Kindly Póg Mo Thóin

Just watched the Kentucky Derby.

Big Brown won, with great life story of the trainer (whose girlfriend was murdered in the next room from their daughter, who was with him at the Derby) and the jockey (seems he’s got a hearing-impaired son).

Really a great pull-away win.

But.

Eight Belles, the first filly in the race in 9 years, who took second place by more than the same margin that Big Brown beat her, broke down after the race and was euthanized because she broke both front ankles.

I was at Belmont Park for the Belmont Stakes in 1999, when Charismatic was supposed to take the Triple Crown, but he broke down at the end. It was a gorgeous fucking day in Queens, perfect temperature, no discernable humidity. My friends Rosalyn and Kevin were in town from Chicago; Roz was on business and Kevin was along for the ride (though he was from Kearney, where the pork store on The Sopranos is (sometime, remind me to tell you about my (very) peripheral involvement in the North Jersey and Connecticut mobs) and had moved to Chicago to get away from the mob thing).

Kevin lent me $50 to bet, because I had been misled by the Visa Triple Crown ads that they’d accept my debit card there.  I bet on Charismatic and a couple of other horses; Kevin wound up betting on the eventual winner, Lemon Drop Kid, because of a throwaway comment I made about him while I was looking at the race guide, that he was out of Seattle Slew.

In the end, Lemon Drop Kid won, Charismatic broke down at the finish, and Kevin won about $4000 on his bet based on my throwaway comment about Lemon Drop Kid’s parentage.  He also sprung for dinner that night.

The creepiest bit is that I’m fairly certain that the breeders will work hard to extract usable eggs from the corpse of Eight Belles.

When I got home tonight, there were several news trucks parked outside one of the neighboring buildings. It’s cold, so I didn’t go and ask what was going on and instead figured I’d watch it on the news.

Well, I just saw the news. And this is what’s happened.

This is just horrifying.

I’ve seen this dog around, and I can’t say that I know anything about the dog’s temperament, because I’m not permitted by my own dog to get anywhere near other dogs. But I had to put my last dog down because she bit me badly, in the face, when I discovered in quite the wrong way that she was an object guarder.

A lot of people were very angry with me for putting her down, including the dogwalker I used at the time, who called me up and screamed at me for being so irresponsible, said she’d have taken the dog, she couldn’t believe I would kill my own dog, etc., etc.

Mind you, this was a woman who was so stoned half the time that she couldn’t close the baby gate I used to keep the dog in the kitchen. You know, the kind where you just raise and lower the bar to get it to open and close.

But one thing I knew: I was not going to pass along a serious aggression problem to anyone else, particularly when it came in the package of a cute, friendly and seemingly happy-go-lucky dog. And I also knew this woman was not equipped to handle this dog’s issues (not that it turned out that I was, either, but she didn’t live with the problems and the constant challenges for domination).

And one of the scenarios I feared was that the dog would go to a family with children because she seemed playful and cute, and that the kids would get hurt when they tried to take something from the dog.  Or even got too close when she had something — which is where I ran afoul of her.  I’d never noticed this behavior because I’d never tried to take anything from her; everything was an exchange.  But the dog trainer I consulted after I was bitten asked me a few questions that threw everything into sharp relief: Had I noticed the dog freezing when I passed by while she was chewing something or eating?  Did she ever growl at me?  Was the skin broken?  On one side of the bite, or both? (Yes, yes, yes, and both).  Answer: she was an object guarder, the signs were there all along but I didn’t see them, and the severity of the bite meant that she meant to hurt me.

I’ve got no idea what happened with this dog, but the grandmother, who was babysitting, likely didn’t see the signs because while this was a trusted family pet, she probably wasn’t that familiar with it.  Could be the parents didn’t see them, either, if they weren’t looking.   But now they’ll probably have someone ask them a few questions, like the dog trainer did me, and all those little things that seemed a little odd at the time but were dismissed will start to fall into place, and they’ll wonder how they could ever have missed it.  And they’ll tear themselves up about it, with grief and guilt.

One of the people interviewed on the news tonight was my former dogwalker, who lives in that building.  I couldn’t hear what she was saying because my cable signal is breaking up pretty badly, but it opened a few old wounds to see her talking about something like this.  I suppose it’s too much to hope that maybe now she realizes that this is exactly the kind of thing I was trying to avoid by having my dog put down after remedial training failed to address her aggression.

You’ve finally given me something interesting to read while I clear out the spam trap. Trackback spam with quotes! A sampling:

If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow enobled and no-one dares criticize it — Pierre Gallois

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it — Woody Allen

Man has no right to kill his brother It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder — Percy Bysshe Shelley

And, finally, this one from “beef-witted setting”:

I must confess, I was born at a very early age — Groucho Marx

Good try, and I thank you for providing me better reading material than the folks who want to sell me porn and diet drugs, but I’m still not approving your trackbacks.