In Memoriam of a Dog.
Cedar was my third dog, but he was also my first.
Technically, Sparrow was my first dog. We adopted her when I was four, on the assumption that adopting a dog was the logical next step for a young family that had just moved into its first house. A beautiful German Shepherd, she delighted in turning on the porch lights for us when we returned home after being out for a while. After Sparrow came Star, a Shepherd / Husky mix with gorgeous dichromatic eyes. When I returned home to her she would spin around in circles and then drop into a perfect play bow and freeze, then explode into action again, racing around the house, the moment I moved.
When I met the woman who would later become my wife, she already had a petite tuxedo cat named Chessie. It amused us to imagine her speaking in the voice of Ren Hoek from the cartoon Ren and Stimpy. We didn’t think it was fair to inflict the presence of a dog on her — she barely tolerated other cats, let alone dogs — so we waited until after she had passed before we adopted a dog.
Enter Cedar.
Cedar was the third dog I lived with as a part of a family, but the first to be my dog. I’d loved Sparrow and Star as much as any child loves a dog, but Cedar was the first who looked to me as “his human”. Rescued by an adoption agency from destruction by the state of Georgia, we first met him at the home of the family who had been fostering him. As soon as he was allowed into the room with us, he ran over to my wife and daughter, leaned against them affectionately, and stared at me as if to say, “Look! Look at your family! Are we not perfect?”
I never had a chance.
In his youth, Cedar was athletic and assertive, and possessed an occasionally worrying prey drive. On more than one occasion we would discover that a hapless rabbit, groundhog, or snake had been caught out at the wrong time in our backyard, with disastrous results. He also loved to chase people, an occasionally terrifying prospect for cyclists that crossed our path. Once, my daughter ran through our backyard demanding that Cedar chase her, and he obliged by overtaking her and planting both front paws squarely between her shoulder blades, sending her sprawling face first to the ground. She was momentarily distraught, but I was able to reassure her that Cedar hadn’t meant to hurt her: Cedar, tellingly, never chased her or any other child again.
There was never really any question that Cedar looked to me first and last for most things, but that’s not to say that he always deferred to me. Early in our relationship, and before I discovered the existence of the martingale harness, his constant pulling against the lead on our walks led to a mild shoulder injury. On occasions when he was frustrated with me for not being sufficiently entertaining, he would bark at me in a whisper, gradually increasing in volume until I paid sufficient attention to him. Two family vacations with him featured a Cedar escape, forcing us to stop what we were doing to track him down in an unfamiliar place. In one case this led to a scene which could have been scripted by Steven Spielberg, where a moderately sized suburb’s worth of kids on their bicycles fanned out across a neighborhood looking for our lost dog. He was found resting underneath a front porch, no doubt wondering what the big deal was.
Being Cedar’s made me want to be a better “dog dad”, and I made an effort to train him responsibly. He knew “sit” and “lie down” when we met. We worked on “heel”, “stay”, and “jump up”. The command I came to appreciate most was the phrase “out of my”, to be followed by whatever room we were in. We used it mainly in the kitchen to keep his nose away from the cutting board: the reaction we’d get when guests saw him dutifully, if grumpily, obey an order to “get out of my kitchen” was worth the effort it took to train.
In the course of reading about how to care for and train him better, I also started to read a bit about the history of domesticated dogs. One theory holds that the differing dietary requirements of humans and dogs made it such that we weren’t in natural competition for food, and thus could cooperate on hunts. Another prevailing theory is that wolves were attracted to the smell of cooking meat among tribes of hunter-gatherers, and that those with lower flight response and aggression eventually would enter the camp, in a process sometimes referred to as “survival of the friendliest”.
Those theories became stuck in my head: creatures literally born from cooperation, generations of interactions bending them towards symbiosis with us. With every generation of dogs, they would become more aligned to our interests, friendlier, closer to our families. They can’t help it — they are an entire species literally programmed to look to us for love. And sometimes when Cedar looked at me, I imagined I could feel the weight of generations of dogs in love with their humans on my shoulders, and I wondered how any of us could possibly be worthy of that devotion.
I still don’t have an answer. But it was an honor to get to try.
Thank you, Cedar, for making us a part of that. We miss you.
