Orson gave me many gifts. He brought me to sheepherding, one of the joyful things in my life. He brought me to border collies, dogs that have entered my life and changed it more than once, brought me Izzy, Rose, Red, Fate.
He began a process that led me to to leave my life behind and move to a farm in Upstate New York. He led me to my life with animals, the one I write about, the one I live. He brought me to a mystical understanding of dogs and their impact on human beings. A shaman took me to see him in his afterlife, he still looks down on me, she said, he needed to leave this world, he dwells in a land of blue lights by a crystal clear creek, meadows to the horizon.
But there was one gift that I only recently came to understood, and it might have been the biggest gift of all. Orson taught me to stand in my truth, to answer to myself. He taught me that it did not matter what others think of what I did and do. What mattered is what I think of what I do. It was the first time in my life I understood what it meant to be honest, to be authentic.
I believe that was his purpose, his message for me. To tell me to never be afraid of being honest, even if there are those who might punish you for it.
That’s a big gift. In 2004, I euthanized Orson after he bit and injured several people, one seriously. I wrote a book about it called “A Good Dog,” published in 2006. It remains my favorite book. It is my all-time best selling book, my most critically acclaimed book and my most disliked and controversial book.
The book was my first serious encounter with what the animal rights movement was beginning to become, a kind of rolling hate militia that claimed to speak for the rights of animals but did not always believe in the rights of the people who owned them. Various animal rights groups launched a systematic attack on the book – you can see the reviews on Amazon for yourself, and they continue to this day, although there are many bigger targets than me.
I admit to being naive, I was shocked to see people lie about me with so much abandon. I was amazed that there were all these people out there who actually believed they loved Orson more than I did. People who never met him or me or spoke with me but who claimed to understand my every move and motive and who did not hesitate to invent what they did not know to be true.
How could I possibly have known then – I was still taking valium every night so that I could push the terror back and sleep – that every hateful message, every raging review on Amazon was a gift that would teach me something, reinforce something, make me stronger and clearer. How could any rational person see it as a gift?
I must confess – and I’m not speaking politically, that this feeling returned to me as I watched Hilary Clinton try to explain to people who did not care to listen that she also cared about the dead people in her care, no matter what her mistakes were or were not. And it turned out to be a gift! How strange that I knew what it felt like to be the target of that kind of raging and mindless condemnation. Thousands of messages, from everywhere, for years. The movement I had supported and worked for for so long – the animal rights movement – had disgraced itself in my eyes when Orson died, and I guess it was personal, no longer abstract. What they had done to other people they were now doing to me.
When I saw the carriage trade in New York being attacked in the same dishonest and irrational way, I could not help joining the fray. The roots of that writing was Orson, so I suppose that was another gift.
I wonder if Orson led me to the story of Joshua Rockwood as well. I know what it means to be accused of things you did not do. One website went up after that stated again and again that I routinely took my dogs out to the barn and shot them. Scores of people came onto the site to post messages about how horrible I was to do that. They said I was too cheap to help Orson, too cold to care about him, too lazy to find a better end for him.
Not one of them ever contacted me to ask what happened, or if any of it was true. None of them would read my book, they tried to launch a national boycott of it.
Not one person ever wrote me to ask about the people he bit and injured, including the child who Orson bit on the neck and whose blood flowed so freely down his light gray sweatshirt and onto the road.
The experience with Orson was prescient, it foreshadowed the culture of judgment, righteousness and hatred that came to inflect not only the animal rights movement but the very civic heart of the country, our political system. So many people have experienced this, even if in fleeting or passing ways. For me, it was like spotting a dread disease as it began to spread and infect one institution after another, the march of the self-appointed centurions of righteousness, always preaching love, often spreading hatred.
As a long-time book writer who worked quietly and in peace, this kind of mob was alien to me. At first I tried to answer the attacks, then I came to understand I was only feeding them. They didn’t care what I thought or said, they were not in the least interested in what was true. The irony – this is America after all – was that all of the hatred and controversy boosted the book and made it popular. Americans love controversy, “A Good Dog” was and is my best-selling and most popular book. I get messages thanking me for it every single day.
I get hateful messages too, although the targets of outrage addicts are boundless, they only multiply and I have become a small fish. I remember wondering about this idea of personal responsibility, once so large in America, where people were free to make the best possible decisions in their own life. Had we given what away too, along with civility and privacy?
But I love this book, and I loved writing it and telling the story of Orson. It is, in some ways, the very story of life. And yes, he ended up being exploited in many different ways.
I did know that some people would hate me for writing it, but I didn’t hate me. In fact, it began the process of learning to love myself and to not judge others. Killing Orson was the most ethical and loving thing I ever did. It was, as one magazine reviewer wrote, an “act of the purest love.”
Some dogs just keep on giving to us, even after they are gone. Orson was one of those. I think it might have been the very first time in my life that I was completely honest, and brave enough to tell a painful story truthfully to a sometimes hostile world. Everyone in my world told me not to write this book, not to publish it. It was such a good thing for me to do.
I remember reading the moral philosopher Hannah Arendt before and after I decided to have Orson killed. Morality, she wrote, concerns the individual in his singularity. The criterion of right and wrong, the answer to the question, what ought I to do? depends in the last analysis neither on habits and customs, on the opinions of others, but on what I decide with regard to myself. “In other words, I cannot do certain things, because having done them I shall no longer be able to live with myself.” Crime and the criminal confront us with the perplexity of evil, wrote Arendt, but only the hypocrite is rotten to the core.
And the people who spew so much hatred while profess to love animals are nothing if not hypocrites, and sadly, for animals and for people, their movement is in peril, rotting from the center, it has become a cancer. It does little good for animals and much harm for people.
I had no trouble living with myself after Orson died, I had only to think of that boy, terrified and sobbing, his blood rushing over the ground. No one – not a single person, animal lover or otherwise, not a single one of the people who called me a heartless murderer, has ever asked me how he has fared, how he is, or expressed the slightest concern over him or the other people Orson harmed.
And another irony, here he is, living in my town, I see him all the time, he is quite grown up now, he loves his Lab, He still has his scar.
I remember meeting Maria around the time “A Good Dog” came out. She told me that she could not believe I wrote a book about euthanizing Orson, she said she wondered many times if I had any idea what I would be in for. She says she thought it was very brave. I have to say I didn’t really think of it as brave, nor did I quite know what I would be in for, but I never had one regret about writing “A Good Dog.” Isn’t that the very idea of the book, exploring a subject like that, bringing it into the open? I never once flinched at myself in the mirror. And I did learn this: it is not about what others think, it is about what I think. That was a life changer. I never feared the mob again.
Thanks, Orson, for that. You are a spirit dog, you come for a reason, you leave when your work is done.
The publication of “A Good Dog” was the first mob I had ever stood up to, there is something awful and yet exhilarating about that. I went on a book tour to promote that book and went all over the country. I was praised everywhere, in reviews, at my readings. It was disorienting to have written a book so many people loved and hated. Not one of the outraged people attacking me ever showed up to meet me or look me in the eye. We know now how easy it is to hate behind a computer keyboard. It is both real and an illusion.
Orson’s death helped define me and understand who I really was. And I liked who I really was. I never thought of myself as a person who would risk much to tell the truth, I knew after that that I was such a person. And that I could tell the truth, and would always try. I might mislead or misunderstand myself, but I would never knowingly lie again.
Before Orson, it seemed terrifying and unimaginable. Once you stand in your truth, I don’t think you can ever go back, and that is Orson’s final gift to me. I stopped being afraid to tell my truth, I took the painful first baby steps – and then big ones – towards honesty. I can hardly explain how good it felt. It will never bring me a perfect life, but it has brought me a life of meaning and fulfillment.
And think of this dog. Nothing in my life is the same as it was when he entered it.
My heart fills when I think of this story, a portrait of my soul. The great thing about honesty is that there is nothing to fear, nothing to hide. My journey with Orson showed me what it really means to be authentic. To look in the mirror of your life, and be comfortable with what you see.
I will never be perfect, I hope to be complete.
