The Dogs Were Rescued (And So Was I) (8 page)

The bus ride home from Agra took more than five hours, much of the time spent not moving at all, stuck in a long line of traffic with young boys waving at us from the streets and children posing for the photos we were taking from the bus window. Again, I watched for the animals. Over and over I noticed that people set out piles of vegetables for the cows, and occasionally poured kibble and food scraps out in piles for the dogs. These dogs were not pets, but it seemed they belonged. They knew where and when to expect food. I realized then that the dog at the Taj pond probably waited every morning for the gates to open. Every morning he trotted in for his drink and perhaps a roll on the dew-dropped lush grass on the grounds before starting his day on the streets. The Taj was home to him and the other dogs I’d seen outside the gates. His place in the universe.

It was nearly midnight when we arrived back at CVV home base. I had not slept on the bus, though at least my thoughts were now restful. I changed clothes quickly, trying not to wake my roommates. I crawled into bed and quickly fell asleep.

When I woke in the middle of the night, I had an email message from Chris.

Seamus was improving daily, Chris assured me, and it was then I remembered reading in my
Traveler’s Tales: India
book that dogs at a location were a sign of positivity. Maybe that would be true now in my own life.

Armed with that hope, and with the calm brought to me by the golden dog, I set out to salvage my second week in India from the ruin I’d wrought in my first. Groups would never be my thing, so I made efforts to get to know my fellow participants individually. By running out shopping with one of them, I learned she feared dogs and had never traveled far from home, let alone without any family. And I knew then, though she’d been joking and popular with everyone throughout the trip, how very difficult this all must have been for her being in a land where dogs run wild and the culture is so very different from ours. I had dinner out with a small group, and together we were late to the evening wrap-up session. Though the anger at a late arrival was palpable, this time I made amends by joining the conversation. I shared a story of a friendship I’d lost when I went through cancer. I defused the anger rather than stoking the fires, and I realized I missed the friend of whom I spoke. I tried to help another participant by trading volunteer placements for a day—she had wanted to go to Mother Teresa’s and instead was sent to teach at a school. Although the trade didn’t work out (Mother Teresa’s does not allow a one-day volunteer), I was sent to the school for a day and learned I could, in fact, deal with children. I knew that going in—there was a dog sleeping on a cart outside the school when I arrived.

I wanted to run from baggage claim, laden with my suitcases and packages, to Chris waiting in the car at curbside pickup, but I couldn’t. On my last day in India I sprained my ankle—I don’t even know how, but I guess it was inevitable with the roads and potholes and uneven terrain—but the injury and twenty hours of air travel had swollen my ankle to the size of my thigh (not small, if you were wondering). But I knew Seamus was in the car with Chris, and I needed to see him—alive and happy. Chris had texted me a photo of Seamus in his crate in the backseat of Chris’s car, along with a note:
We can’t wait to see you.
I couldn’t wait either. Nor could I move more than inches at a time without pain shooting up my leg.

When Chris saw me, he jumped out of the car and took the bags from me.

“What happened?”

“I have no idea. It started yesterday. Or two days ago now, I guess.” I opened the car door.

Seamus wagged his tail quickly, thumping the side of the crate. He greeted me with an enthusiastic howl. I opened the crate door and kissed his head, petting him and breathing him in. He was thinner, but not by much, and his energy seemed better than when I had left. Chris had not been deceiving me with his middle-of-the-night emails. Seamus was doing better. I closed the crate door.

“Sorry, Moose. We’ll get home and cuddle like mad.” I took my place in the passenger seat while Chris finished loading my luggage.

“You have no idea how glad I am to see you,” he said.

I kissed him. “I’m glad to see you too. It’s been a very long two weeks.”

“Tell me about it. Every minute for two weeks, I’ve worried about keeping this dog alive. I promised you he’d be here when you got back and I had to make that happen.”

“Were there problems?”

“No. Just in my imagination. If he sneezed, I panicked. When he slept, I worried he wouldn’t wake up. When he was awake, I worried he wasn’t sleeping enough. Let’s just say it was a stressful two weeks.”

“Agreed. Very, very much agreed.” I reached across and rested my hand on his thigh. Seamus’s tail tapped against the crate wall. I was exhausted and injured, but I was home.

• • •

Since Seamus was supposed to be kept calm, and I was recovering from…well, from India…we spent the next several days on the couch watching documentaries. (Okay, Seamus may have slept.)

The movies I’d been stockpiling were documentaries about food. Not “foodie” travel documentaries—not at all. No, these were films about where our food comes from—the abuse and torture of the animals that are the food “products” we eat. I’d watched
Forks
Over
Knives
at the suggestion of Julieanna, my plant-based diet guru, and now I moved on to
Vegucated
;
Food, Inc.
; and others. Each was progressively more explicit about the horrors inflicted on these animals during their short lives and at the moment of death, which was, I now knew, no short, quick “moment” as we’d all like to believe.

Considering what I was watching—and when I wasn’t watching I was reading—it’s a wonder I didn’t pet the fur right off the poor dog in a frenzy of love and protection. In my post-India state, knowing that my trip had been rescued by the vision of a dog, I contemplated more deeply my feelings about animals. I’d always felt a strong connection to all animals, but most of my focus had been on dogs. But now I was confronted with the subject of the animals we eat and how they suffer. I contemplated becoming completely vegan, but I was unsure where to start, and I had a dying dog home with me that took most of my focus and energy.

After each documentary, I turned off the television to look away from the images of dead pigs left to rot on piles of garbage, no more consideration given to what had been live, sentient beings than was given to the paper cups and rags in the piles below them. I had to look away from the “fryers”—chickens bred and held captive with their bodies pumped so full of growth hormones that they grow rapidly to a size their legs can’t support, leaving them crippled and in pain in the few short months they are allowed to live. I had to look away from the breeding sows kept for years in gestation crates so tiny they cannot turn around, covered in their own waste, breathing noxious fumes. I looked away from the former “family farmer,” now unable to compete against the large agri-business farm, going against her very soul by turning her own farm into a corporate-controlled factory farm, forcing her to treat “her” animals in a way so horrid that filming isn’t permitted because she’ll lose the farm if she allows it. I had to look away from it all. And yet I could not. I’d start another documentary or pick up another book until I couldn’t take it anymore.

I held Seamus close and let my tears fall into his fur—tears for him, for the cows, for the pigs, the chickens, the turkeys. I got up and poured myself a glass of wine, choosing to overlook that alcohol is a depressant and that was the last thing I needed then. Further into the bottle, I was crying for all of mankind, for what we’d become and berating myself for having been duped all these years, for not knowing where my food came from. I would do better. I had to.

Before I left for India, I had been having headaches and what I thought was probably anxiety attacks—waking up in the middle of the night, my temples pulsing, nightmares vaguely recalled, and my brain seemingly vibrating. In India, the insomnia and a bit of the shaking brain continued, I assumed because of exhaustion and perhaps the grief that was quickly enveloping me. Once I was home, I thought it would all stop. It soon became clear that my choice of “entertainment” was not helping. My nightmares became more violent.

When I was in treatment for breast cancer, I had nightmares that typically involved me losing control—sitting in the backseat of a car, unable to reach the steering wheel or brake to control the spinning, speeding vehicle; or the tried-and-true nightmare of showing up at school completely unprepared for the test to be taken and unable to find the room; and sometimes, of course, I was naked or half-dressed in these dreams. But the animal nightmares were worse because it wasn’t only me suffering. It was everyone around me. I’d be screaming at people to look at what was happening—the dog in the middle of the road with traffic swerving around it, the baby pigs squealing in pain as they were picked up by large bulldozers and thrown into mass graves—but no one saw what I saw. No one heard me. I’d wake, frightened, distraught, and unable to sleep for hours. Seamus followed me to the library and we’d sit together in the recliner. He’d fall back asleep and I’d read.

I read
Main
Street
Vegan: Everything You Need to Know to Eat Healthfully and Live Compassionately in the Real World
by Victoria Moran because that title was exactly what I wanted. Tell me how to do this in
the
real
world
. Tell me about compassion, because at that moment, I felt like hurting people (who, I don’t know…whoever was responsible for abusing and torturing those poor farm animals). I liked her take on being vegan—she too has a partner who is not vegan, and she makes no apologies for that. Her approach was much less “in my face” about the abuse of the animals, so I relaxed into the book.

Decide, then, that you can do this, because you can. You learned how to drive a car, program the DVR, and use your iGadgets; compared to those accomplishments, going vegan is a piece of Wacky Cake… The biggest obstacle most would-be vegans face is feeling different from other people, but you can change how you see that by replacing “different” with “pioneering.”

At three in the morning, this resonated with me.
Pioneering!
Yes, I
can
do this! I can be a pioneer and save all of those cows and chickens and those adorable little piglets! Although, actually, I never have learned how to program the DVR…

• • •

The following week, Chris and I both took Seamus for his next chemo appointment, and I was able to speak to the doctor myself. She was kind, tender with Seamus and with me. Since returning from India, I’d felt calmer about what I knew was inevitable. We would lose Seamus. But I was determined to give him as much time and as much quality of life as I could. I thought often of the dog at the Taj Mahal, so quiet and dignified, and somehow so natural there before the Monument to Love that is the Taj. But that did not make hearing that my own dog’s disease was terminal any easier. I sat, tears rolling down my face, as Chris rubbed my back and choked back his own tears. Seamus was returned to us, his left leg sporting a bright purple bandage from where the IV had been inserted and the chemo pumped into him. This scene had been so oft repeated, with him, with me, and now with him again, that I wondered if chemotherapy, doctor’s offices, and IVs would forever be a part of my life.

Our next stop was the holistic pet food shop, PetStaurant. I’d become friends with Kelle—“Mom” to Bogart from the Beagle Freedom Project—after meeting her at our Words, Wine, and Wags event, and she had referred me to Marc and his shop. Marc, she told me, was a genius with supplements and holistic diets that fight cancer.

When I called Marc and explained Seamus’s situation, he asked me what my goal was.

“I want to give him as much time as possible. I want as much quality of life as possible.”

“You know this is incurable, right?” he said.

“Yes. I know.”

“Okay. Because I don’t want to lead you on. I don’t want you thinking we can cure cancer with food or supplements.”

I was relieved to hear him say that. While I was more open and certainly more interested in food and natural supplements for improving health, I had not come so far as to abandon Western medicine altogether, nor did I believe we could eliminate all disease simply by eating better. If he had promised to cure cancer with dog food, I would not have listened to anything more he had to say. I would have thought he was a nut. Instead, I listened to him. He disagreed with chemo for Seamus and suggested we stop it. The chemo, he said, would lessen his quality of life. Chemo was hard on the body.

I knew this, of course. Firsthand and from watching Seamus the first time, I knew this, but I also believed that chemo had saved Seamus the first time and had quite possibly saved me, so I had made an appointment to see Marc after the second chemo appointment. The vet had agreed that after three chemo rounds, we’d be able to tell if it was helping. We’d be in a better place to know whether to continue. I wanted to hear what Marc had to say; maybe traditional and holistic medicines would tell us to stop.

Marc’s shop was only ten minutes from the cancer center in Los Angeles. It was small but well stocked. He greeted us immediately and bent down to pet Seamus, who was straining at his leash to get at the food—any of it.

“He seems to have good energy,” Marc said.

“He does. He loves his food,” Chris said.

“That’s a good sign.” Marc stood up again. “So tell me about his diagnosis.”

I began to tell him. When my voice cracked and the tears started again, Chris took over. Marc listened carefully, periodically handing Seamus a treat and petting his domed head.

“This is hard,” Marc said. “But there are some things we can do. Definitely, I’d stop the chemo. And we’ll add supplements—enzymes, colostrums, and probiotics.”

I looked up. I remembered my online acquaintance, not-old-man River. He’d suggested the very same thing.
What
if
I
had
listened
to
him
then? Was this all my fault?

“Okay. Yes. We’ll do that. Do you have those things?” I said.

“Absolutely. And can you make a raw diet for him?”

“We feed him The Honest Kitchen.”

“That’s a very good food. But let me show you something better in this case.” He showed me the frozen containers of his own raw diet for dogs, prepared by hand with a menu that sounded like it came from a Michelin-starred restaurant. Then he gave me a list of foods to add to Seamus’s diet wherever I could. Many of them were the foods I’d been adding to my own diet: broccoli, spinach, cabbage, bok choy, red and yellow bell peppers.

We bought the supplements, loaded up on the frozen raw diet containers, and selected several packages of treats that were also on the “approved” list. I wanted Seamus to have a good quality of life, and to a beagle, food
is
quality of life.

The next morning, before I made myself a kale smoothie, I made Seamus’s breakfast. I reached for the containers we’d brought home from Marc’s store and read the labels: lamb, pheasant, quail, Cornish game hen, Angus beef. The ingredients were quite literally the stuff of my nightmares. And yet, suddenly, I could only make myself feel vaguely guilty over these animals. The documentaries I watched, the reading I’d done—that was enough to keep me on the plant-based diet without being tempted to cheat. If I thought about adding cheese or having a burger, all I had to do was think of the animals and the moment passed. But now, all I cared about was giving Seamus every possible moment of life. Did this make me a hypocrite? Probably. Or perhaps I had much more to consider about the cycle of life and the food chain. I don’t know. I just knew I wanted the best for Seamus. Selfish? Yes. Perhaps.

I remembered a hilarious comment we heard while traveling a couple of years back when Chris led wine tours in the South of France. A couple on this particular trip with us was vegan, though that hadn’t been mentioned in advance. Our French friends who helped make the arrangements for the group scrambled to get the meals taken care of. Rachel, who is American but married to a Frenchman and living in rural Southern France, called the owner of the restaurant where we had a twelve-course meal with wine pairings arranged. This meal had been the highlight of trips past, and there was nothing vegan about it. We heard only Rachel’s side of the phone conversation, and it was clear she was having trouble explaining the concept of “vegan” to this Frenchwoman. Suddenly Rachel burst out laughing. She shared the conversation with us, describing the Frenchwoman’s frustration, which had culminated in the totally French, exasperated exclamation, “But they will eat
foie
gras
, no?”