Living Large In Our Little House

Sade and Molly with her tongue out!

Part of Living Large in our Little House is trea­sur­ing and hang­ing on to the good in our lives and Campbell Town just wouldn’t be the same with­out our any four of our canine kids. We call them the “Fearsome Four,” only because hav­ing that many hairy bod­ies crammed into The Little House is a lit­tle scary.

However, no mat­ter how many tum­ble dogs (you know, those big hair­balls that seem to pro­duce them­selves) I have to sweep, or how many times we trip over The Fearsome Four, they are as much a part of Campbell Town and The Little House as we are.

They are well…family.

It’s easy to pre­tend we’re insu­lated here in Campbell Town. Our near­est neigh­bor is a rel­a­tive who lives ¼ mile down the road. Unless we have hunters lurk­ing about the woods, I feel we’re pretty safe from the out­side world.

That is until I read sto­ries such as the one I read in The Springfield News-Leader last night about two dogs that were tossed off a high­way over­pass like they were pieces of garbage.

Dakota with her Bo-Bo

I have to won­der what kind of peo­ple would do that to a liv­ing being that could have brought their home so much uncon­di­tional love. One dog, a pit bull, died when it landed on the rocks below. The other dog, his res­cuers dubbed him “Dover,” is recov­er­ing from a bro­ken leg and hav­ing lost part of his tongue, which he bit off, pre­sum­ably when he landed.

In the late 1990s, just before I res­cued myself from a gray cor­po­rate cube in which I had become much too com­fort­ably numb, Dale and I had the tele­vi­sion on dur­ing din­ner, as we usu­ally do, and was sick­ened to watch a piece of video the local sta­tion had obtained of a dog being burned alive. As it turns out, the video was of Scruffy, a Yorkshire Terrier. He had been stolen from his own­ers and tor­tured to death. The four men who did it video­taped the whole event. By the time the case went to trial, I was cov­er­ing the cops and courts beat for the local daily and wrote about the case. Thanks to a cre­ative pros­e­cu­tor, who charged the men with arson rather than ani­mal cru­elty, the men all ended up with a felony on their records.

In my research for my sto­ries, I learned that sociopaths, or peo­ple who can­not feel empa­thy for the suf­fer­ing of other liv­ing beings, often begin killing sprees on ani­mals. All of the ser­ial killers are known to have tor­tured and killed pets. I learned that Luke Woodham, one of the school shoot­ers of the 1990s even killed his own dog – one by all accounts he had pro­fessed to love — just to make sure he could go through with the mur­der of his mother and classmates.

Since that time, I’ve researched and wrote a story on puppy mills (includ­ing vis­its to a cou­ple) enti­tled “Disposable Pets,” and wrote "Moment in the Sun," an arti­cle about the res­cue of 13 of the poor dogs that sur­vived Michael Vick’s house of horrors.

We took in one of our four after she wan­dered up to our house on a blis­ter­ing hot day. We later learned from our vet that she had given birth, he esti­mated, not more than a week before. Of course, we never learned of the fate of her pup­pies, but because she never tried to leave us to go back to them, we assumed some­one must have done some­thing with her pup­pies before dump­ing her in our neighborhood.

Molly, one of the sweet­est dogs I’ve ever met, was passed to me while the woman held her out as if the lit­tle wiener dog were a stinky bag of trash, “We don’t like dogs that lick,” she said, crin­kling her nose. Another of our sweet dogs was dumped on the side of the road right in front of us in a city where there is a Breed Specific Ban. The peo­ple that lit­er­ally left her in the dust as they sped away would had to have known that if she wasn’t killed by a car or starved to death, she would be picked up by Animal Control and imme­di­ately killed because she hap­pened to belong to a breed they deemed “dangerous.”

I even talked one fam­ily into giv­ing up one of our dogs because they left her chained in the back­yard all day. Because she barked out of lone­li­ness, one of the mem­bers of the fam­ily (includ­ing the 4-year-old) would rou­tinely go out and kick her (do peo­ple really think hurt­ing babies or ani­mals will make them quiet?) When I went to pick her up, she barked at me and one of the kids hit her in the head, knock­ing her off of the couch.

Still, I con­tinue to be shocked at the sto­ries such as the one I read last night. It never ceases to amaze me at the cru­elty and depths of dark­ness some peo­ple have within their souls. It’s enough to make me want to fence off Campbell Town into a fortress, go inside The Little House and tune out the out­side world.

But I can’t bury my head and do noth­ing just because my dogs are safe. The Dogs of Campbell Town are part of the love, hap­pi­ness and peace they add to our lives here. They make liv­ing large even larger and because of that, I want to see peo­ple who hurt ani­mals locked up. I want to see peo­ple who run dog fight­ing rings and host dog fights on their rural prop­erty lose it and watch all of their worldly goods go to auc­tion with the pro­ceeds ben­e­fit­ing the vic­tims – the dogs that survived.

On some level very deep, though, I also have to feel sorry for peo­ple who don’t have the capac­ity to allow what uncon­di­tional love an ani­mal can bring into their hearts. What sad, tor­mented lives they must lead.

"Until one has loved an ani­mal, a part of one's soul remains unawak­ened." ~ Anatole France

In today’s com­ments, tell us about the ani­mals in your lives!

Emma look­ing regal