SuperWeed

One winter day a few years ago, Eastern Shore Sanctuary cofounder Miriam Jones and I were strolling along the boardwalk at Ocean City Maryland. Because it was the off-season, the boardwalk and beach were open to dogs, many of whom had seized the opportunity to enjoy a seaside stroll with their human companions.

After passing a particularly gregarious aggregation of dogs, Miriam turned to me and whispered, “Don’t tell the chickens, but dogs are the best.”

Please don’t tell the chickens (or the ducks or the cats) but I agree. Maybe because I grew up around dogs, finding solace and safety among them in the midst of a precarious childhood, I always feel a little bit lonely when not in the company of dogs.

On this day in 1992, I met the dog who would be my best friend for the next 14 1/2 years.

In Aftershock, I write about how we — our minds, our emotions, our selves — are both biological and social. We become who we are not only within but through our relationships.

“Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu.” People become people through other people. I’ve always subscribed to the sentiment and reasoning behind that Xhosa/Zulu saying summarizing the philosophy of Ubuntu.

But, after Zami died earlier this year, I realized: Not only. Now I struggle to figure out how to be me without her.

In the years we were together, I helped Zami to grow into herself and she helped me to become me. No, that’s not saying it strongly enough. Somehow, she became herself in part through me and I became myself in part through her.

Let me try to explain. When I met Zami, she was a depressed and frightened puppy, moping at the back of a cage at the Humane Society. Even after coming home to more welcoming surroundings, she didn’t act like other puppies, tumbling forward for fun and cuddling. She shook. She cowered. She was afraid of the toys we had bought for her. She was afraid of people, especially men. And yet she also craved contact, so she was often caught in an anguished dance of approach and avoidance.

Zami’s first photo

Since she and her brother had been found alone on a country road, nobody knew what had happened to make her that way. I knew, right away, that she longed for the comfort the lady who found them said that she and her brother took in one another. Unfortunately, someone had elected to adopt him without her which is why my partner and I found her huddled alone in the cage that day.

While we didn’t know what had happened to frighten and depress her, we could and would make sure that she got everything she needed to feel happier and less scared. I taught her to play with her toys by clomping and rolling around on the ground with them in my mouth. A 90 lb visiting akita called Kanin pitched in, playing so gently with the 11 lb pup that she was soon chasing him around the house, even though she had relieved herself in fear when she first caught sight of him. He often let her win.

Our friends helped too. Over the months and years, a virtual Who’s Who of the Ann Arbor Left sat down on our 70s-era orange carpet to greet Zami, demonstrating their harmlessness to the scared pup whose bad-ass barking wasn’t fooling anybody. (Named in honor of the recently departed Audre Lorde, Zami apparently took very seriously the maxim “your silence will not protect you.”) City council members, rent-striking anarchists, post-modern queer theorists… all were willing to meet Zami at her own level, being friendly and nonthreatening without indulging her fearfulness.

Zami and I belonged to one another from the moment we met. So, as partners and households changed, she stayed with me. Over time, she grew into adog who was as kind, steady, and generous as I hope but too often fail to be. She was a top dog who wasn’t at all domineering about it. More than once, people remarked that the world would be a lot safer with Zami as the Secretary General of the UN. She was universally friendly to other species and especially caring toward injured animals. Everybody was soothed by her. Cats and dogs alike liked to just lie near or touching her, drawing comfort from her steadiness and strength.

The stories I could tell: The time she broke up a fight between two bigger and older male dogs! The time she tried to make friends with a baby bunny! The time she tried to coax a garden snake to play chase! The three times she rescued injured birds! The time she greeted a newborn as if she already knew him, which she did, because she had nuzzled and smelled his mother’s belly whenever she came over to practice her Lamaze exercises!

Poems were written about her eyes

Everybody felt safe with her. And they were. I was too. The moment I held that shaking puppy in my arms, she climbed into a part of my heart that, unbeknownst to me, had been locked up, empty, waiting ever since I was a three-year-old with nobody to count on but the pack of abandoned dogs who stayed at our house on the navel base.

We both felt it. We both knew: I can trust this one. It was a long restless night I spent worrying whether the Humane Society would let us adopt the dog they described as “eyes: brown; ears: little waxy; disposition: cute.”

Of course, at first I was the grownup and she was the pup but, as she grew, Zami shaped me too. When Zami was a pup, I was a not-always-reliable vegetarian who vaguely supported animal rights but didn’t integrate them into my analysis of the political world. I actually used to make jokes that Zami would grow up to be an activist against “speciesism,” cracking up a bit about that word and imagining Zami in a balaclava staging raids on pet stores and freeing the dogs at the shelters. (I didn’t know or think about the dogs in other cages.) Now I go around writing chapters and giving speeches in defense of the people who stage such raids.

In my speeches, I often trace the intellectual trajectory that led me to bring the earth and animals into a central position within my analysis of the interconnected oppressions that lead people to menace each other. But what I sometimes forget to say is that Zami was there all the way, sitting on the couch with me as I read the books, lying nearby as I typed the emerging ideas, walking in the woods with me as my mind wandered. I can’t trace a particular insight to her. It’s just that she was the ground of my life in the same way that I was the ground of hers.

And, of course, there is the sanctuary, at the emotional center of which used to be Zami. Long before Miriam and I found the chicken who would be the true founder of the Eastern Shore Sanctuary, Zami had found and refused to move until somebody did something to help an injured wild bird. Twice. In her later years, Zami would come out with me to do my morning and evening sanctuary chores, peaceably mingling with the chickens who knew they needn’t fear her. (Broiler chickens would actually walk under rather than around her if that was the quickest way to get where they were going!) I’ve often thought that Zami’s pacific energy was part of the reason we have a sanctuary where former fighting cocks lay down their arms and barn cats wait out the rain in the woodshed side-by-side with the hens who are always stealing their food.

Zami’s last photo

Zami came outside with me on the morning of what would be her last day. She had declined very rapidly due to what turned out to be a cancer that had emerged and spread in between her semi-annual senior blood tests. She hadn’t been eating and I suspected she was in pain. Glancing up from the chickens in the infirmary yard to see Zami standing quietly in a nearby clearing, I felt simultaneously happy that she seemed to be finding a measure of enjoyment in the morning air and utterly bewildered and bereft at the thought that I might not ever see her standing there again.

In the months since, I’ve taken some comfort from knowing that Zami grew to be the steadfast, trustworthy dog she was in part because of the steady love from me that was the context of all but the first few weeks of her life. That wasn’t all, of course! There was also love from first Janelle and then Miriam, not to mention scores of other human friends and relations. When Zami was four, pup Dandelion moved in to become her devoted companion. Then came Arlo, who saw her as a sort of grandmother, and Madeline, who had been unsocialized as well as abused and really needed Zami’s brand of gentle schooling in the ways of canine society. And I won’t even bother to list all of the cats, who Zami treated with dispassionate kindness, sometimes playing with them but not really being much of a cat dog (unlike Dandelion, who loves cats more than even breakfast.) I’m not sure how much the chickens influenced her, but she certainly did enjoy spending time with them.

Zami became herself in the context of all of those relations, becoming the emotional hub of our mixed-species household. And, of course, she brought herself to every relationship, helping to shape all of us in turn. I became who I am today in the context of the steady love from her that was the context of so many years of my life. I know that I wouldn’t be who I am now if it hadn’t been for her.

Now I have to figure out how to be me without her. I can’t… quite… seem to do it yet. It’s as if some essential element has dropped out of the atmosphere. Or maybe some vital nutrient has gone missing from my food.

I know — I know — how lucky I was to have the love of such a dog for so many years. And I know that I am lucky to enjoy the love of so many other animals, including a few humans. But I still can’t quite believe that I’ll never see Zami again. “Where are you?” I want to ask, “Where did you go?”

And, in the midst of my anguished loneliness in the absense of one dog, my mind drifts to the anguished loneliness of other dogs. Dogs on death row. Dogs on chains. Dogs locked up in vivisection labs, awaiting fates worse than death.

Tammy Grimes is right: Dogs deserve better.

Here’s a link to a video of an ALF rescue of 33 dogs from a vivisection lab in Brazil. Any one of them could have been Zami.

You don’t need me to tell you what you can do.

November 23rd, 2007 | Category: Animals, Direct Action | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL