Call of The Turtleman
By all rights, I should not love him
For starters, my greyhound’s name is “The Turtleman.” He was presumably named after the star of the brief Animal Planet reality series “Call of the Wildman,” which ran from 2011–2014 and featured star Ernie Brown Jr. — better known as “The Turtleman,” owing to his skills wrangling snapping turtles by hand. The series chronicled our shirtless, quasi-toothless hero’s adventures removing nuisance animals in Kentucky … but met an untimely end after allegations emerged of everything from snakes being chucked into pools for Turtleman to remove, to animal mistreatment and neglect. (Which is all somewhat fitting for an essay about a greyhound; while this piece is not about the divisive topic of dog racing, it’s hard to ignore the fact that domestically and around the world, the breed does not always have the easiest life.)
As for my Turtleman, it’s all ultimately my fault. The adoption inquiry asked what type of dog my wife and I were seeking. I wrote “big personality” — perhaps an odd request for a breed that invokes such adjectives as “lazy,” “couch potato” and “aloof.”
But reader: They delivered.
Yes, the Turtleman is those things — roughly 5% of the time. The rest is raw chaos and unrestrained canine fuckery. The Turtleman is so un-Greyhound–like that he has been asked to leave volunteer greyhound adoption events for not being “fully representative of the breed” — in other words, for peeing on a reptile endcap at Petco in front of laughing children before selecting the largest pig ear from the shelf and marauding around the store with it as the other greyhounds stare on in disbelief.
Because we have two smaller dogs, the adoption group recommended The Turtleman wear his racing muzzle around the house while we were at work. And so when I returned home on Day 2 of life with The Turtleman, I was perplexed to find him without it, napping upside down on the couch in what’s known in greyhound culture as “roaching.” I searched the basement. First floor. Second floor. No fluorescent yellow muzzle.
As the sun sank low, I glanced out the window of our second-floor bedroom … and discovered the muzzle atop the roof. The Turtleman had managed to stuff his head through the vinyl side vent of the window AC unit, cleanly removing his muzzle with the dexterity of a Houdini.
On Day 3 of The Turtleman, I returned home to find him staring at me through the glass slates on the front door. I inserted my key into the lock — but the door would not budge. In his excitement about passersby, The Turtleman had apparently jumped up on the door and slid the deadbolt into position, causing me to have to break into my own house through a window, thus setting the alarm off. After letting him out in the backyard to relieve himself, I discovered that his athletics didn’t stop at door hardware, but extended to jumping up and disengaging our backyard gate. One has never felt futility until they have chased a greyhound through the neighborhood in their socks. Alternative locks and a new gate followed.
There’s also the curious matter of his tail. It’s hooked at the tip — barbed? — seemingly having been previously broken, and when he’s excited about something, it’s prone to cracking me like a bullwhip in the testicles. We theorized that perhaps the racing gate once closed on him before he was all the way out — and that prompted us to ponder just what kind of racer, exactly, he was.
And that’s when we discovered that greyhound racing fans are prodigious record-keepers. The Turtleman hails from Birmingham, Ala. He was sired by “KNP Pete’s Pop” and dam “Driven to Speed.” He raced 20 times over four months — and was a decidedly poor competitor.
Here are the notes from seven of those races:
“Little change.” — Lost to Champion Chicken
“Weakened early.” — Lost to Terracuda
“Always behind.” — Lost to Lc Sneezy
“Mostly Behind.” — Lost to Gsx Gamecock
“No threat.” — Lost to Coach Fritz
“Dull effort.” — Lost to Jazzy Beavers
“Always last.” — Lost to his own brother and littermate, KNC Rambo
Away from the track, The Turtleman is a methodical collector and curator. Shoes from throughout the house are carried, one by one, into the guest room he has claimed as his own, where they are assembled into a mound. Any new object that we bring into the house is removed from a table or countertop and brought to his room for inspection. He usually just collects — but sometimes, he destroys.
I was at IKEA when my wife texted me “The couch is gone.”
I sent her back a question mark. The phone rang.
“Literally,” she said.
Soon after, my phone pinged with evidence of the crime:
Further on furniture: We bought a California King to avoid being quite literally kicked out of bed, should The Turtleman feel the need to stretch after spooning one of us (a nightly activity). Additionally, we bought him a $300 orthopedic bed to trick him into sleeping on a throne of his own. It now sits on our first floor largely unoccupied, except when he fully elongates himself on the couch and I am relegated to it.
At mealtime, meanwhile, he tends to gingerly pick up his bowl with his front teeth, trailing food as he carries it to the (human) bed in his room, where he lies down to momentarily eat, before sitting bolt upright — thunderstruck by some thought or realization — and moving it to yet another room, a succession of kibble in his wake. When the bowl is empty, he parades it before us, Oliver Twist–style, for a refill. When parched, he drinks only from the toilet, before drying his face on the arm of the couch.
Outside, he has run so many laps that no grass will grow for a thousand years. When he tires of the backyard, we take him to a nearby dog park to burn off excess energy … which unfortunately has beds of gravel. Which are unfortunately located next to a beer garden — a very particular combination when it comes to his habit of kicking for a solid 15 seconds or so after every pee he takes.
All of this is to say: By all rights, I should not love him.
But I do. I do — I love him wholeheartedly, obsessively, and completely.
Maybe it’s because of everything he’s been through, from the broken tail to the autoimmune disease he got from being bitten by a tick at the track.
Maybe it’s simply the fact that he is thrown into joyful hysterics by the sight of me — and I’ve never been so unconditionally and pointlessly loved.
Maybe it’s because it’s not always the easiest to be the weird one in life, the outlier, and he, without apology, is.
Maybe it’s because we were both in this universe, against all cosmic odds, at the same time, and I just happened to request the dog with the big personality.
Shortly after we adopted him, we went to the vet to have him looked over, and a woman with a Bichon Frisé asked his name.
“The Turtleman,” I replied. “It was his racing name.”
“You know, you can change it,” she said.
I asked her dog’s name.
“Lexi,” she said.
“You know you can change it,” I replied, swelling with indignant pride for this new son I did not yet know, but who I knew deserved a better life than he’d likely had.
Come hell or high water, for some reason, I was going to give it to him.
For more from Zac, visit zacharypetit.com or drop by Twitter.
