I called him “my little boy” and “my youngest son.” When we “talked” I called myself “Dad.” Millions of dog owners are too embarrassed to admit the same, with variants.
All dogs are equal, but some are more equal than others. Yours and mine.
A conservative estimate: In our seven years together, more than 5,000 people and groups in West Vancouver stared, stopped, and suspended their own worries and secret cares to ask — usually “Has he got a sore foot?” — about my little lame dog, Kaylan.
I’d explain: In early youth Kaylan fell from the window of a swerving vehicle and was hit by a car. His left front leg was badly injured. He limped on two toes and a bone end, and a section of the leg, under the fur, sickeningly looked like a cooked chicken leg.
His owner couldn’t, or wouldn’t, pay the vet’s bill. If he had to choose between paying it or for the rent or groceries, forgiveable.
So the vet, Dr. Katherine Meek, in Maple Ridge, took in Kaylan. She tried to find him a home. No takers. I was told the SPCA wouldn’t accept him because nobody would adopt a lame dog — they’d have to put him down.
One day Meek filled in for West Vancouver vet Dr. Neil Cropper, and brought Kaylan with her. My younger daughter Berta, between university years, was working at Cropper’s Hollyburn Veterinary Hospital. Coincidentally, my wife and elder daughter Kate dropped in to see Berta.
Talk about a roll of the cosmic dice. It was love at first sight — three sights — for this hopping, tough little dog, a schnoodle, a schnauzer-poodle cross, new term to me.
The phone call. “Dad, he’s so cute — can we have him? We all love him.” Stern response. “Berta, in September you’re going back to Guelph, Kate to Victoria, Mom back teaching — who do you think is going to be left looking after this dog?”
Besides, we already had a dog, Booker, an amiable Labrador cross — soon to be dominated by this fearless, pushy little newcomer. For of course I caved.
It soon became clear that on our walks it was Kaylan who caught people’s eyes. He could hobble on his bad leg but not bend it. So when he ran, determined little lion’s head bobbing — hop, hop, his progress almost as much vertical as horizontal — he held his injured leg straight out, as if affably waving to approaching people.
If I detected they were not only compassionate but had a sense of humour, I claimed we’d taught him to do that — “and don’t think it wasn’t a hell of a job.”
Lameness apart, Kaylan was like every other dog — unexceptional yet unique. He slept at the foot of the bed, in winter on it. He snoozed on the office couch while I worked. He was the only creature on Earth eager to be with me 24 hours a day.
He had only one cute trick. We tried to break him of it. Couldn’t.
When a family member came home, Kaylan would rush to the door. After a hysterically happy greeting, he’d charge upstairs to a bedroom, seize a slipper, sometimes two, in his tiny mouth, and proudly prance into the living room, where he spoiled the trick by holding on while we pleaded with him — “Kaylan, drop!” Stubbornly, he refused, his plumed helicopter tail circling.
When I was perched in the only room in the house where I knew exactly what I was doing, he’d push the door open, and I’d cup my hands around his whiskery mutton-chop face and look into his loving eyes. The learned insist this is anthropomorphic — attributing human characteristics to the non-human — but dog (and cat) people know better. Pascal, great 17th-century mathematician, great Christian, wisely wrote: La coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point, “The heart has its reasons that reason does not know.”
Kaylan was put to sleep last month. He had kidney failure.
In his last days, and in the weeks since, I knew my abject grief was ambiguous. Some was for him. But it was also for the self-pitying survivor in the mirror.
How could this little bit of life fill so much space in a big house, bring compassion and a smile to the lips of thousands of passing strangers, and hop valiantly on three legs into every corner of an old man’s heart?
Former Vancouver Sun columnist Trevor Lautens writes every second Friday on politics and life with a West Vancouver bias. [email protected]
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