Epitaph to a Dog

 There's a real "could we be the baddies?" vibe when a Republican politician spends their week defending a decision to kill a pet dog. Now, admittedly, when I first heard that there was some controversy about this stemming from Kristi Noem's upcoming memoir, I assumed that this was all the result of some unfair politically-motivated smear. I assumed that the dog in question had been old and sick, and that Noem had decided to put it down herself with a rifle, rather than having it be euthanized behind closed doors at a vet's office. And I couldn't see why—apart from some class-based or anti-rural bias—people would draw a major moral distinction between the two. 

But no—the dog seems to have been perfectly healthy at the time it was dispatched with a bullet. And the worst part of all is not only that Noem decided to do this, but that she did it with a strange degree of malice toward the animal. In subsequent interviews, Noem has tried to defend her choice by saying that the dog had bitten people and was a danger to others. Which, fine—fair enough—that's an arguable and morally ambiguous point. Noem should have left it there, in the book. But, apparently, she did not. According to the New York Times, Noem also added salt to the wound: "I hated that dog," she apparently wrote. That, surely, was the unkindest cut of all. 

The Times also makes note of a strange moment in the book in which Noem seemed to be gesturing toward the possibility of a pet afterlife—maybe even one in which an animal's punishments continue beyond the grave, at the hands of a vengeful deity. Here, surely, is vindictiveness and malice against this unfortunate wire-haired terrier carried to yet another degree of excess. 

In subsequent interviews, Noem has tried to deflect from the criticism facing her by making a comparison to Biden's German shepherd Commander, who had to be removed from the White House for repeatedly biting Secret Service officers. In the book, Noem apparently seemed to imply that Commander and her deceased terrier Cricket might meet again someday, either in doggie heaven or perhaps—in context—what sounds a great deal more like doggie hell. As the New York Times concludes its account of the passage in question: "Imagining becoming president in 2025 and sending Mr. Biden’s dog to meet his maker, Ms. Noem added: 'Commander, say hello to Cricket for me.'"

I could only think of Byron's characterization of human beings as "vain insects" for daring to reserve to themselves "a sole exclusive heaven." Here is Noem not only heaping hatred on a poorly-trained dog in life, but also wishing further punishments and miseries upon it after death. Byron's great "Epitaph to a Dog" could not be more fitting. The poet wishes, throughout the verse, to point out the contrast between the vanity, hypocrisy, and treachery of humankind and the steadfast loyalty of the canine animal. How absurd, then, that it is the human beings who dare to imagine that they alone are the inheritors of eternal bliss, whereas the loyal animal is to be annihilated at death—or to face something even worse, as Noem seemed to imply. 

"Thy tongue hypocrisy," were some of Byron's words for a humankind that arrogates heaven to itself while displaying none of the virtues of the animals they despise. And such words are surely fitting as applied to Noem. To be sure, maybe Cricket really was poorly-trained and poorly-behaved. But then, so too, by all accounts, was Lord Byron's beloved Boatswain. The enormous Newfoundland dog (and there is dispute as to whether a "Newfoundland dog" in that era bore much relation to the beloved gentle giant "Newfies" of our day) seems to have bitten even more people in practice than Commander. Byron's point still stands. At least neither Boatswain nor Commander ever added sheer vindictiveness or malice to a bite. Dogs bite out of fear or fleeting aggression: but they would not add the thought of posthumous tortures to the wound. 

Of course, not everyone conceives of the doggie afterlife as a place of retribution. In fact, Kristi Noem may have been the first pet owner in recorded history to relish such an idea. Instead, the more conventional notion these days is something close to the idea that "all dogs go to heaven." The Omnibus Project podcast ran an episode the other week, for instance, that explored the history of a comforting poem that made the rounds in the 1990s via an Ann Landers column. The piece was called the "Rainbow Bridge," (this was the first I had heard of it, though it may be well known to others), and it apparently depicts a future resting place, where deceased pets gather in the afterlife to await the arrival of their beloved owners, whom they then join on the way to heaven. 

I don't mock the sentiment behind it; I have mourned lost dogs more than I've mourned anyone else in my life—I cried for days in college when I learned that our yellow lab had died while I was away from home. But the treacly vision of the afterlife provided by poems like the "Rainbow Bridge" does nothing for me. Partly because—just as with the human afterlife—I can't bring myself to believe in it; nor would I especially want it if I could believe in it. 

Instead, the poem that has brought me the most consolation for losing a pet is one by Robinson Jeffers. It offers a much more humanistic (in the non-theistic sense of the word, not the anthropocentric one) take on animal mortality. Jeffers portrays an aged dog passing peaceably because, as it reflects (the poem is written from the dog's perspective) "a little dog would get tired" living as long as humans do. 

I hope that Cricket, wherever she may be, has found that same rest.