DOG IS GOD SPELLED BACKWARD; LOSING CAESAR, GAINING BOGEY BEAR

DOG IS GOD SPELLED BACKWARD, for a reason.

       Who was it who said until you have truly loved an animal, your soul is not fully open?  Or something like that.  Ah, here it is: “Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened.”

― Anatole France

       And another: “When animals express their feelings they pour out like water from a spout. Animals' emotions are raw, unfiltered, and uncontrolled. Their joy is the purest and most contagious of joys and their grief the deepest and most devastating. Their passions bring us to our knees in delight and sorrow.”

― Marc Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy - and Why They Matter

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LOSING CAESAR, GAINING BOGEY BEAR

       Eight and a half years ago, shortly after we moved to Central Oregon, when we answered an ad for Rottweiler puppies in Bend we didn't know how much our lives would be enriched and forever changed.  I had just finished reading Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series, and the name Caesar seemed fitting for the little fellow who was the only pup in his litter to wake up and crawl across his littermates to sniff Walt's hand.   Walt picked him up, handed him to me, and he nibbled on my chin, thus sealing his choice of us for all time.  He was just five weeks old, and we couldn't take him home for another two weeks.  Over the course of his life with us I often talked about writing a book called Raising Caesar, but it never quite materialized.

       Caesar was our second Rottweiler, the first having been a female rescued from a man who had a heart condition forcing him to give up the dog. We named her Lava, and her world greatly expanded from the small RV in which she had been living when we brought her home to our 17 acre sheep farm in the Willamette Valley.  She marveled at the moving hands of a clock, images on a TV, fish swimming in the aquarium - all new things for her, and watching her wonder was new for us.

       Rottweilers are a special breed.  If you are ready to be followed from room to room, to never be out of the sight of your dog, you may be ready for this kind of relationship.  It's a big responsibility, one that leaves you in awe, humbled, wanting to be worthy of this kind of devotion. 

       When Caesar was five, we almost lost him in what turned out to be an Addison's Disease crisis; he had days when he wouldn't eat and we simply thought perhaps he'd eaten a rabbit somewhere on our ten acres and just wasn't hungry.  When the crisis came Walt had to carry him to the vet; his body temperature had dropped to 95 degrees and his adrenals had failed forever.  But modern medicine had an antidote, and with continuous expensive medication and nutritional supplements he made a recovery that we hoped would be a lot longer than the three and a half more years it lasted.  He became an amazing, 150 pound gentle giant Rottweiler who understood us and everything in his world so perfectly it should have lasted forever.

       For six months this year we had planned a vacation for early August, going back to Maine for a family reunion. But in mid-July, Caesar stopped eating again, and we cancelled our flights because we wouldn't leave him in anybody else's care. Nothing would entice Caesar to take a bite on his own; we began feeding him by hand, first raw hamburger, then cooked, then only roasted chicken, then a mix I made in my Vitamixer that was more balanced than pure protein. We fed him by plastic spoon so that it wouldn't hurt his mouth.  Because he loved us, when he stopped taking food from our hands voluntarily he allowed us to stick our fingers between his teeth, open his jaws, and insert spoonfuls of yogurt, cottage cheese, kibble mash, chicken, and a variety of supplements we thought might possibly help him regain his health and vigor.  Nothing worked; he lost muscle mass, had a galloping heartbeat, and was very suddenly, very old. 

       Tired of flying blind, we took him back to a vet for help and a diagnosis.  A complete blood panel showed that his Addison's was perfectly controlled; this wasn't the problem.  His blood said everything seemed normal, but it wasn't at all normal; Caesar was dying and our hearts were breaking.   We took him to another vet we greatly respected for a second opinion and got a confirmation of our worst fears; his time was limited and there was no happy prognosis.  After we tried some drugs to lessen his edema and it made him horribly sick, the next day we made the wrenching decision to let him go. He had been telling us for over a month that it was his time and we just didn't want to hear it.  We couldn't bear to accept it.   I can barely write this through tears even now. We spent his last two nights lying with him out under the stars on our front lawn, where the cool grass gave him some comfort. And it let us stay as close to him as we possibly could.

       On Caesar's last day with us, good friends came over to see him one last time and we all took some pictures and videos.  Caesar rallied, carried the paper in again, something Walt had taught him to do at seven weeks old; he gave us love bites, greeted his favorite friends and played with his pack mates, four female dogs of other breeds, all rescues, with almost his old enthusiasm before exhausting his energy.  We finished the day doing the inevitable and taking him to a crematorium called Annie's Healing Hearts.  His ashes are now with us in a wooden box on my piano with a memorial plaque given to us by other friends who also knew him and how much we loved and would always miss him, a soul so pure and perfect it defies description.      

       We were grieving, are grieving still, but fate took a surprising turn.  We had been surfing the internet looking at Rottweiler rescue sites and found nothing in Oregon; we said we didn't want to have to drive to New Mexico or some other far away state to get a dog.  When Caesar got sick, I had emailed a  breeder of champion Rottweilers we had met a few years ago in Bend and asked her if she knew of any that were available.  I hadn't heard back from her, so we didn't hold out much hope that she was still in our area.   Then three days after we lost Caesar we got an email from her saying she had a lead on a three year old male Rottweiler whose owner had just died; were we interested? When the email came in I was in the kitchen, Walt was on the computer.  I heard him exclaim,  "Omagod, we have a dog!!"  (He denies this, but he said it.)

       We responded immediately, yes, we were interested, and she gave us a telephone number to arrange a meeting with the woman handling the situation, who, we were told, was very eager to place this dog, not an easy thing to do.  We agreed to meet the dog the next day, Labor Day, not knowing anything more about the situation.  The next morning the newspaper was full of the story:  a 78 year old woman had been brutally murdered near Sisters, and we realized this was her dog. 

       We drove to Sisters and waited with friends until the crime scene was cleared and we could go to the house where the dog was chained to his doghouse, confused and growling if anyone touched his collar.  We walked up and saw a beautiful, 110 pound intact male Rottweiler with a massive head and a 26 inch neck, a German type smaller than our Caesar was, but just as impressive in his own way. He reminds us of a big, black bear, so we decided to add that to his name, but I'm getting ahead of my story. 

       Bogey sat in front of his doghouse on a heavy chain attached to a very thick collar two inches wide encircling his neck, looking warily about at the people milling the scene. My first thought was, "Oh what a beautiful boy!" We learned later that he had forced his way into the house and ran to his dead owner, so he knew that she was gone and had no idea what was coming next. We explained to the watching family and neighbors that we had just lost our own beloved Rottweiler and that we believed he had something to do with our being there now. 

       Someone said that Bogey hadn't ridden in a car before, so the first hurdle was convincing him that he wanted to get into our car with us. We had brought roasted chicken pieces and some dog treats to tempt him, and with a little coaxing he climbed into the back of our car, a Honda Element perfectly designed for carrying dogs. He rode well on the trip back to Powell Butte, only losing a little bit of his lunch, peeing on the throw blanket possibly because it smelled of our other dogs. 

       We knew nothing more about Bogey, really; he had been mostly an outside dog, we were told, but had been inside some of the time.  From the looks of his chewed up doghouse, he had spent a lot of time chained to that.  We have ten fully fenced acres, but we are retired and our dogs all live with us in every sense, spending a lot of time inside, sleeping upstairs in our large bedroom.  We decorate with dog beds, I tell any interested person, explaining the abundance of large, soft dog pads scattered throughout our house.  So when we got him home, we brought him inside alone, leaving our four females of various breeds in our big kennel so that we could introduce them to the new "top dog" one at a time. 

       Bogey came inside and immediately began peeing on everything inside the house.  With some dismay, we were afraid that he wasn't housebroken at all, a daunting task to attempt in a male dog of his age, but after doing several loads of laundry and using up all of our enzyme cleaner, I was relieved to see that he stopped peeing and thankfully didn't do it again. We brought three of our girls inside one at a time, all with no problems, but not our large American Staffordshire Terrier, Sunshine, more commonly called a Pit Bull, because she was not at all happy to see this big interloper on her turf and ferociously voiced her disapproval.  

       Having had problems in the past with two large dogs fighting incurably, we were very hesitant to test this new relationship and put off their introduction for five days until Sunshine had calmed down and seemed to accept that this was a permanent addition to her pack and that her hoped-for Alpha status wasn't going to happen.  It worked; when we finally tired of shuffling the two back and forth to the kennel, Sunshine just danced a little jig, flirted with her new "big boy" and wasn't a problem at all.  

       We took Bogey Bear to our vet for shots and a chip, and got him licensed, making him officially a Wagner.  We did still have one major problem to solve, however.  For some unfathomable reason, Sage, our 10 year old fixed female McNab was just irresistible to Bogey, who followed her constantly and insistently, not understanding why she was rejecting him.  I did a Google search and discovered that some people had good luck applying Vicks Vaporub to females; I dabbed some in key spots on Sage; Bogey sniffed and sneezed; his ardor visibly cooled.  

        At first we didn't quite trust him inside the house at night, so for the first week, about 9 p.m. each evening we took him out to our kennel for the night.  He would begin to cry, a low, mournful howling, groaning sound that made us cry too, so we'd go out and sit with him and hug him.  He might have been more than just lonely; he could have been grieving for his lost mistress, as we were grieving for our lost Caesar. The bond between us grew quickly; we were delighted to see how fast he was adapting to his new environment and to us; he isn't Caesar, but he is a beautiful Rottweiler with all their characteristics very evident.  We were more convinced than ever that our Caesar was guiding him when he began to sit and sleep in all the places Caesar did.  So when after he had been here eight days and we decided to try him inside for the night,  he came upstairs to sleep on the biggest bed in our room as if he was born to it.  Caesar grew up in that bedroom, first as a tiny puppy refusing to sleep in his crate, insisting that he was big enough to sleep on a big bed just like the older dogs. 

       I'm sure food has been a big part in Bogey Bear's acceptance of us as I doubt he ever ate as well as the dogs eat at our house.  His training at Walt's experienced hands is progressing well, too.  Yesterday was another hurdle passed:  we gave him a bath on the front lawn, with me sudsing him up with lavender Johnson's Baby Shampoo while Walt distracted him with bacon and hot dogs.  Now he smells sweet and his coat shines!

       When we leave the property and leave all five dogs loose, we always return with treats for them, teaching them that though we may leave them behind, we always return.  We were gratified to see Bogey Bear leading the pack yesterday, running faster than anyone else to meet us at our gate. 

       That this was fate is an inevitable conclusion to our story; we were facing a future without our beloved Rottweiler, and while we will miss Caesar forever, Bogey Bear is filling a very big hole and doing it remarkably well.

Rebecca Just Wagner

September 15, 2013