Normally, I try to come up with creative names for my dogs, but the 12-year-old hound mix I adopted at an animal shelter in upstate New York eluded my attempts to give him a distinctive handle, so he ultimately became known as just Hound.
He could be a cranky old geezer – one fine morning I gave him a kiss, and he responded by biting me indignantly on the nose - but I always forgave him. After all, he’d gamely survived the indignity of being abandoned as an elder statesdog, when canines of a certain age should be reaping the benefits of a cozy retirement, not coming to terms with the cold concrete walls of a shelter enclosure. But in the high-stakes game of adoption, Hound had three strikes against him: he was plain and brown and old enough to have cloudy eyes. Other than that, he was in perfect health.
I like to think Hound got to enjoy a small measure of the retirement he deserved when he moved in with me and my other dogs. Whatever indignities he’d suffered, he trusted his packmates completely, never picking a fight with a single one of them (although he had no problem trying to start dust-ups with any canine passersby that happened to annoy him outside, morphing into a snarling Mr. Hyde).
One day in August, Hound was 14 years going on 14 months, leaping vertically at the first scent of food and seeming to get younger with each passing day. The next, he was suddenly walking helplessly in circles and falling sideways, his eyes rolling frighteningly fast in his head. The vet diagnosed Hound’s problem: Canine geriatric vestibular syndrome, which unbalances the body’s organ of balance, causing a sort of permanent vertigo. Basically, it was making my poor Hound feel like he was on a high-speed carousel from hell. This syndrome has no known cause and no cure, and often strikes in the month of August (no one knows why, but for me this factoid gave new meaning to the term "dog days of August."
I had the option of waiting, with a 50-50 chance that the condition might clear up with time. If it didn’t, he’d be permanently, outrageously uncomfortable. But due to Hound’s advanced age, there was less of a chance he’d bounce back. All the while, he seemed desperately miserable. I waited a couple of days, but he could barely manage to eat the small morsels of freshly cooked chicken and duck I offered him. That’s how I knew he was really suffering; he was too out of sorts to eat his favorite treats.
It’s always difficult to know when it’s time to put a dog to sleep; people often say, "You will know," but it’s only human to keep clinging to the hope that things will somehow turn around and your dog will wake up tomorrow and be his old self again. In this case, however, the dog who just days before was defying gravity to jump for scraps of roast chicken was physically unable to accept my relentless offers of chicken, bacon, roast beef, and baby food. His appetite for life was officially gone. When the injection was administered at the vet’s office, Hound passed so peacefully, closing his furiously rolling eyes with such evident relief that I knew I’d made the right decision. After days and days of terrible dizziness, he seemed genuinely grateful for some rest.
