Heart-beat at my feet

Man was appointed by God to have dominion over the beasts, and everything a man does to an animal is either a lawful exercise, or a sacrilegious abuse, of an authority by divine right. The tame animal is therefore, in the deepest sense, the only ‘natural’ animal — the only one we see occupying the place it was made to occupy, and it is on the tame animal that we must base all our doctrine of beasts. Now it will be seen that, in so far as the tame animal has a real self or personality, it owes this almost entirely to its master. If a good sheepdog seems ‘almost human’ that is because a good shepherd has made it so… It seems to me possible that certain animals may have an immortality, not in themselves, but in the immortality of their masters. (C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain)

I’ve been rereading Lewis’s thoughts on animal pain this morning because our dear dog is suffering. (It’s not all that comforting, but at least I’m reminded that others have wrestled with the subject.) She is terribly congested, and has been all summer. It hasn’t responded to the antibiotics the vet gave us back in July. All night I hear her snuffling and panting. We are headed back to the vet next week for her yearly exam and shots, and I fear the news will not be good.

We’ve had Katie for nearly 14 years, and a sweeter dog you will never find. She began life with equal parts sweetness and aggressiveness, but the aggressiveness vanished years ago. As a puppy, we learned from the vet how to put her in a submissive “down,” a practice which involved making her lie down, and lying down next to her and holding her down, for ten minutes or so, a few times a day. It didn’t take long to establish in dog terms who was the boss.

She came to us in our second year of marriage and gave us a year of practice in nurturing before the birth of our first child. She has been with us through our first year of home-ownership, and the births of both children. She has been on numerous trips, numerous hikes, numerous visits to grandparents with us. She’s been unfailingly gentle with the girls.

So much family history is bound up in her time with us. These days as I give her the extra pampering of mixing in canned food with her dry food, reaching down a hand in the middle of the night to pat her when she’s wheezing, and generally allowing her to lick my hand more than I normally would (she’s always been a licker), my throat tightens and my eyes leak in dread. She’s had a good life, and a long one, with us. I pray that her end will be natural and easy, perhaps a slipping away in the night, as she deserves. I really can hardly bear to think of having to intervene.