Baxter the bastard boxer
anybody who knows me (and by “know” i mean maybe passed me once or twice) knows that i ADORE dogs. i have a desire to raise some little puppies the way some people i know have a desire to have kids. that said, it makes the story i have to tell, that much more traumatic. i’ve never really told it before because it’s so upsetting to me, yet it also brings back so many good, happy memories, i thought getting it all off my chest would possibly be a good thing.
when ryan and i were first married, we got the cutest, bestest (well, more on that later) little brindle baby that we named baxter.
we got him from a guy ryan worked with: his dog had surprisingly become pregnant after apparently mating with a roaming sicilian dog. i think in part because of the brindle, when he was born he looked like the dad was maybe part boxer. so we nicknamed him baxter, the bastard boxer.
as he grew up, he became taller (although only about knee height) and really skinny. i think he was part italian greyhound - but a little bit bulkier. he loved to run and was SO fast, just like a greyhound. he had those little pointy ears that greyhounds have, but his flopped over when he wasn’t alert.
we lived out in a sicilian villagio on the beach - the homes there were most people’s summer homes, so during the rest of the year, there weren’t very many people around. i think early on, baxter missed out on crucial socialization. we’d have friends over from time to time, and he was ok, but never very well behaved. he barked and whined, and sometimes got pretty snappy with kids. which doesn’t really bother me, but, well, is usually frowned upon by their parents.
now i know, sometimes - a lot of the time - a child’s bad behavior can be blamed on the parents, to an extent. even if the “child” happens to be your dog. i’m sure that’s true in part for us. part of my love for dogs includes an intense spoiling of them. we crate trained baxter and kept him in his own space when we weren’t home, he learned basic commands, he was housebroken (and in a ninja-like way). but as time went on, i began letting him up on the bed, on the couch, under my covers, and i coddled him. i know i did. i held him ALL THE TIME (see above picture). my dog growing up, bailey, would never let me pick her up, she kind of became a little bitch about it.
so i vowed to raise baxter so he would always let me pick him up. and he did.
when baxter was only about ten months, we moved back to the states. he had to be in his crate on the plane for a very long time. that was SO hard for me, and in some ways, although he was fine when we landed, i think it was kind of traumatizing to him. hell, a flight like that is traumatizing to me. we lived with ryan’s parents for a couple months until we closed on our house, then moved in. maybe living in a state of flux for several months further upset him.
i think his temperment also had something to do with the fact that we don’t know who his dad was. if he was a wild italian dog, he was probably mean and scrappy - just like bax turned out. and for an italian, who “breeds” their dogs to bark, guard their homes, and devour anyone who comes close (all things baxter was good at), then a dog like baxter is just what they need.
however, america has laws against dogs like that. laws that made having the bax a slight problem. we lived in a four plex, where neighbors (and sometimes their children) were always close-by. i understand a dog’s initial need to protect himself and his pack - to bark and lunge and the like. but baxter never calmed down from that, he’d never realize someone was ok, that WE were ok with them. we began to live in fear that baxter would bark at/ nip/bite the wrong person and we’d be brought down in this crazy law suit.
so we got a personal dog trainer. she worked with us and with him for many weeks. it was hard to see much improvement - although in all honesty it’s hard for me to be that patient.
we tried to take him to doggy day care so he could get socialized. but after bringing him in there for weeks, JUST to get him comfortable with the front office staff, when we felt he was finally well-enough adjusted to be introduced to the dogs, he didn’t pass the temperment test.
fotunately, he never bit a stranger or a kid - he usually only did that when someone got inside our house (the only person he was ever ok with was the trainer) - which was only our friends. some of them got nipped, never anything super-serious, and they were our friends, so they didn’t sue. still, there was the fear.
then we began to talk about moving to san francisco. it would be hard to live there with ANY dog, let alone baxter. we began looking at our options. i don’t think it’s right to euthanise a dog just because you don’t want it any more, but sometimes i feel like that’s what we did. except i DID want him, i wanted him with all my heart, and i miss him so much.
it wasn’t that simple. i lived a tortured state of not knowing what to do for probably six months. we looked into every option possible - boot camps, rescue missions, but nothing worked out. even the humane society couldn’t take him, because he was aggressive. in some ways i think leaving him there might have been worse - for him and for me. in the end, ryan had to take him to be put down.
it makes me even sadder because i rarely even talk about him, or keep pictures of him at my desk - like i used to - because i really don’t want to answer questions about what happened. i don’t want people to judge me for what i did. deep down i’m afraid that i didn’t do EVERYTHING i could have to help him be a better dog. i think, what if i wasn’t patient enough to enforce what the trainer told us, what if i didn’t discipline him like i should have, what if i didn’t look hard enough for someone to take him. i don’t know if i did the right thing, and that might plague me forever.
i can barely write this without crying now, almost a year later. but then i think that, baxter’s up in heaven and it’ll be like 30 seconds to him before we come up there and join him. or maybe it’ll be 60 years - but he’ll be so busy running as fast as he can and chasing rabbits that he won’t even notice. i know i gave him the best life i could while i could, and he probably has it pretty good right now. probably, this is harder on me than it was on him - i gave him a lot of credit, but i doubt he really understood what was going on. i guess that’s what makes death so hard - in a lot of cases, death can actually improve someone’s life (not to sound morbid) but those left behind have a much heavier task.