The Secret Life of (Abandoned) Dogs
Things I can never know about Roxie
By Francis Battista
Sometimes, usually in the evening, Roxie lies on the dog couch in our kitchen with the sad look of a dog who is waiting for the center of her world to return. You know the look. It is during these brief interludes that Roxie tells me a story with her eyes and her body language of a terrible thing that happened to her. If I didn't know the facts of her case, I could probably fill them in with a high degree of accuracy.
Roxie was found sitting by the side of the road in the Angeles National Forest north of Los Angeles. The area is as infamous for dumping bodies as it is for dumping dogs. She was flanked by two cardboard boxes each containing four puppies. Her slightly skewed gait suggested a hip injury. X-rays revealed a fracture in the head of her thigh bone, the ball part of her hip's ball and socket joint.
The woman who found Roxie, a working mother and dog groomer, found good homes for the puppies without difficulty, but finding a place for Roxie proved too much. The big girl had some issues to contend with: She was a submissive wetter and suffered from gale force level separation anxiety, on top of being a not-at-all-trained large dog. But the nice woman and Roxie lucked out, and she got a much-coveted pass to Best Friends.
It was arranged that I would bring her back to the sanctuary, but several days of foul weather forced us to bed down for a few nights in Los Angeles.
It was obvious that Roxie was desperate for a person, and it didn't take much more than a few nights of her sleeping on my head and a few bowls of kibble to convince her that I was that person. I was pretty taken with her, as well.
So Roxie wound up sharing a house with me, my wife Silva, and 15 other dogs. True to her advance billing, she tore the place up whenever we left her alone. She had a few other bonus tricks, too: like, whenever I would go out the front door, for however short a time, Roxie would jump up on the dining table to keep an eye on me. If scolded for being on the table, she would pee on the spot! Crate training and patience seem to have addressed most of her problems. Although she still jumps up on the table, she no longer pees when told to get down. We are grateful for all progress.
Roxie is quiet and undemanding and she is devoted in that single-minded way that characterizes German shepherds. She has a great time here and has recently adopted a young mini-Border collie named Jimmy as a sort of puppy surrogate. The two play together for hours on end. (She's even taught him how to jump onto the dining table!) But there is that sadness deep inside her that I will never be able to cure. Perhaps time will.
All the dogs in our home can tell some version of Roxie's story. They all had first families and people to whom they were devoted in the way that only a dog can be. Their universe and their sense of dogness revolved around their place in a household where, for one reason or another, their person decided to breach the social contract between human and dog. They were abandoned.
Roxie, who tends to wear her heart on her paw, provides a window into the emotions that all dogs who have been rejected must feel. I wouldn't try to classify them in human terms. I can only observe that, as deeply devoted and attached as she is to me, her heart once unequivocally belonged to the family that took her from puppyhood through to the awful decision to dump her in the woods with her babies.
And even though they never trained her as a puppy and then got mad at her for what she didn't know; even though they never had her spayed and then abandoned her when she had pups; even though they took her into their home (she certainly knew what a bed is for!) and probably let her sleep with the kids and then left her to live or die by the side of a highway; even through all that and more, Roxie still waits for them in the quiet of the evening.
The simple truth is that a creature like Roxie could never in a million years begin to understand such betrayal, because it isn't in her.
It isn't in any of them.
