I go to the doctor and say, “Doc, every time I hit my hand with a hammer it hurts.”
The doctor says, “Stop hitting your hand with a hammer. That will be $300.”
I keep hitting my hand with a hammer, as it were, every time I read another story about an abused animal, and I read another story almost every week. Sometimes every day.
The latest (local) one is about a dog named Mystery, who was tossed out of a car window earlier this month in Teller County.
(Learn more about Mystery at the Teller County Regional Animal Shelter’s website, . Mystery is going to need a lot of repairs; you may want to donate.)
Her story comes a day after the report of two poisoned dogs in Firestone. Kyera and Dozer Boy both died.
One wishes — this one, at least — there could be a dog lovers’ “discussion” with the perpetrator outside of the hearing rooms.
I don’t shoot animals, run over them, or tape them to refrigerators. I don’t make dogs fight dogs or chickens fight chickens. I wouldn’t go to a bullfight if someone promised me a signed Picasso bullfight intaglio.
I don’t drown kittens or operate a puppy mill or smuggle exotic birds.
When I taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the 1970s, I saw packs of abandoned dogs roaming the campus after the spring term ended.
Apparently some entitlement brats needed a trophy dog during the school year to look cool, left the dogs behind and went back to mom and dad. The dogs eventually lived, and survived, like the boys in “Lord of the Flies,” who lost their codes of conduct and became feral scavengers — and dangerous ones.
I am not a psychotherapist, not even close. Human behavior is often inexplicable to me.
Treating women with condescension at any time for any reason is wrong, but it has gone on for centuries, hasn’t it? Some manly man is not far from you right now brow- beating his wife or girlfriend.
“One of these days, Alice, straight to the moon!”
By extension, some of us also pick on animals. They get in the way, bark too much, pee on the shag, or come between us and someone else.
“It’s me or the dog.”
I used to watch “Animal Cops” on the Animal Planet channel but stopped. One time a dachshund was featured. I can’t remember if he had a name, but I’ll call him “Frankie.” His owner had struck him in the eye with a hammer.
He didn’t hit his hand with the hammer. He hit his dog.
The eye looked like a very old prune and had to be removed. Frankie made it and was adopted and now he dashes all over the place, chasing balloons like a happy dog.
Frankie’s owner was fined and warned.
Another dachshund named Smitty was happy for Frankie, but unhappy with the punishment. Smitty’s own history is unknown, but it may not have been pleasant. When I adopted him, I was told that he had spent a lot of his first five years in and out of animal shelters.
Our dispositions are very similar. Neither one of us is particularly social.
He prefers one person at a time and is not very receptive to other dogs. Consequently we have been turned away by a number of boarding facilities.
I remind myself of the character in Camus’ “The Stranger,” the dog owner who walks his dog and grumbles and mutters things at the dog, but it’s found out late in the book that the owner deeply loves his little friend.
On our walks — sometime three, four, or five short ones a day — Smitty halts about every 5 feet to do some detective work, perhaps to see if a badger had been there (dachshunds were bred to hunt badgers). So I grumble and mutter — but I implicitly respect him and dearly appreciate the gift I have near me.
Best wishes, Mystery.
Craig Marshall Smith (craigmarshallsmith@comcast.net) is a retired emeritus professor of art and an abstract expressionist painter and lives in Highlands Ranch. He was a member of the 2009 Colorado Voices panel.
