dead dog

Saw a dead dog on the side of the road. Large, mottled brown, white paws. No collar. A boxer, I think. The distinctive flattened muzzle partially obscured amongst the damp grass, as though trying to hide its face from death. Someone must have hit it with a car in the early hours, a stray perhaps or runaway. The unknown driver, hands still shaking with adrenaline, stopping just long enough to drag its body on the verge beside a busy stretch of road, where it lay now, beside the indifferent traffic.

Last time I saw a dead dog was in Puerto Morelos, Mexico. We had taken a taxi into town to join what would be a memorable walking tour of local streetside eateries, only we misjudged the travel time and had to kill an hour with a meandering loop of a dilapidated neighbourhood just as the place was waking up. There, lying face down on the pavement like a dropped beanie baby, was a bloated caramel coloured puppy, a trickle of blood running from its anus along the curb and down into a rusty blot on the asphalt. Nobody paid it any mind other than to step around it. The other strays kept their distance, sensing perhaps that misfortune is catching.

I remember feeling a strange parental urge to take it somewhere out of the sun. But we were visitors there and it didn’t feel right to intervene. It was as though there is an unspoken rule that the ritual of dead dogs belongs to the local community not passing tourists. I even considered taking a photography, only to check myself and walk away, unsettled by the thought that with that photograph I would made an unkind judgment—not just about the dog, but about the people who lived there, about how they treated their animals, about their lives and values.

Later I would write, then scratch out something similarly unflattering in my notebook. Lines that could have been written by an arrogant colonial administrator a century ago. Too harsh, too critical, a little too easy to write and lacking substance. The truth of it is that I had already convinced myself that I could detect this same superior gaze in the eyes of fellow tourists, and yet here I was, guilty of the same. The specific phrasing escapes me now, but it was a comment about how there is a point where poverty pushes the niceties of everyday life to the periphery, where the handling a dead puppy falls low on the scale of necessity. There was a dead dog today, and likely there would another tomorrow, or the day after that. And so it goes. I felt a little silly for caring as much as I did, but also for not caring as much as I thought I should. Perhaps the other strays were right to remain on the other side of the street after all, recognising that a dead puppy on the backstreets of Puerto Morelos just isn’t as significant, as important, as it is in those places where the air isn’t thick with diesel fumes and the antiseptic aroma of unrefrigerated streetside butchers.

It’s not that people didn’t care, more than in that context at that time the dead pup was just another casualty of humanity, another piece of collateral damage of human society. Had I taken that photograph it would have been poverty porn inviting an unkind observation. Back home in the UK people abandon pets all the time yet we tell ourselves that we are a nation of animal lovers whenever an instance of animal cruelty makes the evening news. The shelters are overflowing with refugees from the cost of living of crisis. Seeing a dog, any dog, dead by the side of the road in any context leaves you with an emotional residue that is difficult to process, so we just chalk it up and step around the issue.

Although I only glimpsed at it for the second as I drove by, the boxer appeared to be nearly fully grown. Afterwards I imagined a family waking up that morning worrying about their missing dog, and later discovering an unlatched gate from the night before.  I also considered whether the body had been dumped, and what series of absurd events could have led to a sinister nocturnal disposal? In literature, dead dogs often become metaphors, their deaths transfigured into something more—an act of loyalty, a sacrifice, a symbol of lost innocence. Some are figuratively reconfigured by the swinging of a shovel or the violent finality of a shotgun blast heard slamming against the creosoted walls of a Dutch style midwestern barn. Only in death can they memorialise the best of us, of our potential, that that which has been wasted, lost. A literary dog might suffer to die saving an infant from a burning house. Another might expire waiting for a human companion fated never to return. But in reality, there is no meaning in it, no grand gesture. It’s just a dead dog on the side of the road.

Almost certainly it was someone’s pet because how else could you account for its well-fed proportions. With any luck, a considerate soul would have reported it and an affirmative beep on the veterinarian’s scanner revealing a home address. I wondered if I was supposed to report it, and to whom? Do deceased dogs have similar rights to human beings? At any rate, there’s a moral dimension that I completely forgot in my rush to beat the motorway traffic. When we take our cats for their annual check-up I always find it a little odd how the receptionist talks about them as though they were human patients with their own National Insurance number and Netflix account. “I see that Margot is due her twelve month booster,” and that sort of thing, even going so far as to affix a family surname. How upsetting it would be for the family in question to get that phone call, delivered with the sombre tone over the perpetual din of a Pets at Home store (only marginally less depressing than a Soviet era zoo in my opinion).

At least on the verge the boxer would be spared the inevitable emulsification suffered by countless roadkill, because nobody ever stops to lift a badger onto the verge. I did see a barn owl once, perfect and dead and perfectly dead lying beside a tram stop on my way through Clifton, Nottingham. It must have collided with a passing truck and lay on its side with its wings slightly splayed, as if in a deep face-planted sleep. I wanted to disembark and take it with me, to check to see it had been ringed and then place it in the communal fridge in a Tesco bag until the RSPB or whoever it is that gets the call could organise a collection. I didn’t of course, just as I didn’t intervene in Puerto Morelos or stop for the roadside boxer, although in all three cases it felt wrong to leave such beautiful things to rot in obscurity. With the owl there was also a palpable sense of the uncanny, as though this magnificent bird so shockingly out of place amongst the sprawl of Nottingham estates hinted at an almost supernatural quality. Was a time our ancestors would have taken this bird-sign as a dire portent of things to come, a dark omen, whereas now it barely registers at all. The people waiting at the tram seemed entirely oblivious. I can now add the boxer to this unhappy internal menagerie.

Less distressing but still connected by a common theme I can also recall one evening many years ago when my father brought me a slim newspaper parcel containing the tiny, elongated body of a weasel. I was perhaps eight or nine years old with an abiding passion for wildlife, only ever and rarely having seen weasels on the Attenborough nature documentaries we sometimes watched as a family on a Sunday evening. My father had found it outside the rear doors of a delivery depo at work that backed onto an expanse of semi-cultivated grassland that the university had installed as a way of forcing some aesthetic as well physical distance between itself and the neighbouring council estate. His theory was that a bird of prey must have dropped it and was then picked up by one of the resident cats to be left as a feline memento mori for the dayshift guys. We discussed several theories of its provenance, and in all cases he remained forthright in his belief that a domestic cat wouldn’t have the balls to face off against a fully operational weasel.

We placed it on the top of a pile of used bricks in the garden to get a better look at it. It was, in its way, miraculous, much like the barn owl - a creature so far outside my realm of experience to be almost mythical. I stroked its fur as dad turned it over to reveal its white underbelly and tiny, kitten-like paws. In the space where I should have felt the uncomfortable sadness of someone standing before taxidermy dioramas in dusty museums, I felt instead a morbid kind excitement. That in death this exotic creature now belonged to us – to me, and that a connection existed between us. I was convinced that the right people had found it, and that this kind of memorialisation was a good thing. Dad said that we should bury it wrapped in newspaper so that we could exhume it several months later to examine its skeleton. Possibly it was the times he grew up in, but this didn’t seem in anyway outlandish. He had done this as a boy growing up in the 1950s when I gather this sort of thing was so commonplace as to be considered a healthy boyish interest rather than cause for a trip to the child psychologist. Some of his more patient childhood friends were renowned for having carefully wired the bones of various unfortunate specimens back together, like a ghoulish Airfix model to be displayed and undoubtedly encouraged by conservative leaning parents for the contraceptive quality of an adolescent’s bedroom replete with Norman Bates style decorations. My father explained that he had done with this a grass snake he had found, pinning and gluing the delicate vertebrae to a board like a disembodied slinky, and how visitors would ask to see it. When I asked my grandmother if she still had it she admitting to giving it away just as soon as my father moved out of the house. Regardless, I liked the idea, so we picked a seldom disturbed spot in the garden, marked it with a couple of bricks, and returned a few months later only to find an empty hole and a few scraps of newspaper, an opportunistic urban fox high on the list of suspects.

If I’m being honest, I’m not a fan of the boxer breed, more so on looks than temperament, and not to extent that that I would ever wish one dead. It’s something about the squashed disapproving face and the fact that they bear an uncanny resemblance to an awful, chronically jowly maths teacher I had as a kid who delighted in humiliating small children who couldn’t perform their times table on command while standing in front of the class. Rather maliciousness, the boxer breed have a resting expression that to me at least conveys a misguided pouting over confidence, much like someone who makes a big fuss over speaking to the manager. With a square forehead all but begging for a lolling 90s fringe and fixed expression of mild disgust the boxer could very well be the “Karen” of dog world (apologies to any boxer lovers). No such manufactured outrages, sadly, for the poor departed soul stretched out on the verge.

Afterword

Holidaying in Tynemouth a few years ago we visited The Turk’s Head pub famed for having a taxidermied dog, Willie, displayed on a shelf behind the bar. The accompanying plaque informed us that Wondering Willie, for that was his name, was a sheep dog who lost his way one night while. When he retraced his steps to the quayside starting point from where he and his master had departed, Willie found the shepherd nowhere to be seen. And so bound by that deep, unfathomable loyalty of dogs Willie remained at his station awaiting his mater’s return, just barely surviving on the charity of strangers. About a year into this unhappy vigil and sick at the sight of a starving lonely Willie, a group of locals took him out on a boat and cast him over the side, supposedly as an act of mercy. Only Willie survived his brush with euthanasia, paddling against the swell to a disntant shore, where he remained until his death. He died in 1880, at which point he was promptly skinned, stuffed, and mounted behind the bar at The Turk’s Head to be gawped at by passing tourists, ourselves included.