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| dog and the guy with him by It'sGreg/flickr.com/Creative Commons |
© Shamoni Sarkar
The light had
just changed to the white walking man, telling pedestrians they could now move.
At some point a few seconds earlier, a puppy had run onto the street and was
hit silently on its head by a passing car. When I turned around, a man was
holding up the last rushes of traffic while he lifted the puppy’s stunned body
with one hand and placed it gently on the sidewalk. He had a dog of his own– more
robust than the one that had been hit. It came close and whimpered to its
companion to hang in there. There was a large crowd by now, standing around
with confused urgency. Where on earth was
its owner? The puppy was breathing with effort. Slow spots of blood came
from its temple. It couldn’t move its head, so its eyes pointed straight up at
the crowd.
Then one of the
owners appeared. “Is she okay?” He asked with little conviction. He bent down to
look at her with real care and guilt, but this was clearly unfamiliar territory,
and he didn’t know how to proceed.
“It’s my
ex-wife’s dog. She’s a few blocks away. She’s just coming.”
He had found
himself the accidental owner.
For the first
five minutes, the puppy was resilient. Then she went to the bathroom on the
street. Her insides were slowly letting go. She had understood that this was a
big deal. People fetched some cardboard and made her a bed.
It was decided
that the ex-husband would get into the first taxi we saw and take the dog to
the nearest animal hospital (which people would look up for him on their
phones), and we would send his ex-wife there when she arrived at the scene.
At first the
cardboard didn’t fit through the taxi door, but finally the task was completed
with elegance. The ex-wife was almost there, so the man chose to wait. He
guarded her spot for her– in the backseat, next to her dog. The driver was
patient. Seconds later, a woman came running down the block. She was petite and
spontaneous– a distinct contrast from her ex-husband, whose large frame
contained many hesitancies. They crossed each other when he moved to the front
passenger seat and she threw herself into the back. She embraced her dog,
protecting its life. We waved the taxi away and breathed out our best wishes
after it.
My insides had
trembled when I saw the puppy lying there at the edge of the sidewalk, scared
stiff, staring up at us and imploring. I imagined the violence inside its
nimble body– the internal bleeding, the slowing heart rate, the mess. I felt
sad, inside and outside. My guess was that other people felt the same way, and
that this is what drove them to think on their feet and help out. A small,
dying dog was all that was needed for so much human concern. But at the end, the
people that came forward to help didn’t do so because of some grand duty to
humankind. There was an accident, and it needed prompt attention. From then on,
small moments of carelessness and bigger ones of precision moved everything
forward. The matter-of-factness of everything actually felt wrong to me for a
short while. It was as if I had been cheated of feeling something bigger. But
this was a lofty, unfair expectation, because there really was no better way
things could have turned out.
There was one
thing that made people give so much of themselves while still keeping a
distance– something about the fact that the victim was, after all, a dog. It
was someone’s pet– a living object of
that person’s affection. So it was at a strange halfway point between losing,
for example, a toy, and losing an actual person.
A dog is not just a toy, and so people acted out of care and respect for the life
of the dog itself. But, more importantly, they acted out of care for another human being’s capacity to care for a
life. Having found themselves in this emotional middle ground, they were
genuinely involved, but also strangely detached. They were not rescuing a
person, but an animal that holds the value
of a person for another person.
The ex-husband had
found himself in that same strange middle ground of having to take charge of
something that was of crucial importance to someone else he was close to. (But
this didn’t mean he didn’t care for the dog himself, and he meant every word
when he apologized profusely to her every time she whimpered in pain.)
But shouldn’t
the situation have a completely different meaning for the ex-wife? Pet dogs
bring out sides of us that often nobody else sees– we are playful, childish, and
excessively affectionate and loving. Pet ownership gives us these privileges. But
can this really be the same as loving one’s own child or a family member? Pets
do bring out special things in people, but they are still pets and people still
own them; they are living possessions
that we have chosen to love selectively. So losing one’s pet must be
fundamentally different from losing a person one loved.
But then, what
if the ex-wife lived alone and only looked forward to her dog’s company at the
end of the day? What if she had formed such a strong bond with it that it knew
secrets about her that nobody else did? What if her dog was the strongest
presence in her life, and she needed it more than she needed any other human
being? Would it still be a relationship of ownership and loving faithfulness?
Or would it be something quite different– something very human?
