by Erik Hare

Created on: June 30, 2007   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

It was just after one o'clock on an October day. The sun was bright but thin as I wended my way through the streets of Rochester to the shabby side of town. A converted funeral home had the correct address, a building battered by weather and the need to beg for every dollar. This was "Paws and Claws", the Rochester Humane Society. From the gradually graying sky down to the leafless trees and the sidewalk turned to gravel, an air of "last chance" hung heavily. I parked near the door, not out of laziness but an anxiety to get this going.

Inside, the grabbing smell of wet dog and pee stopped me immediately. The frantic barking was deafening. When I nervously approached the desk, the older woman seemed almost surprised that I kept my appointment. I said I was here to see the Westie they called "Newman". She told me to wait a moment before he came out.

From the yapping back room, a young woman bounded out nearly as excited as the white flash at the end of her short leash. I knelt to meet Newman, and was greeted with a frantic bath of dog spit. As I became wetter and wetter much of my anxiety melted. His handler recited how happy she was to see me, too, and maybe we should go in the pen to let him off. Here was a loving creature and not just a hopeless case looking for a reprieve.

As we went to the pen a different kind of anxiety rose. The hardened death row feel was gone, replaced with the blur of a hyperactive puppy zooming brainlessly. He could destroy a tennis ball in less than a minute, a frantic pace required by his nanosecond attention span. He could leap over a very high wall to get out, and stopped only to pee on everything.

With the little dog having no attention to give me, I grabbed him and cradled his head in my hands, staring into his eyes. Peacefully limp for a moment, Newman looked away, as if unworthy of such attention. Gradually, his discomfort wiggled him out of my hands. "Sit!", I commanded, but he had no idea what I meant. "Sit!" again, and this time I pushed his back end down. He sat a just long enough to say in a glance that he had it, and went back to being a white blur.

His handler saw that I was trying very hard to connect. She spoke in stutters, telling me how great the little white furball was and what honest difficulties he had. Her attention could never be fully on anything except endless puppy antics, so we only spoke in bites of conversation. He was 11 months, they thought. He had been there a week. He wasn't house trained, but maybe neutering

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