When I was 3 or 4, my mom was working at the Sheriff's office in South Florida. A woman came in one day with a horribly malnourished dog and said she had found the dog, that it was not hers and that she didn't know what to do with it. My mom, having grown up on a farm where collies were bred, took one look at the grungy Sheltie and took the rest of the day off and brought the dog home with her. She was a Blue Merle, a dog whose fur coloring and pattern you cannot properly predict, a dog that breeders would pay thousands to have. She was a sweet, affectionate dog, and someone had allowed this gorgeous dog to become so filthy, she was black and her skin was literally crawling from ticks and fleas. She had a nylon rope tied in a slip knot around her neck, an apparent outside dog, and she had chewed through it. She never did like being confined. Nobody ever tried to claim her, which was just as well, they didn't deserve her, at all. Her name became Bandit, my mom thought it was a clever addition to the stray bird we had named Smokey. The Prima Donna that my 4 year old self was insisted that Bandit was not a proper name for a girl dog and that I would have nothing to do with her until it was changed. Bandit had different plans, she adopted me almost immediately. And being the animal lover I have always been, I began to love her too.
Like all good parents who have kids and animals, my mom sat me down and had the "your dog will die one day" talk with me and at the end of the conversation, I confidently concluded that my dog would die when I was 18. Those words would come back with a vengeance.
Life went on, my dog was always by my side, except, of course, when she would sneak out the front door and decide to run down the street like we had been beating her. She's a herding dog, what else does she know to do but run? Years go by, she finally calmed down to the point that I could walk her without a leash, but that didn't happen until I was 17 and my family had relocated to Tennessee. She still loved to run, especially if it was after a tennis ball.
Not long after that, I noticed that she had stopped eating her food, we had switched her from dry to wet dog food a year earlier to try to put some weight on her, she was a very thin dog. We started giving her baby food, she liked that for a while, but suddenly stopped eating it and would go as far as putting dishcloths on it to cover it up. It was then that my parents brought up the option to put her down, she was old (15) and not eating. I decided to take her to the vet to get a professional opinion.
I was told that her kidneys were failing and that her ability to process protein was basically gone and to not feed her meats. Dogs are carnivores, what kind of carnivore doesn't eat meat? So my mom and I started making her mashed potatoes and spaghetti. But she kept declining. She couldn't control her bladder and we had to confine my energetic dog to the tiled kitchen to keep her off the wood floors. It was killing me watching her die, so I finally made the decision to put her down.
My dad took me to the vet the next day, I held her in my arms as she took her last breath and slumped over, dead. We took her home to bury her, and slowly my life as I knew it unraveled. We get to the house and my dad and my at-the-time boyfriend got shovels to dig a hole for her. I went inside and went to my room, then it hit me, I had been 18 for a whole month and 6 days and my dog was dead; my prediction had come true. My legs gave out and I collapsed in a heap on the floor, unable to stop bawling my eyes out.
A little while after that, we found out that the wet dog food we fed her for a year was part of the poisoned food from China and I felt awful, I fed my dog poison for a year, I killed my dog.
It has been 4 years since that day and I still break down and cry about it on average twice a week. Watching t.v. and a collie is on a commercial, or there's a Merle at the park. It kills me, I've realized that she was never my dog, I was always her human. And there have been times in my life that I have wanted to die, but I never did anything about it because I needed to be there for my dog. She kept me alive and going through some really dark parts of my life. And it's for the love of a dead dog that I know with 100% certainty that I want to rescue abandoned and stray dogs, give them another chance. Because if it weren't for a woman who cared enough to take my Bandit to the Sheriff's office, I would have missed out on the biggest lesson in life one can ever learn - unconditional love.
