And he knows I know the lay of the land better than him.

It happened that less than a week after Beau's operation, he and I were delicately making our way through the Crosby Farm area along the Mississippi. (The delicacy having more to do with Beau's throat wound than his neutering.)

All of a sudden, a German shepherd that had been coming toward us on leash, snapped his leash and dashed toward us. He was on us in about two seconds, and the woman who had been leading his was shouting out to me, "He's never done this before!" Somehow I got between the two dogs -- Beau was in no condition to defend himself -- and began kicking the shepherd, who even in attack mode knew he was not supposed to attack me. His owner and I got him back on leash and we resumed our walk.

Poor, once wicked Beau, was just a shivering, shaved, defenseless creature.

It occurred to me that everything Brigitte had said came to pass. From that day on, I have taken to carrying a stick with me on our walks.

A free gift awaits visitors to Michael Finley's web site at http://mfinley.com. Mike is co-author of this spring's eagerly waited book Transcompetition.