It seems to be my month for bad dogs. Yesterday a large dog charged up and began barking in my face. I have seen this dog exhibit aggressive behavior toward others onshore. The owner of the (illegally unleashed) dog tried to call the dog (no effect) and to reassure me he was harmless. Yes, head and tail down, weighing close to a hundred pounds. Harmless. “He can be intimidating,” she said. She was laughing when she said that, and walked right on without apology or any attempt to correct the behavior. Well, yeah. The last time someone told me their dog was “friendly” I got hit in the face.

“For $60, the Cuss Collar, which fastens around a dog’s neck, will spit out a swear word every time your dog barks.”

Several years ago, an ER doctor with a weekend place just up the road was walking his dogs loose on the beach. One dog came up behind Gary and, in play, bounced his feet off the back of Gary’s knee. The owner laughed after Gary picked himself back up. The trouble is that Gary has had “bad knees” all his life. Over the years his knee has “gone out” on occasion, leaving him in unbearable pain on the ground. As a teen, his doctor predicted he would need knee replacements by his thirties. Thankfully, that has not come true. But falling down is not funny except in films.

When did this become a thing? When was it not?

(When Doberman Pinchers were popular, people liked them for their look but also because they “can be intimidating,” which is a problem when a breed developed specifically to be a personal guard animal is kept by an owner more than a little afraid of his own dog. If owners refuse to be alpha, their dog will take that position.)

We know and like most of the local dogs. Now that we are petless, we look forward to greeting early walkers—both human and canine. We love dogs. Losing our Yeti and Leakey was very hard. Our parents are gone, Gary’s older sister is gone. I will cry any time I call up the memory of putting our first dog Ann Ann down at nearly nineteen years of age. I held Bowzer, dying of cancer, as he died, but I could not kiss my mother’s corpse goodbye. My younger brother is mentally ill and we are the oldest people in our immediate families. Death is right there. Losing another pet might be beyond us.

There is a line in the second novella of Jane Smiley’s Ordinary Love & Good Will (1989), something about not wanting to endure the deaths of too many animals. A Vietnam veteran Robert Miller lives entirely off the grid with his wife and son at a time when there was no term to describe what he was doing. He handles just enough money to pay property taxes and buy his son Bic pens for school. (He is not happy about his son going to school—his wife insists.) He makes or trades for everything. No electricity. No road. Water from a spring. His furniture is self-made using only hand tools he has traded for. He keeps sheep for wool and meat and a pony for his boy. A cow would give more milk than they could use. Trouble begins when his young son abruptly does not want to witness slaughter of the lambs. His father reasons with him.

“Mr. John Doe, a guy who buys a steak at a grocery store. Don’t know where it came from, don’t know what it means to eat it. You want to be like that?”

“No, Daddy.”

“We took good care of those lambs. They ate good grass and had plenty of fresh water, and now they won’t know what hit them. This is a good life for a lamb, Tommy, all the way to the end and past it.”

Smiley was not forty years old when she wrote this novella. I had already sworn off meat when I first read those lines, but I am older now. These days I think a great deal about death and feeding animals. I could do a Duck-Duck-Go search and find out how much meat goes to feed pets in the United States. For over twenty years we had five or six dogs and gave them a good diet. I was part of that. Why would I want to know? I flew to field trials and dog shows in different parts of the country. I was, as the saying goes, part of the problem. One day our Snowbird was sniffing behind a beach walker who whisked Snowbird away. The person accidentally hit Snowbird in the eye, and our dog promptly nipped her in the butt. I saw the bruise. Snowbird was never allowed loose on the beach again.

I have written at least 35,000 words of an SF story about our world without animals of any kind except, oddly, seven women. Imagine no mammals, no birds or reptiles or amphibians. No fish in the sea. Phytoplankton and insects. And my narrator. It feels oddly prescient in the panic over COVID19. My narrator is a young woman who goes to bed with what she thinks is a bad flu and finally crawls back out to find everyone she knows has died.

She is depressed for a long time. Grieving. Early on, she smashes a door of a convenience store and drinks from glass bottles. She is able to subsist on “theft” for a long time. I have researched sources of oil and protein and calcium. I wonder whether she will need to boil seawater for the salt or will she breathe enough in? Loneliness. Her eventual facultative parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction in an animal that ordinarily reproduced sexually) comes as a shock.

So these days I think about how we keep and feed and use our animals. I think about needs versus wants. I think about nutrition and overpopulation and pets and especially self-justification because I am as guilty of that as the next person.

I have hesitated to share concerns here. No one enjoys another’s grief. My MFA thesis advisor warned me years ago: “Everybody’s mother dies.” Have something new to say or just don’t.

When I was younger, I used to fear my husband’s death. I would wake in the night and listen for his breath, place a hand on his chest and feel the rise and fall. I wasted a great deal of emotion fearing something that was not rational or immediate, but a squandering of energy.

In the past year or so we have abandoned broadcast television. I have sold books and jewelry and given away furniture I loved. I have made and gifted shawls and quilts. I think about taking a class at the college and making jewelry of the stones I find on the beach. Am I leaving things behind or staking a claim on other’s memory?