Inside Puppywishes

By Adam Stone

From The Upcoming Book, Ghost In The Dog.

 By Adam Stone

The odds have finally beaten me. After years of training problem dogs I have lost a body part: the tip of a finger. Where once there was a long elegant digit, there now exists an ugly stump. Part of me thinks that I shouldn’t grumble; after all, I am a dog trainer who specializes in the treatment of unwanted dog aggression. It is not as if I were taken by surprise - not at all. On the contrary, I have made, and still make today, a deliberate effort to seek out and rehabilitate dogs that behave aggressively. I am, therefore, in no position to complain that one of the dogs I was training lashed out and dismembered me. Or am I?

As I sit here laying out the words that I hope will become a published website, I can’t help but think of all the events that led up to my painful dog training incident. When did I first decide to work with aggressive dogs? How did I become a popular enough dog trainer to gather clients from across the continent? And did I ever truly believe that I could be severely wounded by a dog I was training? Moreover, I think about all the events that transformed a normal puppy into the monster that maimed me for life. What on earth could have happened to transform a puppy into a guillotine?

I think.

I think.

And as I am contemplating all of the insidious and cumulative events that converged to create my unfortunate accident, I cannot escape the dreadful notion that it was, in fact, not accidental at all. I say this because I am forced to also consider the lamentable and bizarre manner in which the dog’s owners reacted to the news of my mangled hand.
 

“Are you sure it was our dog that attacked you?” They said.

Yes.
 

“How much of your finger did he bite off?”
 

Almost half.
 

“He’s really not that bad. He could have bitten off the whole thing.”

And I’m sure he would have if I had not stopped him.

“Perhaps he just misses our children and is acting out.”

I’m surprised that your children have not been seriously hurt.

“Do you really think he is that violent?”

He bit off half of my finger.

“But he has never been aggressive to anyone before.”

I find that hard to believe.

“Why?”

Because you hired me to stop his aggressive behaviour.

“Oh. Perhaps you’re right. How long will it take for you to get him trained?”

I don’t think he can be trained.

“Why not?”

Because he crossed the line. He went too far. He bit my finger off and it is simply too risky to keep a dog like that around.

“You don’t think we should put him down?”

Yes, I do.

“Why? He is such a nice dog.”

He bit my finger off!

“So?”

So!

“You told us that he only bit off half.”

That’s more than enough.

“Are you sure that it was our dog that hurt you?”

Yes.

“How can you be sure?”

I was there.

The lightening bolt struck and something truly disturbing became abundantly clear. They did not realize that their dog was aggressive. They had been living with the problem for so many years that the aberrant had become normal. Black and white had melted into a comfortable shade of gray. It was then that I realized how the depths of the human mind could warp great truths and concepts. Suddenly the world was much clearer to me, and my role as a dog trainer had become so much more than I had ever imagined.

The Accident, Part Two

I had always imagined that losing a finger would be terribly painful. In actuality, the severance felt merely as though my finger had been suddenly dipped into a cup of ice water. It was only when I raised my hand to my face to see why my finger had become so cold, that I realized part of it was missing.

Perhaps the velocity of the bite surpassed the rate at which the nerve endings scream out to the brain. Perhaps the overall attack was so ferocious that the critical moment was lost in the whirlwind of more calamitous possible outcomes. Or perhaps I simply was not prepared to believe that such a horror could occur a mere twenty seconds after blowing out my birthday candles. But it did.

That November 13th had felt like one of the longest days of my life. My house was overflowing with sixty or more dogs that had come from many different parts of the world to benefit from my “magic touch”. There was a Boxer that attacked babies, a Golden Retriever that had bitten more than a dozen children, and a Chow that had almost killed her owner over a bowl of soup. There were large dogs that looked exactly as you would imagine an aggressive dog to look, and even larger ones that appeared angelic until you moved too quickly or asked them to do something they found disagreeable.
My four thousand square-foot home was almost perfectly centered on my six-acre property. Much like my childhood Lego house, my farmhouse utilized every room, hallway, nook and cranny, but this time my tenants were far larger and potentially more dangerous than a community of spiders.

The main floor of the house boasted nine rooms, each with two or three separate doorways leading in and out. The second floor was equally spacious, but doorways were limited to one per room. A giant loft on the third floor reached up twenty feet to a majestic cathedral ceiling and a skylight that crowned the house.

The kitchen had dark oak cupboards, and an awe-inspiring ceiling that had been crafted from various slivers of wood. The old floors, once neglected and infested with worms, had become so worn that they transcended shabbiness and became regal in their own right.

The house was reported to be two hundred years old and, having survived the psychedelic renovations of the sixties and seventies, retained much of its old country charm and humble Canadian warmth that has been lost in so many larger cities. But it wasn’t this feeling that impressed me when I first saw the house. It was the rooms. With each owner the house grew a new wall, and with each baby, a complete new room. I was delighted to learn about an elderly woman who moved in with her daughter in the early eighties. Her arrival gave birth to an entire addition at the back of the house – an addition that would subsequently become known as “the Dog Room” and harbour many of Canada’s most dangerous dogs until they were ready to return to city life.

This is where I lived. I ate breakfast surrounded by nasty Rottweilers and cut my grass while dodging the violent advances of demented Dobermans. There wasn’t a corner, hallway, piece of furniture, or morsel of land where a dog could not be found. They were everywhere. They came from everywhere. And there was not a week that passed in which a new one did not arrive.