New Dog, New Beginnings
The Story of Stanley Macaroni Penguin
I lost my first two dogs on the same day.
I’d had Pandora for 13 years, having adopted her as a 10-week-old ball of cream colored Labby-looking fluff. A strong-willed dame from the start, she’d been trying to squirt unceremoniously out of a homeless pit bull momma dog who’d started labor in the middle of a very busy street in Oakland. Fate in the form of our tax dollars at work intervened, however, and Momma Dog instead had her puppies in an Animal Control van that was unusually well apportioned with a veterinarian that day. This quick-witted vet first saved Pandora, who — being bossy and slutty in addition to strong-willed — found herself stuck in the birth canal trying to meet the nice doctor lady first, and then the good doctor delivered three more puppies before realizing that she was now, inevitably, the temporary foster home for a mixed-breed litter of pit bull puppies and their mother.
Scatterbred pit bulls make up a large percentage of the overcrowded shelter system, they being prone to large, healthy litters of puppies that are easily bought and sold to impulse buyers. That being the case, there was simply no way that four wayward pit bull mongrels and their homeless momma — who had seemingly been knocked up by a deadbeat Labrador somewhere — were going to get out of the Oakland animal shelter alive. And so, resigning herself to 8 weeks of puppy pee and the other joys accompanied with caring for a newborn littler of puppies and their untrained mother, this kind-hearted vet took them all home to her very understanding partner and an already stocked house of pets. She then, wisely, contacted a rescue for help in finding them homes.
I was looking for a Lab mix puppy at that time, and figured that Pandora was close enough: she looked exactly like you’d think a puppy that came out of a rednose pit bull and a yellow Lab would look. In reality, the most Labby thing about Pandora was her coat: it shed the way that Pigpen of “Charlie Brown” fame sheds dirt, in clouds that followed her whenever she moved, whenever you touched her, or whenever she was hit by a vague breeze. And sometimes, I swear, those barbed and waterproof hairs and their downy underlings just floated off her of their own volition, hellbent in wedging their spiky ends into any black clothing that might be in the vicinity.
This, I do not miss. The Labrador dust bunnies are, blessedly, forever a thing of my past.
What I do miss is Pandora’s personality, which turned out to be mostly all pit bull, and this turned out to be a wonderful thing. Pit bulls are amazing pets, being lots of jolly fun and highly in-tune with their owners. Pandora was a driven athlete and an enthusiastic social butterfly with a great sense of humor, and she was just sassy enough to keep me on my toes. As such, she was always the boss of the other dogs — a role that included the active oversight of the many visiting foster dogs that came through in later years.
About a year after I adopted Pandora, I realized that I was madly in love with my dog. This led to a frightening realization: if something were to happen to her, I would be devastated. I additionally decided that having two dogs would be more fun for all of us, including the boyfriend I had at the time who didn’t object strenuously to another dog so long as I was the primary caretaker for them, most notably on chores like “Pee Walk” and “Poop Duty” and the ever-dreaded “Oh my God that dog has an onion shoot sticking half out of his ass!”
And that last is just one of those things that happened to Gunther multiple times over the 12 years I had him, he being a dim dog who went through life eating a lot of things that he shouldn’t have. I adopted Gunther a year and a half after I adopted Pandora, and he was about a year old at the time. He was a sweet, sensitive, bouncy boy who was the most ridiculously handsome and undeniably dim-witted pit bull I had met at the time.
Gunther was a dog who was skunked 4 times. He was a dog who ran straight into a tennis net after a ball and then tried to dig his way under, even as Pandora ran around the net to get that ball. And then he did it again on the next throw. And the next. And so on.
In short, Gunther was the perfect counterpoint to a smart, bossy, sassy female, the Pinky to her Brain: a good-natured, faithful and none-too-bright sidekick whose only aggressive tendency in life was advanced counter-surfing. That dog scavenged his way to canine fame and fortune by demolishing, among various other things: $45 worth of ribeye on one regretful night known as “The Oakland Ribeye Incident,” a tennis ball toy that ended in an emergency surgery for a blockage (“The $4000 Tennis Ball”), my roommate’s grandma-crafted bourbon-soaked annual holiday cake (“The Boozy Christmas Cake Incident”), most the contents of a large bag of dog food that cost me $400 at the vet for emergency X-Rays because I thought he had bloat (“The 4 Days of Infuriatingly Unapologetic Canine Farting During a Heat Wave without Air Conditioning”), and so many loaves of bread and slivers of cheese rind and other ill-gotten gains that I absolutely cannot even begin to count them.
And these are just a few of the memories that 12 and 13 years with the same dogs can give you. I miss them, still, sometimes.
—
Seeing as how Pandora and Gunther moved through the world together as partners in life and foraging crime for 12 years, it was perhaps fitting that they were diagnosed with terminal illnesses at the same time: a brain tumor for Pandora, bone cancer for Gunther. I put them down on the same day in the same month that my ex of 7 years had moved out, making September a very vivid month of loss. I started the month living with one toddler, 3 dogs and my ex-partner; I ended it living with one toddler and one quiet, newly morose senior dog.
That sort of loss takes some time to process. And so, three months after I lost the dogs, I was not necessarily ready to make a 13 year commitment to another dog. But my remaining senior dog, Millie, is a shade beyond dim and into the “special” category: she’s 12 and operates on about a 6-month-old puppy scale of cognitive development, which is to say that she’s the Forrest Gump of dogs (without any desire to run). She’s also Gunther’s probable littermate, having been found at the same shelter as him 5 years later, and looking so exactly like him that, in profile, they were identical twins.
Millie is an unassuming wallflower who makes no demands at all. Her needs are endearingly simple: love, food, water, love, love, butt scratch, pat, love. She faithfully grooms the other dogs and, always making sure to keep herself at the very bottom of the pack, she sweetly mothered both Gunther and my human child, Abby, who was just turning three when we lost Gunther and Pandora. Millie and Gunther had a special bond, and she was genuinely heartbroken without him.
And I was still a little heartbroken, too. One of the things that I really enjoy doing with dogs is hiking, and Millie is for hikers who prefer their trails to be flat and under a mile long in order to maintain a pace roughly that of a snail riding on a turtle wearing tiny, broken roller skates.
This is to say that she’s slow. And she doesn’t go very far. And both clash with my style of hiking. And usually, to work through something terrible like “I just lost both my dogs on the same day in the same month that my long-term partner moved out,” I go on long hikes with my dogs and think about things.
Unfortunately, I was out of hiking dogs.
And so I put it out into the universe just before Christmas (which is to say “I posted a status update on Facebook”) that I was maybe kind of finally ready to find another dog, probably in the Spring, and that I was maybe sort of possibly looking for a dog with the Gunthery qualities that I needed for my suburban single Mom lifestyle: sweet, good with other dogs, great with kids, dorky, low drama, eager to please.
Being a single Mom with a full-time job makes a canine addition seem incredibly overwhelming. Being an ex-dog-rescuer with 7 years of fostering under my belt makes a canine addition seem both doable and incredibly overwhelming: yes, I do know what I’m doing. But that also means that I know what I’m in for, which is to say that I am not one to taking adding a new dog lightly. I actually know how much energy and patience and mindshare it takes to acclimate a new dog.
Being an ex-dog rescuer also means that I have a lot of wonderful Crazy Dog Friends, and many of them still do active rescue. One Facebook status update later and I had a diligent search posse of very experienced dog rescue folks actively looking to find me a match. This was the canine equivalent of a Jewish doctor reaching out to all the older women at the synagogue to find herself a husband, and — that being the case — it didn’t take long to have some contenders, as sent to me by my very own canine shadchanim.
One such friend said, prophetically, “Gunther will send you a dog.” And the very next day, an old rescue cohort sent me a picture of a dog at the Martinez Animal Shelter, which is the same shelter system that produced Gunther and Millie.
This particular dog stood out from the rest of the pictures I’d seen, almost a little too much. He reminded me of Gunther… almost a little too very much. But he didn’t really look like Gunther, and there was something very sweet and eager-to-please about his energy that made me feel like it might be worth a trip out to Martinez to take a look. He’d been sitting there for a few weeks, and it was Christmas week: a week where a lot more people dump dogs off than usual. So, I figured I’d best get out there before “Bono,” as the shelter staff had named him, was euthanized for lack of space: he only had a few days left before that long walk down the tiled hallway saw to his end in this world.
I loaded up the human child and Millie, and arranged to meet my old rescue pal out there at the shelter. Berenice was the one who’d found him, after all, but more to the point I wanted to get an objective pair of eyes on any dog who might be coming home with me. I was still grieving for Gunther and Pandora, and I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t missing something.
When we got to the shelter, I decided to do rounds: I took Abby by the hand and we went into every room there, and she said hello to all the dogs while I sized them up. We also, per her request, said hello to the cats and rabbits.
When we got to the room with Bono’s kennel in it, it was very quiet. His kennel was all the way at the back. On the way to his kennel, we saw an overly large blue male pit bull who had a terrible case of mange and was resting his big, swollen, hairless head in his big, swollen, hairless paws. I called him to the front, but he didn’t respond. He was a dog who knew he wasn’t going anywhere; that was his last stop on this earth, and he was just waiting out his time.
I’d forgotten about the heartbreaking wisdom of some of these shelter dogs, the ones who know they’re not going to make it out.
After telling Mangey Blue Guy that I was sorry and that I hoped he came back as a spoiled Pomeranian, we walked to Bono’s kennel. He was sitting politely about 10 feet back, as though he was waiting for something. So I called him to us, and he trotted up nicely to say hello. And then he looked as us and barked sharply, once, and this scared Abby. So I told him to stop it. And he did.
Hmm.
The 3-year-old human was now unimpressed with this dog. “He scared me,” she said, indignantly. “I don’t like his barking!”
“I don’t like it, either, actually,” I said, “but he’s not being aggressive. I think he was just saying hello. Which is kind of weird, actually, because pit bulls are usually really quiet, but… I dunno, Abby, I think he’s worth a look. Here, let’s call him back, and see if he knows how to sit.”
We called him back to the front of the kennel, and he came up wiggling with his head down and his tail wagging. And so I told Abby to tell him to sit.
Being a child who has watched me do this hundreds of times, Abby squared off at the front of the kennel and threw her hand up and said, with a small child’s determination and exaggerated volume, “Sit!”
He sat. And he looked at her, wagging his tail eagerly and waiting for his next command.
Now, I had been ready to be impressed if this dog sat when I told him to. But I was now looking at a dog who was barely a year old and had been sitting in a kennel for three straight weeks in the shelter, and that dog had just happily obeyed a command issued by an unknown three-year-old girl.
This was a good start.
It was around that time that Berenice showed up, and we took Bono out with a volunteer to temperament test him. What we found was that this dog was just as nice to anything that crossed his path: he licked a Chihuahua through the neighboring test kennel; he ignored the rabbits; he was eager to connect with his shelter handler and with me; he was polite and submissive with Millie, who wasn’t overwhelmed with excitement by him (he wasn’t Gunther), but didn’t give me any reason to think she actually disliked him.
Bono was a just a really, really nice dog. He was also was a really, really nice dog who knew basic commands, including their hand signs, and seemed to be house trained. But I knew the drill: you never know what flavor of pain in the ass foster dog you have until that dog is in your house and doing any of the following:
1) Eating the wetsuit that hit the floor for all of 10 seconds
2) Chewing up the [insert item]
3) Peeing on the [insert surface]
4) Pooping on the [insert surface]
5) Being possessive of a [insert high-value item or human]
6) Complaining, loudly, in a crate, tie-down or other confine
7) Escaping a crate, tie-down or other confine
8) [Insert your own anecdote, dog peeps.]
Now, don’t get me wrong: I always loved new foster dogs, because I really enjoy working with dogs — and training issues are solved with training. So many, many dogs land in the shelter simply because they were never taught any manners, and that isn’t their fault. This is why so many of the dogs we see in the shelter are around a year old: they’ve just gotten big enough that their lack of training isn’t cute anymore.
That being said, dog training can be time consuming and frustrating. So, if you happen to run across a legitimately nice dog who was clearly someone’s pet and is already trained — and you happen to be a single mom with a toddler, another senior dog and a full-time job — this is a dog who’s going to make it seem more possible to take him on as a foster project.
And so that is what I did, though not immediately: I wanted to make sure that I was making the right decision for me, for Abby and for Millie. To get there, I decided to do a Zen exercise I was taught by my doula when I was pregnant with Abby: when you’re having trouble making a decision, take two days. Live the first day as though you’ve made one decision, and really live it that way: make the plans to do whatever it is you’re decided. Talk as though that’s your decision. Position your thoughts and behaviors there. On the second day, live as though you’ve made the other decision. On the third morning, you should know which decision is the right one.
After looking at it from every possible angle, by the third morning the bottom line was that I just didn’t feel right letting this dog die. I had thought I’d made peace with letting him go on Day 2, but I just couldn’t do it.
I had a friend in rescue who offered to place him if I was willing to be his foster home, and that promise gave me the opportunity to save a really nice dog without feeling obligated to a probable 10+ year commitment. When you do active animal rescue, there are always a few dogs that you really want to save, and you simply can’t due to a lack of resources. But that wasn’t the case here. He was out of time, and I could save him. And I was his last shot. And so, I did.
When I took his leash from the shelter volunteer in the lobby of the Martinez shelter, I made him sit and “look” before we started out. He gave me that same sweet, eager look I’d seen in those first pictures: the “What’s next? You’re the boss!” look.
I looked him straight in the eyes and said, “Listen, brother, do me a favor: don’t make me regret this.”
I scratched his chest. He wagged his tail. And we headed on out of the shelter together.
—
It’s been 6 months since Stanley Macaroni Penguin, as named by Abby and my neighbor child, came to live with us. Abby decided to keep him immediately, although there are times that she treats him more like an annoying younger brother than a dog. Phrases like “Mommy, Stanley stepped on my foot!” and “Move, Stanley, your tail is in my way!” and “Mommy, Stanley took my sock!” are commonplace these days. These moments are, of course, balanced by the sugary sweet ones in which she dresses Stanley up in a tutu, or puts a bow on his head, or takes a bath with him while singing him songs.
I took a little more convincing to make Stanley Macaroni Penguin a permanent member of the household. But despite him being the single noisiest pit bull I have ever encountered in my life — which almost earned him the name “Bugle,” and moved me to administer a DNA test that confirmed a wayward Ibizan Hound in his lineage — Stanley didn’t make my decision to let him stick around too terribly hard. He turned out to be as easygoing as I hoped he’d be and was, indeed, very nicely trained… although he has eaten and relocated more shoes than I care to count. (Yes, yes, I know: too much freedom too soon.)
I decided to keep Stanley Macaroni Penguin the day that he taught himself to use the double dog door system while I was at work. The Dog Door Desensitization Project was one I’d undertaken over the weekend, feeding the dogs by putting handfuls of kibble on one side and then calling them through from the other.
Millie was confused by this exercise (“Um, nice lady? I was just in the garage, and you called me out here, and now you’re calling me back inside… um, can I just have my dinner, please?”), but she readily participates in such nonsense so long as there’s food involved. Stanley, on the other hand, was not a fan of the falling flap on the dog door, particularly the dog door that leads from the garage to the laundry room: it’s weatherproof, and it’s thicker and heavier than a normal dog door flap. It took about an hour to get Stanley to a place wherein he was willing to walk through the flap for food, but he’d only do it if I was holding that flap up for him.
Stanley is a very smart dog, though, and he’s also a dog who likes to lay in the sun. That being the case, I had high hopes that he’d learn to brave the dog door on his own without me as an audience. And, indeed, when I came home that first Monday, he followed me (and an armload of dirty little kid clothes) into the laundry room and barked once, abruptly. I felt like Abby that day in the shelter: startled and annoyed that a dog barked so loudly and unexpectedly for no apparent reason.
I tossed the clothes in the washer and looked at him and said, “Good Lord, Noisy! What is it, Stanley?”
Once he was sure I was watching, he very deliberately walked out the dog door into the garage all by himself, and then turned around expectantly and peered at me through the clear flap.
“Good boy, Stanley!” I said, very enthusiastically. “Come on! Come back here!”
Stanley ducked his head, pushed it through that sectioned flap and proudly walked back inside, and then he trotted over to me to put his head on my shoulder to give me his version of a hug. The “hug” is a command that he seems to have been taught by his former owners, and it is one of the many charming and well-mannered things about Stanley that has, in addition to his aristocratic Ibizan blood, earned him the nickname “Fancypants.”
Now, indeed, it turns out I’d forgotten some of the annoyances of having a very young dog: the chewed shoes, the relocated gloves, the missing socks, the joyful leaping onto surfaces you wish they’d avoided, the enthusiastic tail wagging accidentally clearing coffee tables. But Stanley makes up for these youthful shenanigans by being the nicest, most easygoing, affable dog of any breed that I have met in quite some time. This dog was not only trained, he’s downright polite. He is however quite unusually bouncy, which is both an Ibizan hunting trait and a trait that reminds me very much of Gunther. But unlike Gunther, who had a blissful ignorance as to his size, strength and relationship with your physical space (read: Gunth would take you out accidentally and enthusiastically by running into you, being underfoot, or leaping excitedly), Stanley is extremely aware of the space he’s taking up in the world, and is more likely to jump next to you than into you.
Oh, Stanley. Who’s a good boy?
In addition to Stanley’s manners and positive, easygoing nature, there is a special bond between the person who takes the dog out of the shelter, and the dog who recognizes what that person did. Stanley, being an extremely intelligent dog, has been an extremely grateful dog. That sort of canine emotional complexity — a trait that reminds me so much of Pandora — is one that makes working with that dog an interesting and rewarding journey.
For my part, I’m very grateful to the friends who helped remind me that, sometimes, big decisions are best made simply by recognizing that you’re making them. I saw a quote recently that rang true:
“You cannot always wait for the perfect time. Sometimes, you must dare to jump.”
And if you’re Stanley Macaroni Penguin, sometimes you just jump for the sheer joy of it.
