Tilla, 1996-2007

Attention Conservation Notice: My dog is dead, and I write about him in some length.

We’re one dog down these days. We had to put Tilla to sleep.

I got Tilla while I was in graduate school, in February of 1997. I had decided I wanted a dog, but I thought I wanted an adult dog, something around fifty pounds, maybe already calmed down. I had gone down to the pound for a couple of Sundays, looking for a dog and not seeing the right one.

Tilla was stuck in a cage with a litter of Labrador puppies that were contentedly gnawing on his ears and feet. He was brown, about eighteen pounds of mostly feet and tail, and timid as can be. I got him untangled from the tangle of puppy, sat him down and tried to ask him what sort of dog he was. He walked over, looked up at me, fell over and peed on my shoes. Despite my better judgement, I decided that he was the sort of dog that I wanted.

I thought he was six months old at the time, which would have probably put him around fifty pounds at adulthood, but the vet took one look at him and decided he was more like four months. He was also handshy, already had a shaky grasp on house training, and had a half-healed broken tail. It didn’t take a lot to figure out that he hadn’t had much of a good life up to that point.

I didn’t know what to name him for a while, so he got tagged with any number of names, many referring to his timidity and fearful peeing. (When he peed on me at the pound, I had no idea that was how he would interact with much of the world.) For reasons that might have made sense at the time, the choice came down to Attila or Clyde, and somehow Attila stuck long enough to get on the paperwork despite its obvious unsuitability. (Attila conquered Rome, he didn’t drown it in urine). We shortened it to Tilla, and that and his timid nature ensured that strangers called him “her” for most of his life.

Tilla was a project. He took to house training fairly well, except that if anything startled him, he peed. We had to tell guests that the dog was friendly, but not to look at him or he would pee on them. Some guests took this better than others, and in retrospect, it was probably a good way to tell who we really wanted in the house. At first I thought he was part boxer because of his big feet and his tendency to lead with his paws (I still have a scar on my arm from one of his paw slaps), but he grew into his feet and turned out to be some sort of brown hound mix. We gave him delusions of proper breeding by telling people he was part Rhodesian ridgeback. It might have been true, if you assume he was a ridgeless runt of the litter. He chewed through everything as a puppy, ripping through rope bones and nylabones at a rate that my grad student paycheck couldn’t support. At one point, I gave serious thought to the idea that he was part hyena. He hated birds, and once snatched an overly obnoxious blue jay out of the air. He was lean, fast, and wait, damn it, grab a towel.

He got better over time, as other dogs moved into the house, then some new people moved into the house, then one of those people moved into my room, then we all moved out of the house together. Through a constant stream of people and dogs coming over for parties and brewing and basketball games, he slowly got used to the idea that people could raise their hands about their head without it meaning that he was about to get hit. He never did get used to riding in a car, and the only way he could handle the excitement was to whine and squeak the entire trip. This made long car rides painful for all concerned. He loved to go to the beach, where he would swim in the ocean as far as the leash would take him (given a big enough leash, he would have swum to Europe), bark hoarsely at jellyfish and grab them in his mouth until they stung him, and get so overwhelmed by the muchness of it all that he would start squeaking at everything until he was so exhausted that we would have to carry him.

After another move or two, we got another dog, who was younger and bigger than Tilla. This seemed to be the final piece of Tilla’s rehabilitation; given a dog to look down on, he seemed happy with his place. He stopped peeing on guests, developed a taste for humping other male dogs in the rib cage, and settled down to a life of being a middle-aged dog. We used to say that he went from a puppy to an old curmudgeon one day, but what we didn’t realize for some years is that his thyroid had stopped working.

When we moved across the country, my wife loaded both dogs into the back of the truck, more than 200 pounds of dog between the two of them, and drove them from North Carolina to California. Tilla yarped the entire breadth of the country. Once we got him on thyroid medication, he regained some of his young dog vigor. He even adjusted reasonably well to the baby, although he never quite knew what to do with a little person who obviously couldn’t walk or talk and kept trying to poke his nose.

About a month ago, he seemed to lose some appetite. We took him to the vet, and it turned out he was anemic. We put him on some drugs, and the drugs worked a little, but last week something broke inside him, and we had to put him to sleep. He went quickly, and I’d like to think it was better than a lingering illness with lots of treatments, but I cried anyway. He was eleven years old.

Tilla wasn’t the smartest dog around, or the bravest. He didn’t really have the tools to deal with the world, but he tried hard. He had the courage of the coward who never stopped trying. He was sweet and friendly, and if people didn’t like him, it was their failing. He was a good dog.

Tilla, in July of 2007, hunting lizards.