If a cow ever got the chance...

The family dog, Mira, was euthanized on Friday night. I wasn't there (mainly because the parents didn't give me any notice) but I can't question their decision. She had some sort of horrible illness--what it was, we'll never know for sure--but it caused her to go from a slightly chubby 90 pounds in April to 55 or so when she died. First the vets thought it was Lyme disease, then possibly an antibiotic-resistant staph infection, then for a long time it was some rare fungal disease called blastomycosis. She was actually on last-ditch blastomycosis therapy for a few weeks (the treatment is so toxic that 25% of dogs die during the first week of medication; she lost what was left of her appetite because of it and had to be force-fed). The parents were boarding her at the vets' whenever the temperature got above 90 degrees, because she couldn't deal with the heat. This last time, they ran tests and her white blood cell count was higher than it had been before they started the blastomycosis treatment. Indicating that it wasn't blastomycosis after all. At that point they had ruled out everything but cancer, and she wouldn't have survived chemotherapy.

Mira was the kind of dog who converts dog-haters. She was just curious and interested and alert, not demanding. How can you not like someone whose favorite thing in the whole world is to ride in the truck with you down to the pond, to swim around and retrieve duck decoys? Or to be the outfielder in your softball game? Or spend an afternoon in the woods crashing through the underbrush and collecting inflatable ticks? When I saw her last weekend she couldn't do any of that anymore, but she would still wag her tail when she saw you, and look at you with those big golden Chesapeake eyes.

The last week of her life, she started refusing to sleep in her kennel. This was a new thing for her. It had always been a game--her "house" was about a hundred yards from ours, and at night she would playfully resist going to it. (During the day, she was free to go wherever she wanted as long as she didn't cross the road--and she was good about that--but she had to sleep in the kennel at night or when no one was home.) The rule was that you had to get a leash on her first, at which point she would run there with you. But if Mira was on the porch and heard the leash jangling, or my dad say "put away the dog," (she knew the phrase) she would take off for the woods at a gallop. Checking her domain and making sure it was secure for the night, I guess, or asserting her alpha-dog authority, because she would always come back a few minutes later, and this time you could get the leash on her and she would happily go along. But last weekend when I put the leash on to lead her there, she would just flop over and lie on the ground looking at me. The Pinoid tried a few minutes later with the same results. Well, no one was going to drag her by her neck, and even at half her normal weight she was too big to carry easily, so we just left her outside. It wasn't like she was going anywhere... Now I think she knew what was coming, even if we didn't. (We all thought the medication was going to work, eventually...) Mira just wanted to be outside at the end, under the stars, with the night breeze to cool her down. I'm glad that she had those nights. She was six years old.

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