The Day The Dogs Were Shot

(written in 1972)

I can’t sleep.  I keep trying to think of answers to the questions that came today

and that will come again tomorrow. The man shot their dog.  She is gone.  Nothing will

bring her back.  They have accepted that fact.  But the whys will come again tomorrow

as they try to reconcile their questions with what the man did and what he said.

The boys went looking for her this morning after only one dog came home alone

with a bullet wound. The bullet had passed through his shoulder just under the skin and

exited on the other side.  He was more traumatized than hurt.   They went searching for

their other dog. They were soon back from their search, hurt, sad and angry.  They found

Princess dead in the pasture. Without a word, the youngest got on his bike and rode

around and around the block to have time to control the tears. His brother immediately

released his anger verbally. Why did the man cuss and talk to them so ugly?  Their little

sister just listened in disbelief and started crying.

I first thought perhaps my older son’s account was an adolescent outburst of

emotion. When my youngest son returned and got off his bike, I asked him to tell me

exactly what the man said.  He repeated what his brother had told me.

Yes, it was ugly. The man was angry and let them know it in no uncertain terms.

He told them Princess deserved to die because she was running on his land. Then he

ordered them off his land.

The younger boy said, “Mom, he said all those bad words to us. He probably

never had a dog when he was a little boy and he hates dogs now.”

Then he asked, “Can a dog kill a cow?”

“No, but a dog can chase a cow and cause it to get hurt.”

“Did daddy ever shoot a dog for chasing cows when we had cows?’

“No, we never had any trouble with dogs.”

I think back to my childhood and remember that packs of stray dogs occasionally

bothered the baby calves. Our dog and the mother cows took care of the situation.  When

my father took out a gun, it was to shoot a rattlesnake or a skunk in the chicken house.

Those were the only animals I ever knew him to shoot.

The children had reminded me of an incident last spring before we moved to this new

town and new neighborhood.  A dog kept being a nuisance at night.  Princess and Butch

would chase him off, and he would promptly return. After several nights of disrupted

sleep, turned over trash, and holes dug around the chicken pen fence, their Dad tried to

catch the dog. The dog was the faster runner.  The next night he sprayed buckshot over

the dog’s head.  That didn’t scare him. .  When the dog returned the next night, their Dad

followed him home and talked to his owner. The problem was corrected.  We never saw

the dog again.

Why didn’t that man tell us if he thought she was chasing his cows?   I don’t know.  Do I tell them

perhaps the man thought most people would not do anything?   What do I think most people would do?

I do not know.  I only know what we would have done if the man had talked to us.  I cannot answer for

others.

We are on the last street of a new subdivision in this small town.   There is open pasture

behind the houses.   We moved here from the country in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.

There were citrus groves and canals around us.  The dogs had a morning ritual of running through the

citrus groves and along a canal every morning.  The time was always the same, between

8:30 and 9:00 AM.    The runs lasted about 15 to 20 minutes.  They took the same route

every day and the neighbors often commented that they enjoyed watching them run by.

They would return home and stay until the next morning when they repeated  the

routine.  I watched the dogs closely here. The pasture was like the home they had left.

They were country dogs.  They soon followed the same pattern, running in the

pasture behind the houses.   We erroneously assumed there was nothing they could

bother there. The runs were in the same time frame as their runs at their old home and

lasted about 15 or 20 minutes.  It was about 9:30 this morning when Butch came home

alone.

Later today their Dad found the man and confronted him. He was equally as

unhappy as the man.   He described their meeting as “head- on, direct.”   The man was 60ish

and not the landowner.  He had the land leased.  He had never seen our dogs before, but someone had

told him that they had seen some dogs chasing his calves.  He just shot the first dogs that

he saw.  It happened to be our pets, Princess and Butch.  We can never prove that Princess  never had

chased his calves, but this is little comfort to the children. She had never chased our livestock.

They  retrieved Princess’s body and buried her in the backyard.

Their Dad has no answers either. His question to me was, “What kind of man

talks to an eight year old boy that way after he has just killed his dog?”

I have no answer.  The discussion will return as the children mourn for their beloved pet.  Again,

I will not  have answers for them, only comfort as they accept the harsh reality.

 

Addendum:  A few weeks later Ken was telling a long time area resident about the incident.  The man knew the man who shot the dog and told Ken that he was surprised that he had confronted him.   He said, “Ken, he doesn’t just shoot dogs.  He just got out of prison for shooting a man.”  We never saw the man again and Butch’s morning runs stopped.