George Bailey hadn’t stood up in more than a day. He hadn’t even given his tail a wag. But we didn’t think he was dying. Not at first.
Bailey usually had all the spunk you’d expect from a 9-year-old Welsh terrier, which is plenty. But in the days following Christmas, he lay on the living room rug, eyes dull, breathing torpid and shallow.
The fault was ours. If we had trained Bailey properly, he wouldn’t be suffering from an epic brie hangover.
It’s not that we hadn’t tried to teach the dog to behave. We had hired a trainer to help us avoid the mistakes we had made with our first Welshie, Zuzu, who had ruled the household for a decade with a queenly hauteur. During the first session the trainer was visibly frustrated that Bailey shrugged off his surefire training tricks; the second week the pup put on a master class of willful stubbornness. There was no third session. The obedience man just emailed us a list of breeds ranked by their trainability. Welsh terriers were at the bottom. I always suspected the trainer had typed up the list himself to hide his humiliation.
With some patience and perseverance, Bailey did ultimately learn the basics. He could sit like nobody’s business. But we never did break him of his habit of hunting hors d’oeuvres. Any time we had guests and dared to put snacks on the coffee table, vigilance was the watch word. Bailey would bide his time, cheerfully making the rounds for pets and skritches, just waiting for the cocktails or conversation to lower our guard. He would lunge, snatch what food he could get, and hold out under the dining room table, defending his prize with low growls and a fearsome display of terrier teeth.
Christmas night we had a house full of family. My wife had just put out a tray of cheeses and gone to get a bottle of champagne when I came in from walking the dog. Unthinkingly, I took Bailey off his leash. He bolted straight for the unguarded brie and seconds later was under the table with a quarter-wheel of the mushy stuff. Bailey didn’t bother to defend it, didn’t try to eat it at his leisure. No, he just swallowed it whole.
Come the next afternoon, Bailey was bloated and listless. I have to admit thinking it served him right. The day after that, the poor dog was worse; by the evening we were alarmed. His vet being on Christmas vacation, we trundled Bailey to the animal hospital. The doctor there guessed the dog had cheese-induced pancreatitis, took some blood, gave us some pills to administer the patient at home, and charged us $547.
The next day we got a frantic call from the dog hospital. Bailey’s blood work had come back, and it was code-blue, crash-cart stuff. We returned to the ER, where the vet explained that the dog must have a bleeding tumor, likely malignant. They were readying the operating room for exploratory surgery. If successful, the surgery would buy Bailey an extra month. Successful or not, it would cost us many thousands of dollars.
I declined.
The vet paused and then suggested we might as well go ahead and put Bailey down right then and there. “No one will think badly of you,” she said in a tone that suggested she thought badly of me. I paid $442 for the consult and took Bailey home.
We made him as comfortable as we could and waited for the worst. Bailey hung on for a couple of near-lifeless days. The emergency vet’s words festered. We finally decided to call a service that makes house calls to euthanize suffering pets.
My wife was put on hold by the canine Kevorkian. While she waited, distraught and distracted by her terrible task, she noticed a snuffling at her ankle. Startled, she looked down and there was George Bailey, up on all fours, his tail wagging away.
Some three months later, Bailey is his old rascally self, chasing bunnies out of the backyard. If there were any brie in the house he would surely be stalking it. He isn’t any better behaved, but he is doing his best to stay away from those who would prematurely push pentobarbital.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
