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| My wife and I knew we wanted a dog when we moved to D.C. from Massachusetts for the sole reason that we lived in an apartment complex that allowed dogs. She was very much in favor of adoption since there are so many good dogs out there without homes. As for me, I thought anything with four legs and two eyes would be fine. We came close. We found Grendel the Dog at an adoption fair put on by the Rappahannock Animal Shelter. The fair was held inside a PetSmart Pet Store, which in retrospect seems a bit cruel, what with it being chockfull of smells that will either make dogs hungry or piss them off or both. Most of the dogs were barking loudly and pawing at their cages (their thought process is as follows: “I’ll bet I can get out of here if I bark real loud. BARK BARK BARK. Now I’ll try the door. Damn, no such luck. Oh I know, maybe if I bark real loud. BARK BARK BARK. Nothing doing. Perhaps if I….”). However there was one little black and gray dog laying down in his cage, staring straight ahead and making no sound, like a kid lying in front of the TV watching cartoons on a Saturday morning. They brought him out of the cage so we could see him, saying he was mostly Lhasa Apso with a little wiener dog thrown in. He had extremely short hair, almost down to the skin. He was cute in the same way a baboon was cute -- ugly, but with style. He moved tentatively, the way a soldier would walk through a minefield. Then they said, “It really is such a shame about his eye.” It was only then that we noticed his left eye was missing – his fur was so dark you couldn’t tell unless you really looked. Apparently someone had found him very near death, his skull almost crushed. The vets surmised that someone likely kicked him in the head, and possibly worse since he had scars under his fur (he had to be shaved to repair the damage, thus the short fur). This dog was roughly the size of a skateboard and couldn’t weigh more than 15 pounds soaking wet. I leave it to you to wonder what he could have done to deserve such treatment. Despite the fact that the shelter was willing to let him go for free (not a lot of demand for one-eyed dogs, I guess) we paid our $150 adoption fee and brought him home. Our first move was to change his name from Hoover (ick) to Grendel, after the Beowulf demon, who also had one eye. (My wife and I, both English majors, though this was a hysterical bit of irony, like calling a black cat “Snowball”). We brought him to the vet for routine post-adoption tests. “He’s fine,” the vet said, “Only his skull may collapse in a few months.” This was clearly a new definition of “fine” of which I was previously unaware. Most people have dogs that are too fat, or have fleas. Mine had a collapsing skull. Apparently, since Lhasas have such big eyes in comparison to their skulls (they look a bit like the Power Puff Girls), there was a possibility that without his eye his head would fall in on itself. Fortunately, this never happened. Upon leaving the vets, the receptionist asked us a question we would be asked many more times in the future: “Did you know your dog only has one eye?” This question has now become so commonplace my wife I respond with “WHAT? OH MY GOD! WHERE THE HELL IS HIS OTHER EYE?”. Or even better, if he’s being groomed or boarded, we say “Well he had two when he came in here! I think I deserve a discount!” He was very jittery when we first brought him home, which we were told is normal for dogs that have been abused. He would slink to his food bowl, take one piece of food in his mouth, and then run under the coffee table to eat it. This didn’t strike me as odd, however, since I eat very much the same way when my wife is watching. He had trouble adjusting to the loss of peripheral vision as well, since he would turn his head quickly and bump it on a table, or flat out run into things. But he would spring back up, seemingly happy as a clam, as if nothing had ever happened. (I couldn’t tell if this was an image thing, like when you trip and nearly fall on a crowded street but then keep walking as if nothing happened, or if it was because they had removed a hunk of his brain when taking out the eye…having lived with him for three years now, I’m leaning towards the latter theory). To sum up, he’s one of the best-behaved dogs I’ve ever seen. He hardly ever barks, even at other dogs, and loves meeting other people (especially children). Even better, he seems to have adjusted to the one-eye thing. Not to get on a soap box, but I’d like to see more folks adopting from shelters like Rappahannock, rather than going for those fancy two-eyed dogs the breeders are hawking these days. It’s a safe bet that as a shorthaired, one-eyed Lhasa/wiener mix you won’t see him on the podium at the Westminster, but we think he’s pretty cool just the same. |
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