Roger’s Reality: Bailey was a good dog

By Roger Owens

Bailey was a good dog. She wanted to be a good dog; she tried very hard. We first saw Bailey in a photo from a group called Rescue Sisters, out of Palm City Florida. She was at the back of the cage, sitting on her tail, obviously scared to death. The post said she was aggressive. I knew right off they were wrong. She wasn’t aggressive, she was terrified. Of what there was no way to tell, but Bailey was a brindle Catahoula, a breed we have extensive experience with, and when brindle hounds are frightened they tend to respond aggressively. A fine point, but there is a difference.
    Bailey’s predecessor at the Owens house was a brindle named Rena, because her mommy (my wife Cindy) thought “Rhiannon” was too long, so Rena she became. If not the best dog we ever had, she was in the top three for sure. She too came to us from a rescue; in fact, all our animals are rescues one way or another. It makes no sense to buy a companion animal when God regularly puts them in our way. Rena’s predecessor was Sadie, another brindle, the offspring of Brandy, a golden retriever who got out one night in heat and must have serviced every male dog in the neighborhood, because in the requisite sixty days or so she produced a veritable rainbow of puppies, every color and stripe imaginable. We let our son Jamie pick which one to keep, and he chose the little striped brindle. Sadie is definitely in the running for best dog ever. So we had high hopes for Bailey, we really did. And for about a year and a half she seemed to be all we could have hoped for.
    Bailey came to us in a car driven by a member of the Rescue Sisters, who delivered her, relay-style, all the way from Miami. She had, they reported, spent the entire trip hiding on the floor in the back seat, trembling in fear. I was on the way home when the text came that she was here. When I drove up she was still in the back seat, cowering. And then, as if it was all planned ahead of time, she got out of that car and came and jumped up on me as if she had been my dog all along. The gal from the rescue group stared, astonished, while her husband just shook his head. “She’s afraid of everybody,” she said. “Nobody can get near her.” And in my arrogance I believed I had this. She would be fine; she just needed the right family, and we were just the family for the job.

Bailey started off well, but I could tell she would need some adjusting. She had been found wandering the streets of Miami, and there was no indication she had ever really been a domestic dog. She gobbled food like there was no tomorrow, and tried to steal her siblings’ food if she could. She was dominant with the other animals in our house, and brooked no interference with her food or toys. Having studied animal behavior, I understood her actions; she acted the way any wild dog would, which behavior had surely served her well on the mean streets of Miami, but caused some friction now she was in a home setting. Her problem was that, like any child who grew up starving, she had learned to get what she wanted, by force if necessary. It was difficult to convince her that at our house, everybody gets what they need, but eventually she seemed to relax and began to be what appeared to be a normal dog.
    Bailey took well to training. She was better behaved than her “brother” Billy Bob, who had come to us over the back fence from our friend Sue, who basically just stole him from an abusive owner and gave him to us. He had been with us for almost three years at the time, and when Rena died he was our only dog for a while. In spite of this, Billy was never as well-trained as most of our dogs; he is just too active to be well-disciplined. Bailey would sit, stay, and walk off a leash under verbal command. In time she would wait her turn for cookies with the other animals, not steal food, and more, not respond with aggression if one of the other critters took some of her food or one of her toys. But now and again, she would bark, or snap, or otherwise raise a ruckus over something like that, but we always told ourselves she was getting better, that she was adjusting well. And the fact that she clearly adored me personally caused me to rationalize away her increasingly belligerent behavior.

Two years is magic for dogs. If they are raised in a home, it is at about two years that most dogs begin to settle down and really become part of the family, but with their own personality intact. That is, of course, if their family is open to animals expressing their own personality, and we are just that sort of family. If a dog is transplanted as an older animal, it may take up to two years for them to feel at home and be their own being, so to speak. But for Bailey, two years was the point where everything seemed to go wrong.
    More and more, Bailey would not tolerate anyone coming to the house, or even in the yard. Forget the UPS guy, or the postman, or a neighbor. She would go nuts. Barking, snarling, threatening. And still, I wouldn’t hear anything bad about her. She was my dog, and by God I knew how to raise a dog. Hadn’t I done it over and again, and quite successfully, if I do say so myself? You’re darned right I had, so Bailey couldn’t be a problem I couldn’t fix.
    But she was. The aggression got worse. We went into intensive training to try to desensitize her to the presence of other people. It didn’t work. We brought her to Dr. Dan, our vet, whose wife, Dr. Sarah, is not only a vet but an animal behavior specialist. We spent hours on the floor, in the least threatening situations we could devise, all to no avail. We tried an antidepressant, which also didn’t work. We tried another. It didn’t help either. We tried them both. Nothing seemed to change.
    Meanwhile her aggressiveness increased. Neighbors Bailey had known for her whole life with us were no longer safe on our property. One of my technicians, a Fort Peirce redneck fellow named Seth who never feared a dog in his life, was afraid to come into our yard because Bailey wouldn’t let him get out of his work truck. Once she had welcomed him; now she would have bitten him if she had the chance. She bit our neighbor Sue, the lady who gave us Billy Bob, and who had first gotten us in contact with the Rescue Sisters to get Bailey. If she wasn’t a good friend we could have been sued, and rightly so.

The issue came to a head when we needed to go out of town. For over two decades we had left town when necessary or for vacations, and friends and neighbors had fed our animals for us, with no incident. This was no longer an option. We tried having Sue come over and feed her when we were still there, resulting in a violent confrontation when she approached the communal food storage area on our back porch. She was scared so badly she wouldn’t even visit for several weeks. She had used to bring her dogs over to play; now, her two massive pit bulls were too frightened of Bailey to come near her. My technician, Seth, flatly refused to do the necessary; the one time we tried having him feed her she had attacked him so viciously he wouldn’t come on the property for love or money. Our neighbor Joyce, whom Bailey had known since the day she arrived, fared no better. The second time Bailey went after Seth my wife texted me that she had to go. I wasn’t to know until I got home that Bailey had gone after her too.
    We had had this argument several times already. She kept saying Bailey had to go, and I knew it was true, but I didn’t want to admit it. We had actually gotten into a shouting match about it more than once, which is something she and I never do. But there was no escaping the fact that something had to be done. Every day another near-bloodletting would occur. It was only a matter of time before we were in real trouble.
    We tried sending her to a local boarding facility, just for while we were gone; they wouldn’t take her. We tried counselling once again with Dr. Sarah. Bailey didn’t attack her, but for over an hour she shook in fear and the slightest false move by the staff had her growling and threatening. I contacted the rescue people, who had said they would take her back if there were problems, but that was no longer an option either. The dilemma was that anyone we gave her to would be subject to the same behavior. No one could come near the dog at this point-except me. I was the only human being she trusted. I could not imagine her living in a cage, unable to run and play, always terrified. It seemed absolutely inevitable that, should we give her away, whoever took her would be bitten or come to the same conclusion we had, and they would be forced to put her down. Someone she didn’t know, of whom she would be terribly frightened, would ship her off to a vet and do a bad job because I had shirked my responsibility to my dog. As horrible as it was, we had no choice but to do the job ourselves.

It is so hard to write this. I am crying as I do so and am unashamed to say it. I loved that dog. I love all my animals. Dr. Dan and Dr. Sarah came to our home and, while Bailey sat in my lap, administered the drugs. I held her close for an hour until it was time to let her go. But I haven’t let her go. I never will. I thought that writing this would be cathartic, and in a way it has been. But unlike dogs, we humans don’t seem to let the past go after two years, or ten years, or ever. I know Bailey had a good home for two years of her short life, with her own bed and all the food she could eat and her friends to play with. I know she was happy for a time, but even that happiness was marred by her ever-present terrors, those nightmares from wandering alone on the streets of Miami which never seemed to leave her alone. I hope she is happy now, and I will never again be so smug as to think I can fix anything that troubles a wounded animal psyche. And I just hope, with all my heart, that she didn’t think she was a bad dog.

Copyright © 2017 by Roger Owens