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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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THE McELROY ZOO: Meet Maggie, the sweet dog who wouldn’t learn to be mean

By David McElroy · June 12, 2011


“Girls like mean dogs, so I’m gonna train her to be mean.”

That was my introduction to the shepherd mix puppy who I would eventually come to know and love. Doug was a troubled teen who lived with a family on my street, and he had gotten a puppy. He was no more ready to take care of an animal than he was to become a brain surgeon. He was irresponsible and callous from a dysfunctional upbringing, but he was trying to turn his life around.

As I stood in the driveway of the house where he lived — playing with this lovable bundle of energy — Doug kept talking. He told me that he was going to get the puppy’s ears pierced soon and start taking her to someplace where there were “fighting dogs,” so he could make her tough and vicious. I knew from talking to my vet that any dog can become mean if you treat it in mean ways. I was very troubled, but there was nothing I could do.

For awhile, my only contact with this puppy was when she would (frequently) get herself wound up in the rope that tied her up in the guy’s back yard. I would hear her whimper sometimes as I walked past and I’d find her completely tied up in knots, unable to move. When I’d tell Doug, he would seem unconcerned.

I can’t remember how long this went on. Doug seemed to lose interest in her. She never got the piercings, because he couldn’t afford them. He seemed disappointed in her, though, because his plan wasn’t working.

“I’m trying to make her a fightin’ dog, but she won’t be mean,” Doug said. “She don’t scare no one.”

More and more, I visited her in the back yard where she stayed tied up. She wasn’t getting much attention and she was getting no training. So I started trying to teach her to walk on a leash and learn basic commands. I didn’t ask Doug. I just did it. I’m not sure he even noticed.

She turned out to be the smartest dog I’ve ever been around. I know that puppies learn more easily, but she seemed to pick things up with amazing speed. I guess she was about 9 months old when I started working with her just a bit. At about the same time, she and I both had something great happen — but it was something terrible for Doug.

I didn’t realize it, but Doug was dealing drugs. I knew he’d had brushes with the law and I knew he had had drug problems himself, but I had no idea he was dealing. When I found out he was in jail — and couldn’t afford to make bail — I worried about what was going to happen to this puppy (who he called Sheba, by the way).

I started taking care of her more and more while he languished in jail. I told the guy who was still in contact with him — the one whose house she still lived behind — that I’d be happy to take her if he needed someone to care for her. The first couple of times, the word came back that he wanted to keep her.

About the third time I asked the message to be passed to Doug that I’d like to take her, I was losing hope that he was going to give her up. But the next time I was in the restaurant where my older neighbor worked, I heard him call out to me from the other side of the room, “Hey, David. Doug said he’s not getting out of jail anytime soon. You can take that dog if you still want it.”

I went straight to the house where she was and cut the rope tying her in the back yard. I left it lying in the grass, because she wasn’t going to need it anymore. Maggie had a new home with me. She was free.

Of all the dogs I’ve had and worked with, she was the most amazing. She learned with lightning speed. She was rough with her play and protective with others who came near me. She seemed like a really tough girl, so I named for for another tough girl — Maggie Thatcher.

She was about as close to a perfect dog as I’ve ever been around. She would let my young nieces roll around with her and get rough with her without ever growling or barking at them. (The picture at the top is Maggie with my older niece, Katherine, nine years ago.) But if I played with her with a shoe, she was vicious and ready to destroy it with a single pounce. Her biggest enemy was the vacuum cleaner. Anytime it was in operation and she was nearby, she pounced on it — literally — trying to bite it as though it was a dangerous enemy.

Until three years ago, she lived a charmed life. She was definitely the “leader of the pack” among the three dogs I had at the time (and had been the leader in the past when there were five of them). She loved rides in the car — and loved to hang her head out of the small slit in the window that I’d open for her, even though she was leashed. (The picture on the right just above was about four years ago.) She enjoyed life more than any dog I’ve been around. Everyone loved her. But one night, everything changed.

When it was time for her to get up and go to where she slept every night, she wouldn’t get up. The look in her eye told me something was wrong. I helped her get on her legs, but she collapsed. She couldn’t stand.

I picked her up in my arms and carried her to the car. It was late at night, so we headed to the emergency animal clinic. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I was convinced she was going to be OK. Up until the day before, she had still been acting like a puppy, despite being 13 years old.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. The clinic’s x-rays showed that her abdomen was full of liquid, presumably blood. Their best guess was that she had internal bleeding of some sort. If it simply came from some kind of injury, she might be fine. If it was from cancer or something similar, she had no chance. I stayed with her all night in the clinic, sitting much of the time in the floor next to the kennel where she had an IV that was pumping fluids into her to make her strong enough for surgery. (The picture you see below was shortly after 5 a.m. that morning. It turned out to be the last photo I ever took of her.)

As soon as it was possible, I called my regular vet and made arrangements for him to meet us at his clinic to do the surgery. I wanted her in the hands of someone I knew and trusted.

As the surgery progressed, I waited and hoped. I honestly believed she was going to be OK, but she never woke up from surgery. My beautiful brown girl had cancerous tumors in several organs that were bleeding. It broke my heart to lose her.

I printed cards to send to the people who had known her, with a few pictures and a message of appreciation and remembrance:

A faithful companion isn’t coming home.

There was once a sweet and beautiful puppy who lived with a young man who wanted to make her into a “mean dog” and teach her to fight. Fate intervened and she came to a better life instead. For 12 years, she was a faithful companion and amazing friend — for all of the people and dogs and cats in her life. She was funny and smart and sweet and brave. Without warning, she fell gravely ill on Feb. 28. She had internal bleeding caused by cancer in several organs. Maggie died a few hours later during surgery. Her absence creates a terrible hole in a family. She is missed and she is loved.

Three years later, she’s still missed and she’s still loved.

Editor’s note: If you enjoyed meeting Maggie, you might enjoy previous posts about Henry,  Lucy, Amelia, Charlotte and Emily.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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