Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Finley

The people who developed the poodle breed, sometime 600 to 1,200 years ago, were individuals of remarkable ingenuity. They created an animal of superior intelligence that could run like a cheetah, that could hunt and retrieve, that could fight and laugh, and whose incomparable coat protected it from rain, wind, sleet, and snow.

But as with the invincible Achilles, one part of the miracle dog was left vulnerable – the ears.

A poodle's ears go in forever. You twist the flap this way, and you can make out a dogleg to the right that twists and curls several inches. Then, if you pull the ear out straight, you see another long curling chamber aimed right at the middle of the head.

The dog’s entire head is only about five and a half inches wide at the ears. But the twisting chambers of the earways create spaces and crannies no finger, no swab can get to.

The problem is that the dog is the same inside as it is outside. Its thick coat can grow inside its ears, and the profusion of hair creates a climate conducive to the creation of waxy deposits, the entrapment of moisture from swimming and bathing, the infestation of mites and ticks, and the culture of yeasts and bacteria.

The first time Daniele and I brought Beau to Brigitte for grooming, we worked with the dog for four and a half exasperating hours. Brigitte clipped away at Beau’s puppy hair with a pair of barber scissors, while entertaining me with one horrific story after another about betrayals that had occurred to her in the breeding business.

She told me about handlers who so damaged certain of her prize-winning poodles that they replaced them with different, lower-quality animals, hoping the switches wouldn’t be noticed. Handlers, she said, were about one rung lower on the ladder of creation than field smut.

Other breeders cared nothing for the dogs in their care. Horrible deceptions were rigged to win ribbons at the expense of the dogs’ health. Animals were spray painted, fitted with prosthetics, taken apart, mixed and matched, driven mad by sordid deprivations just to bring home the victory bow. Only she cared about health, about integrity, about the dogs’ well-being.

Then she came to Beau’s ears.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, my.” She stepped back and bit her knuckle.

“What is it?”

“His ears. They are bad.”

“How bad?”

She looked at me without wavering. “Bad,” was all she would say.

Brigitte got out a bottle of ear dust and a pair of Foley surgical clamps, and had me hold Beau's head still while she went in after the hair. The dust allowed her to grab great fingerfuls of easy hair and pull it out, with the dog yipping. Every now and then she would grab a taproot hair, that had its origin deep inside the animal’s head, and yank it out. Beau would scream when she pulled one of these hairs.

Brigitte looked grimly at me. “I did not know about this condition when I sold you this dog,” she said. She went back to work, muttering bad, bad.

“Well, how often does this need to be done?” I asked. It was my plan to ignore everything she was saying. I was no canine ear surgeon, and Beau had never complained about his ears in the months I had had him.

“You do it all the time. If you are watching the TV, get in there and pluck out the easy hairs. Oh, this one will hurt,” she said, and wrenched a giant hair from Beauregard’s ear, and a giant cry from Beauregard himself.

“If you fail to do this,” she said, pointing the Foley clamp at me, “you will destroy the dog.”

I nodded, that I would be vigilant. But I wasn’t, and the ear problem came back. When Beau was about eight months old he began shaking his head. Something was bothering him. I continued to ignore it, until he was crying out when he would scratch his own ears.

The veterinarian I took him to told me that this would be a chronic problem Beau would have all his life. I could no longer ignore it, and began doing ear interventions at least every four days. A year later, his ears are as sensitive as ever, and I have been to four different vets about it, ranging in orientation from straight to natural healing. I have bought at least twenty different medicines – oils, unguents, dusts, and alcohol-based cleansers.

But the problem is insoluble. No antibiotic exists that will kill the infection and also reduce the pain. No cleaner exists that will scour out the wax effectively. The oils don’t seem to work at all, and some of the natural agents I have bought seem to make a bad condition much worse. Meanwhile, Beau is far from the perfect patient, squirming whenever I try anything. And I am far from the perfect doctor, with my bad eyes and low aptitude for detail.

I date the onset of adulthood in Beau to the time he had his first earache, and I was unable to bring him any relief. I have cleaned him, and massaged his ears, and painted them with tinctures of this and that. But the pain won’t go away, because his ears are freakishly predisposed to this kind of infection.

I call it adulthood, because it is about the acceptance of suffering. From the day the pain began, Beau was a different dog.