I Like Animals

            I like animals.

            I lived on a farm until I was 16, so I was around a lot of animals – milk cows, bulls, calves, steers, heifers, horses, pigs, sheep, goats, geese, rabbits, chickens, and, of course, dogs and cats. And rats. Not to mention a close association with fish and pheasant. My parents obviously liked animals, too. My mother especially doted on her baby chicks, which arrived every spring in aerated boxes from Kansas.

            When I was about 4, we had a German Shepherd, who liked and protected me, growling at my dad when he tried to swat my bottom for some little infraction. My dad was so surprised that he never touched me. He just laughed.

            The next dog I remember was a white mutt named Pal. She chased the school bus one day, after a driver accidentally ran over one of her pups. She would have maimed that driver if he had ever gotten out of the bus.

            Then came Hondo. I really regarded him as my next older brother Dick’s dog because Hondo went hunting with him and because Dick named him after the dog in the John Wayne movie of the same name. I never had the heart to remind him that Hondo was John Wayne’s name in the movie, not the dog. But in later years he laughed. He said he always knew that.
            After I was married, our first dog – a Lhaso Apso – was given to us by a co-worker. However, he liked to nibble my baby son David’s feet so we ended up returning him to his owner.

            Our dog-aficionado friend, Arlene, could not stand us to be dogless, so her stepdaughter gave us two Golden Retrievers – mother and son. The mother, the peerless Golden Squaw of Atlantis (I kid you not) was wonderful, while son Freddie was adorable. However, we soon learned that two small children and two dogs were too much for us (even after I named them Fred and Ginger after you know who), and we ended up giving Freddie away. We kept Squaw for 13 years, a member of the family whom we always cherished. I still miss her.

            While, we had Squaw, we also got a miniature Dachshund, we named Wolfgang, of course. (Our pet names were not too original, especially not like a friend of mine Dan McLean, who named his dog - get ready for this one, - Harpo Barks. I love that name.)  Wolfgang was a riot. He used to walk underneath Squaw and drove that amiable dog crazy. We soon returned Wolfie to his original owner, another friend, Dick Corwin.

            Then my wife’s niece Kate gave us a cocker spaniel whom I tried to extricate from under the table one night and was promptly bitten. His reaction was a total surprise to me, because biting was foreign to our Golden Retriever. It took six months for that bite to heal. We got rid of that dog, too.

            My son David came in one night with a dog he picked up somewhere in Torrance. The dog was wandering the streets, and David saw he was blind. He brought him home and promised to take him to a shelter the next day, but he named him Ray Charles first.  Well, we had Ray for about six months before he had to be put to sleep, because of many infirmaries. He and I had become soulmates. I had a detached retina surgery at the time, and we had a picture taken with him sitting on my lap, and both of us wearing dark glasses. I always thought he had a tough time getting around, until one day I went out in the back yard and there he sat with bird feathers coming out of his mouth and a very contented smile on his face. .

            Then, my dogged son brought home two dogs whom you could barely get near. They obviously had been abused. He was going to get rid of them the next day. Naturally, they stayed. And stayed. And they hated any other kind of animals. They were not like Golden Retrievers. Finally, one night, they were barking like mad, and I went outside, and they had cornered a skunk. The skunk tore into the pool area. So did the dogs. They busted through the pool gate and went after that skunk. One got a hold of the head and the other proceeded to literally skin that animal. The dogs were acting so fiercely, that I was scared to death of them. I phoned my son, and he said just to let the dogs run. I thought my wife was gloriously happy to see the dogs gone, until she guiltily went to the nearby animal control office the next day, found them and brought them home.. Finally, a neighbor was smitten with them and took them off our hands. Whew!

            Next came another wonderful Golden Retriever named Lily. This was my son David’s dog, and his attachment to her was infinite. Love was not the appropriate word.  Worship is more like it. We had the dog for a few years, because my son had no place to keep her. She slept on our bed, when she was not sitting in my son’s lap watching football games with David helping her give paw signals for touchdowns and penalties. When he lived in West L.A. with Lily, he could not find her one day. She had gone into a nearby pet store, picked out a toy and was standing in line to buy it. Then Lily lost an eye to a thorn, and the money we spent on her was much more than any operation any human in our family ever had. Finally, Lily was ill and had to be put to sleep. She was cremated, and her ashes still rest in my son’s apartment.

            Since then, David came onto a Jack Russell, named Annie, the most aggressive, untrained little devil I have ever seen. She also had been abused, but after a couple of weeks with my son, she sat on my lap, slept in our bed and was angelic. That is where we are today.

            So what is the point of this puppy dog tale?  While I obviously like animals, I don’t put them above people. My mother, thought animals never should be allowed in the house. We obviously did not follow that advice.   And we are infinitely kind to animals, but we do know their place. I believe God put animals on this earth to help humans survive, not vice versa. Animals, as we know, need a lot less help than we. It’s nice when we treat animals as well as humans. But it is really nice when we treat humans as well as we treat animals.

        Dogliker Don Lechman is a former reporter, critic and editor for the Daily Breeze.