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4. ALEX
It’s easier to like animals than people, and there’s a reason for that.
When animals make a stupid mistake, you laugh at them. A cat misjudges a leap. A dog looks overly quizzical about a simple object. These are funny things. But when a person doesn’t understand something, if they miscalculate and hit the brakes too late, blame is assigned. They are stupid. They are wrong. Teachers and cops are there to sort it out, with a trail of paperwork to illustrate the stupidity. The faults. The evidence and incidents of these things. We have entire systems in place to help decide who is what.
Sometimes the systems don’t work.
Families spend their weekend afternoons at animal shelters, even when they’re not looking for a pet. They come to see the unwanted and unloved. The cats and dogs who don’t understand why they are these things. They are petted and combed, walked and fed, cooed over and kissed. Then they go back in their cages and sometimes tears are shed. Fuzzy faces peering through bars can be unbearable for many.
Change the face to a human one and the reaction changes.
The reason why is because people should know better.
But our logic is skewed in this respect. A dog that bites is a dead dog. First day at the shelter and I already saw one put to sleep, which in itself is a misleading phrase. Sleep implies that you have the option of waking up. Once their bodies pass unconsciousness to something deeper where systems start to fail, they revolt a little bit, put up a fight on a molecular level. They kick. They cry. They don’t want to go. And this happens because their jaws closed over a human hand, ever so briefly. Maybe even just the once.
But people, they get chances. They get the benefit of the doubt. Even though they have the higher logic functioning and they knew when they did it THEY KNEW it was a bad thing.
The shelter is running a neuter-and-spay clinic next month. One of my jobs this morning is to get the mail, fighting the urge to throw a rock at a speeding car when the driver wolf-whistles at me. The mailbox is full of applications for the clinic, most of them for dogs but a handful of cats as well. Rhonda, the lady who runs the shelter, has me sort them out, dogs and cats, male and female.
Rhonda snorts when she sees all the male dogs on the roster. “People don’t learn,” she says.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Everyone thinks if you fix a male dog it will lower his aggression, but most of the biters are female. It’s basic instinct to protect their own womb. You see it in all animals—the female of the species is more deadly than the male.”
“Except humans,” the other girl volunteering says.
The phone rings. I answer, saying, “Tri-County Animal Shelter, this is Alex,” instead of saying to the girl, “You wouldn’t be in a position to know.”
Which is what had been on the tip of my tongue.
Rhonda gets a call about a stray out on the county line, so she takes the pound truck and tells us to “hold down the fort.” There’s not much to hold down at this particular fort for the moment. The mornings are filled with volunteer dog-walkers and wives who like to pet cats but “aren’t allowed” to have one at home. All of those people have slowly seeped out. The other girl and I are waiting out the last fifteen minutes, me at the desk pretending to sort through spay-and-neuter applications so that I don’t have to make conversation, her on her hands and knees poking her fingers through the cage our lone bunny resides in, which we dragged out to the waiting room hoping that someone would cave and take her home.
The front door swings open, slamming against the wall hard enough to knock down three “Lost Cat” posters and an informational pamphlet about Lyme disease. A woman with a red face and eyebrows that are permanently frowned into a meeting position above her nose comes in, talking before she even looks at me.
“Someone just tossed a bag of puppies out down on 9,” she says.
“County Road 9?” I ask for clarification, mostly because I know it will annoy her and because I don’t like how she’s talking to me. Or rather not talking to me, just shouting words in my direction, already half turned toward the door to leave.
“Yes, County Road 9,” she snaps. “What’d you think I meant?”
The other girl pulls her fingers out of the bunny cage and stands up but doesn’t approach us. She hovers in the background like if I need support she might actually say something but I shouldn’t count on it. This annoys me as well, so now I’m happy with no one in the room.
“Where at on 9?” I ask, pulling out a slip of paper to write it down.
“Right before the curve,” the lady says. “He slowed down a bit and chucked the bag out the window.”
“How do you know it was puppies?” I ask.
“Excuse me?” she says, the brows finally separating a little as they fly upward.
“How do you know the bag has puppies in it?”
“I had to swerve to miss it,” she says, her voice losing a bit of its edge. “I could see it in the way that it rolled, you know? Like there was something inside trying to get out.”
“Could’ve been kittens,” I say.
“What does it matter?” the lady half yells at me. “I came here to the shelter to tell you there’s a bag of kittens or puppies or whatever lying in the ditch on 9 and you’re not doing anything about it.”
