Goodbye to a Good Dog
scrappybadger July 27th, 2007
Several news sites carried the story of Jake, a Utah based search and rescue dog, this week after he died of cancer on Wednesday. He worked as a therapy dog visiting sick children and the elderly, trained other dogs, and performed search and rescue, most notably after Hurricane Katrina and September 11th.
I have mixed feelings about rescue dogs. On the one hand, they are often removed from abusive situations. Such was the case with Jake. According to one story, he was found with several injuries, beaten and abandoned before he was a year old. His caretaker for the next 11 years trained him for search and rescue. It seems positive. After all, dogs are like humans in that they usually want to do something meaningful; they like having a purpose. For some dogs that means strength exercises, agility, or caring for the humans who believe we’re taking care of the dog. For dogs like Jake that purpose is a more dangerous one. Search and rescue dogs risk injury and sometimes death fulfilling their life’s purpose. It is a purpose, however, that is foisted upon them.
It is the good-natured temperament that most dogs have that puts them in danger. Like so many other animals, they pay the price for human foibles. Our desire to live near fault lines, to build homes on potentially unstable mountaintops, to vacation on coastlines susceptible to hurricanes, our propensity for conflict that results in bombings, and, occasionally, our dumb luck creates situations where these dogs have to help us. We look to a creature that is held captive by our whims and schedules to do what we can’t. I’m not sure it is fair to ask so much when, comparatively speaking, we usually give so little back.
I hope that Jake’s cancer wasn’t related to any of the favors he performed for us. I’d rather think of it as a fluke, something no one could have foreseen and that we didn’t contribute to. I don’t really believe that, but I want to. Truth is, if it wasn’t his work that did it, it was likely something as ordinary as sniffing the neighbor’s lawn and, in the process, inhaling toxins from fertilizers and weed killers. I guess that in the end it doesn’t matter what caused Jake’s cancer, but I don’t want to think that we helped it at all.
To read more about Jake, and to see pictures visit:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12301482
