Story 2: Choiceless

I was at the animal shelter over an hour that morning before I found the dead lamb. She was right out in plain sight in the middle of the barnyard, but the routine called for me to run through the chores inside the shelter before taking care of the animals outside. I arrived at the shelter around seven, so I had two hours to get things in shape before Will Haggerty arrived at nine to open up for business.

First on the list that morning was the oven. Will and I had to put down a dog the night before, a rangy Doberman with an unbreakable vicious streak. The dog had come to us two months ago. He was a beautiful animal in splendid health and had been a beloved family pet for a year and a half before almost taking an arm off a seven-year-old neighbour boy. Two hours after that, the Doberman was in a cage at the far end of the shelter.

After his owners were gone, Will sighed and went back to take a look at the dog and talk to him. Then he turned to me. "We could put a fifty-dollar adoption tag on him and move him out of here, Eddie, but I won't do it. Good old Rex is a killer. He'd rip up cats and chickens; give him room to run and he'd go after sheep and calves. No Doberman is worth a cent unless he's trained by an expert and even the best experts won't get a hundred percent success. Train one right and he's still no family pet. He'll be a good guard dog, a good attack dog, but who wants to live with one of those?"

"So what happens now?" I asked.

"We tag the cage 'Not for Adoption' and give the poor beast food and water. I hate it Eddie, let me tell you. There's nothing worse. I'll keep an animal forever if there's any chance of placing him in a home. There are many owners in this business who burn half the dogs they get and sell the others to research laboratories. I have never let one go for research and never will. And I have never burned one unless it was so injured it cannot be saved."

We were standing in front of the Doberman's cage a few weeks later when Will dropped a big hand on my shoulder and shook his head sadly. "No sense putting it off anymore. Let's just get over it. He's a big old boy and it would be easier with two of us. But i'm not going to tell you to. God knows I have no stomach for it myself," he said.

I said I would stick around.

He got a pistol and loaded it with tranquiliser darts, then filled a hypodermic syringe with morphine. We walked back to Rex's cage and Will kept the pistol out of his sight at his side until Rex was facing the other way. He raised the gun and fired quickly, planting two darts an inch apart in the big dog's shoulder. Rex dropped like a stone.

Will crawled into the cage and hunkered down next to him. He had the needle poised. The tranquiliser darts would keep the dog unconscious for fifteen minutes. The morphine would kill. There were tears flowing down Will's weathered face. I watched him find a vein and fill the comatose dog with a lethal dose of morphine.

We put him in the wheelbarrow and took him inside. We got the dead dog out of the wheelbarrow and into the big metal box. I closed the lid and Will threw the switch without any pause. Then we turned away and walked silently into another room.