on false compassion

On Tuesday night, the dog came back from the veterinarian's office, with droopy eyes and a ridiculously large cone around her neck. For the fourth time in less than two weeks, the poor beast – a two-hundred pound English mastiff – had undergone surgery to have her tail shortened, or, better said, to have the open mess of flesh and bone sewn back shut after she had chewed out the sutures. Why, you must be asking yourself, was she allowed to even get her mouth anywhere close to the freshly-closed wound? The answer, dear friends, is because of false compassion.

Her primary owner – a housewife in her forties with children of high-school age – had left the large, hurting bitch unsupervised on a number of occasions without properly restricting her ability to access the source of her pain. The woman had said repeatedly that she felt sorry because the dog had trouble getting around the house, bumping into things constantly with her plastic cone of shameful ridicule. Given her puffy eyes and despondent mood, oh, wouldn't it be nice to lift her suffering a bit by removing said shameful device and letting her lounge around, outside, by herself, next to her favorite tree. This woman's actions, of course, only added to the dog's suffering; her compassion proved false, harmful to her pet's well-being, dangerous, even, to its very life. The mastiff came within inches of death; had her owner not decided to spend another one-and-a-half thousand dollars to get the tail sewn back shut for the fourth time, the big bitch would have either been put down and cremated or taken into a nearby field, shot, and buried.

False compassion is similar to such false economy as is very often practiced by today's emotion-driven Americans, we who have been told to go with whatever our hearts tell us and that we can always buy whatever we want to buy in order to placate our slightest impulsive craving at our local convenience store, which is sure to open even at this time of night. Rather than practicing a bit of self-denial and self-control, we bash around and do what we think our gut is telling us to do rather than having a nice quiet sit and thinking about things for a while before acting. It was no better at the emergency room for pets, where I witnessed dozens of people fork over thousands of dollars for teeth cleaning, to buy a chemotherapy session for a fucking cat, and to try and save the life of a fourteen-year-old blind dog that was in its death throes, its body rigid and locked in seizure.

This is a touchy subject, one regarding which, I find while writing this article, I am in a sort of inner turmoil. At which point does one allow a giant dog into one's house, a dog recently rescued, a dog that shits and pisses on the floor every night for weeks, a dog that whacks her tail against the walls so badly when her new mistress returns from even the most brief trip outside that she develops a festering open wound that sprays droplets of blood with every wag? At which point does the damage caused to inter-human relationships by all the urine and blood and feces covering the inside of one's home compel one to give the dog away, to install a fenced-in kennel in the back yard, or to put the dog down quickly and quietly? The answers to these questions are hard to come by, but one question – whether to leave on the cone of shame or to let the dog waltz around a bit without it – has an easy answer: to reduce the bitch's overall suffering, one must leave the damn thing on, no matter her crocodile tears or pitiable whimpering.

場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit