A Bad Memory

An article from Bark Magazine: a bad, year-old memory, but one I need to link to.

Pix

More pix can be found here.

One Year Later

A year and a month after last posting to this blog, Julia and I finally feel at home in our new city of Austin, Texas. We've had our two Boston Terriers, Spencer and Sydney, for twelve months now and are generally pretty happy, which is fairly amazing given the fact that we had to begin again from nothing.

Recently I found some pictures of Griffin and Zoe that I'd thought were lost. I will be posting them here so that they can live on in the collective internet memory.

It's hard to think of having dogs other than Griffin and Zoe. It's even harder to think of having dogs that aren't pit bulls. All I want is another red-nose boy, but I know the odds are that I won't be able to have one. Austin is populated almost entirely by apartment complexes and fourplexes and duplexes and none of them are very welcoming of so-called "vicious" breeds. My wife is warming to the idea of having a male/female pair of Boston Terriers. They're bully-type dogs, but much smaller and not subject to the type of discrimination that Griffin and Zoe were. It seems that this will be the way we have to go, unless it turns out that we decide to move somewhere else.

I feel compelled to respond to some posts that I have read elsewhere concerning Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, as regarding to people and their pets.

The fact is, neither I nor my wife made a choice to let our dogs die. I'd lived in New Orleans for thirty-plus years and survived many a hurricane. We didn't expect the city to be devastated. No one expected the city to be devastated. Call it naivete. Call it ignorance. Call it stupidity. Call it what you want. But we fully expected to be back in a couple of days to get our dogs.

And, frankly, we would have been if the levees had not been breached. The catastrophic flooding that occurred in New Orleans was not directly caused by rainfall. It happened because three major levees broke wide open, allowing the city (which is below sea level and resembles a bowl) to fill up with water from the lake and river.

If we'd had any inkling how bad things were going to get, we never would have left Griffin and Zoe behind. And, if we'd had any idea that the SPCA was not going to rescue them at the same time they rescued EVERY other animal in the hospital, we would have broken through the police barricades and risked sniper fire to save them. We loved those dogs more than anything in the world and will never, ever leave our animals behind in the future, no matter what the circumstances.

Does anyone know this handsome, red-nosed boy? He was rescued from Lamar-Dixon by a kind soul who is currently searching for his owner. He is said to be great with people and other dogs, but not so fond of cats.

An email from the LA SPCA has been forwarded to me. In it, the LA SPCA claims that my dogs were dead at the time of the rescue. I want to believe that the LA SPCA is being truthful, but it is hard for me to do so. After the rescue we were immediately told that TWO dogs were found dead: a collie and a shepherd. There was no mention of two dead pit bulls. This is the FIRST time anyone has mentioned that there were FOUR dead dogs.

It's hard for me to believe that two extremely healthy 2 1/2-year-old pit bulls could not survive without food and water for three or four days. A sickly 14-year-old boxer mix survived. A 9-month-old bulldog puppy survived. Many much smaller dogs survived. All the cats, including a kitten, survived. But my strong, young dogs did not? It is possible, I know, but it is also very hard to believe. Time will heal my wounds, no doubt, but I will always wonder about my dogs' deaths. For those who have followed Griffin and Zoe's story, I ask you to just remember them as the wonderful, loving dogs that they were and keep their memory in your heart. This will be my final post, unless events warrant otherwise.