September 23, 2005
ANIMAL CONTROL
Your parents ever bring home a junkyard dog? A feral cat? A fearsome beast they expected you to bond with, and cuddle with?
Oh, hell yes. Not unknown for the Senator to come late of a night, slightly blistered, short of legal fees, but having in his possession some damned cur that had been foisted upon him in lieu of proper remuneration.
"Kimothy Sam! The Biscuit Man!" (his sobriquet for me): "Here's you a dog, son. Treat him special." And I would be staring at something that was obviously out of its element without being surrounded by a dogfighting arena, and cursing, beer swilling Guevaras. A panting fiend, ready for something, anything, to tear into and fill its gullet, which had been on a steady diet of gunpowder and sodium for three months.
They'd last a day or two, and my mother or my maid Etta would have Freddie the truck driver or someone take it for a ride. Wasn't always that bad, but mostly.
My uncle gifted me with a freakish Cocker Spaniel, name of Sandyman, that was a compleat freak. My uncle knew this dog was Not Right, and foisted it on me as a birthday present, whereupon it bit my ankles, chewed my clothing, and pissed upon anything remotely associated with a human being. One fucked up dog, that.
Or Cleopatra, the bird dog that would place her front paws upon the shoulders of a 6 year old in a bathing suit, and then rip her claws down one's chest, being especially cruel around the nipples. Her way of saying "I hungry".
Some dogs I never knew their names. Fang? Wolverine? That's what I called them.
At any rate, I digress. The point of this diatribe is to compare how one disposed of an unruly mutt in the olden days, versus today. Now we take them to a Shelter, where several dozen people inspect them over the course of a week, snub their noses, and then the unholy are euthanized as unsuitable pests. Not bad, really. There is a reason they are called Humane Societies.
In the dark times you would coax that hellhound into the back of the Ranchero with some raw chuck, or a pork chop, and then ditch them on a lonely stretch of highway, deep in No Man's Land. Very efficient, and clean, from the human perspective, but you know those poor bastards skulked along the roadways for weeks, killing the errant chicken, eating (shudder) roadkill. If God were in a merciful mood he would have a tractor trailer crush them whilst they were gulping oppossum carrion. Often they probably starved to death, or were shot by indignant Negroes who were tired of their fucking chickens getting scarfed.
At any rate, as unwholesome and cruel as the roadside ditch was, it was an unmitigated success amongst the Couldn't Be Bothered Less crowd. No one considered taking a recalcitrant, snarling dog to the Animal Shelter. You took that crazed sumbitch to highway 16 and dumped his ass. End of tale.
Kind of like litter. Until Lady Bird Johnson shamed us, we used to just throw entire bags of refuse out of the car window. See that filth? Not me! I'm doing 65, fuckas! You youngsters have no idea. It was de rigeur to throw pounds of garbage out of the car window, because it was important to keep the car clean. Environment? We didn't give a shit. That was Ellijay's, or Thomaston's problem.
And so it was with errant pets. Damn.
Been waiting forty years to say "Fuck you for that, retard."
Very efficient, and clean, from the human perspective, but you know those poor bastards skulked along the roadways for weeks
No, they fucking didn't. They wandered around for a while, then showed up in our fucking front yard, hungry as a bear with broke teeth and, shall we say, discontented with life. Yeah, that's a good word. Discontented. Means my brother and I couldn't go outside, and the snarling starving m'f'er just killed our pet. Or that they crawled up in the yard, mangled by some other stray dropped off by your Ranchero-driving dumpers, whining, starving, and diseased. Or that they made it, whole and relatively hale, and Daddy had to explain that the carrying capacity of this habitat was already at the thin edge of sustainability. Whichever way, get out the Mauser and the shovel, and prepare to waste an hour or so with a useless, needlessly cruel expression of the realities of farm life: blood and dirt.
Given a free choice, very few of us would have shot the dog. We'd have shot you, got out the backhoe, and buried Ranchero and all in the sand bank on the other side of the creek, to be discovered by archaeologists in the fifty-second century: "strange burial practices of rural muricans in the coca-cola era". The rest of the farmers along the road would've made supper on the ground in celebration, too.
Regards,
Ric
Gee, thanks, Ric. Now remember I was a small child. I didn't have a vote here. And I'm eschewing this behavior. Sorry your life sucked. Fuck you.
Posted by: Velociman at September 24, 2005 12:52 AMAhhh, this brings back fond memories. I, too, lived my young years in a mountain community above a college town, where said twits would drive up to dump their pets before summer vacation.
I have been attacked by packs of feral dogs more than once, and I can't imagine how many tractor trailers I and my friends could have loaded with their carcasses, over the years.
Our police kept .22's in their cars for these Misfit Pets, and the crack of small arms in the night, as they patrolled, was a common thing.
The Summer People would do the same thing...come up to our paradise, procure a dog for their children to frolic with, and then dump it in the woods as they returned to their life in the city.
A collar, with a jingling tag, bought life. It is impolite to cap a neighbor's pet.
But the city folk, as a last gesture before leaving town, would slip the expensive collar off of King or Buddy's neck, to save for next summer's pet, and, thus branded, those animals fell to our guns.
Posted by: Bane at September 24, 2005 12:56 PMMy mom took in a stray beagle when I was about 8 or 9, and I remember sitting next to him - he'd been christened Casey - reaching my hand out to pet him, and he bit my arm. Out of the blue.
My father (the psychiatrist) said, "Oh, he didn't mean to hurt you. Just pet him, slow."
Damned if Casey didn't bite me again.
Thanks, Dad. (At least they got rid of the dog after that.)
Posted by: Trish at September 24, 2005 11:13 PMBy 'got rid of', I hope you mean 'blew it's beagle brains all over the front lawn'.
Posted by: Bane at September 25, 2005 12:33 AMWell, I honestly can't remember what they did with the little bugger. I did learn a valuable lesson, though....instincts: good. Psychiatrists: bad.
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