The Dog Gets It

 There is probably no explanation that would satisfy the dog. He’s buried out back, next to a stand of banana trees in our garden in Bali – the first dog I have “put down” because of something other than old age.

He had bitten me for the third time. In three years, he had bitten my wife, her father, her mother and the nanny, all more than once. Maybe it was aggression set off by getting hit by a motorcycle when he was a pup, as our vet said. That didn’t change that with a toddler in the house he was too big a liability. Boz the dog got the needle.

I was prepared to defend myself against expatriate dog rescuers once they heard, ready to tell them how growing up I had heard American farmers say they would never keep an animal they couldn’t trust; how dogs, instead of being just furry companions, are working animals that have to fit into the family unit; how I couldn’t shirk dealing with an unpredictable animal by fobbing him off on somebody else.

“Dogs is dogs,” I would have told the rescuer types had they accused me of “cruelty”. “When they can’t prove themselves this man’s best friend, something has to be done.”

I wasn’t prepared, though, for the silences that followed when Balinese neighbors and friends learned I had put Boz to sleep.

I had thought farmers and sons and daughters of farmers would understand, that they would accept the unfortunate necessity of sometimes having to put down an animal. A few of them, after all, admired Boz as potential satay – and many of them give their own dogs barely enough scraps to keep skin on bones.

None of them seem to care, too, about the mangy, homeless curs that slink everywhere in Bali, so diseased and infected and scarred that their stink gags from a distance. What, I thought, could my Balinese neighbors care about one less overweight, overindulged expatriate dog? Somewhere I miscalculated.

My wife started referring people to me when they asked about the dog. “Tell them what happened to Boz,” she’d say, as if putting him down wasn’t a joint decision. She still hasn’t told her family, ashamed we have taken such a heartless step, or maybe just weary of explaining why we felt the deed had to be done.

“Why did he do it?” local villagers kept asking the first few days after the news got around.

Most of them did not seem to regret merely that we had not given them a chance to feast on dog satay. They kept saying what a good dog Boz was – they were all scared witless of him – and after I explained about his serial biting, and how we were worried for our two-year-old son, still they would come back the next day.

“Why did he do it? Boz was a good dog.”

Boz was sometimes a good dog. He could be sweet. He liked to play ball and go for walks. I also had to approach him with care, never certain how he would respond to an extended hand. And when Boz was sleeping, he was best left to lie. We could give him injections and vaccinations only if the vet first used a sedative dart shot through a PVC blowpipe. Boz was more semidomesticated canine than family pet.

How to explain my Balinese neighbors’ reaction to his death? What was I missing?

Their collective grief didn’t seem to match the barely-there care most Bali dogs get. They seemed to have a horrified disbelief that anyone would take such as step. Balinese maybe have a sense that interrupting an animal’s normal course of life is presumptuous. Killing a dog for satay is part of the flow of existence, because people generally kill things to eat them, and some people do like dog satay.

Killing a diseased and mangy cur, though, simply because it is diseased, is troubling, because the dog has its own destiny to work out. Maybe it will get picked up by a rescue society. And killing a family pet, a member of the family, because it bites -- well, some dogs do, and maybe it seems wrong to Balinese to kill an animal for doing what comes naturally.

I can accept my act as unjust, and more my failure than Boz’s. Boz never saw it coming, never understood the possible consequences of his biting. His last 30 minutes – struggling first against the net and then fighting the sedative prior to the killing injection – were not a pleasure to him, the vet, the gardener or me. Maybe it was presumptuous to assume the power of life and death. It was still necessary, and now I have two new dogs that have shown no aggression toward any member of the household, and for that, I am grateful.

But as I said at the beginning, no explanation is likely to be acceptable to Boz. So far, no explanation has been acceptable to my Balinese neighbors either.  

+ T. Wynn King

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