The Dog Next Door
My wife, Dawn, and I had a dog named Bo, a border collie mix we got as a puppy. He was rescued from the side of a highway when he was just a little guy, and he was my best buddy for many years. And he was a big part of this story.
Bo was an alpha dog in every way, with no patience for other dogs. He had a great personality but could be very intimidating. Neighborhood dogs that roamed free in our development never set foot on our—well, Bo’s property. They could sit at the edge but go no farther.
The only dog Bo ever tolerated was Rex, the dog who lived next door. A purebred border collie himself, Rex was not allowed to roam even in his backyard. He stayed in a pen that measured around twelve by eighteen feet. It was attached to the house with a pet door leading inside, and that’s all the territory he had. So there he would sit in his cage.
Rex’s owner, Mrs. Carter, was elderly and didn’t get around well. I also think maybe she didn’t understand that a border collie needs a job or at the very least lots of exercise. Rex didn’t have that at all. The only exercise he got was roaming inside the small ranch house and hanging out in the pen outdoors.
I know Mrs. Carter loved Rex, and she took good care of him in other ways, or at least she believed she did. She’d gotten him as a puppy and had him trained right away, so he was very obedient. But she soon became too feeble to exercise him. She also overfed him, in particular with table scraps. So Rex became something you seldom see—a fat border collie.
During the day, Rex would sit outside in his pen and stare at our house with his pale eyes. And for some reason, Bo seemed to take a liking to this caged dog. I would often find Bo hunkered down on the grass right next to Rex’s fence with Rex sitting on the other side of the fence. The two dogs sometimes paced back and forth side by side, in step with one another, the chain-link fence between them. Dawn believed that Bo somehow understood what the other dog was going through and that he would sit or walk with him out of empathy. Bo would not deal with any other dog at all. Only Rex.
I owned a gym until a few years ago, and Bo would go with me to work. One afternoon Dawn called me at the gym to tell me that there might be a problem next door. By now Mrs. Carter was in her nineties. Her husband had died, and she lived alone with Rex. Dawn noticed the dog hadn’t been outside in awhile. Now the postal carrier told her that Mrs. Carter’s mail was piling up, and nobody was answering next door. Obviously something was wrong.
I called to Bo to come with me and drove home right away. I parked my truck, got out, and circled Mrs. Carter’s house to see if I could possibly find a way to get inside without breaking in. I looked in her bedroom window, and in my limited line of vision I could see her legs on the bed, not moving. I got a stepladder to see better, and then it was clear to me that Mrs. Carter was dead. Her bedside lamp was tipped over her body, and Rex was lying on the floor next to her bed. Dawn called the police.
After Mrs. Carter had been taken away, the police talked to me. It appeared that she had died in her sleep of natural causes about three days before. Rex apparently would not leave her. He was all right but had not eaten in that time. His waste was all over the bedroom, and when the police entered the room, Rex still lay next to his owner’s bed.
The police told me it was too late in the day to call animal control, so they planned to leave Rex in the house overnight and come back the next day for him. I’m sure they meant well, but I couldn’t believe this. The dog was traumatized already, and to leave him there with the smell of death would be cruel. So Dawn and I offered to take Rex for now, which the police agreed to as long as we left a note on the door alerting any next of kin as to where Rex was.
We took Rex home that night. Once he was outside his fence and on Bo’s territory, I worried that Bo would be aggressive with him like he was with other dogs. But that didn’t happen. The two dogs were still buddies.
So Rex stayed with us. It was a few months before we heard from any next of kin, and of course we had fallen in love with the dog during that time. Mrs. Carter’s son eventually showed up at our house. He was elderly himself and living in another state. He loved dogs but had his own, so he was greatly relieved when we asked to keep Rex.
Now Rex had a new life with Bo and with us. Dawn had always been a cat lover, but she and Rex bonded, and he went everywhere with her. Dawn had a hair salon right next door to our gym, so every day I took Bo to work with me in my truck, and Dawn took Rex to work with her in her car. Rex had gone through losing Mr. Carter, then Mrs. Carter, and now in his anxiety he shadowed Dawn constantly, herding her and obsessively moving when he was indoors with her.
Rex was well-trained, and at first we didn’t understand just how well. We didn’t know until Mrs. Carter’s son showed up why Rex wouldn’t budge sometimes—he had been trained not to move from place to place outdoors without a leash. Until we discovered that, we had to bodily pick him up to put him inside or outside a vehicle. Sometimes Dawn would literally push the poor dog out of her car to get him moving.
One of Rex’s many quirks was that he was afraid of linoleum. I never knew why, but he would not walk on it. So we arranged the traffic rugs at both the hair salon and the gym to accommodate nervous Rex and his linoleum phobia. He was worth the trouble.
I’m an outdoors guy, and I took Rex out walking and eventually running with Bo and me. With exercise and proper dog food, Rex slimmed right down. The two dogs became running buddies, chasing each other, teasing over toys. The communication between them was amazing. It was as if Bo had somehow rescued Rex after all those years of visiting through the fence, and Rex knew it.
I’m happy to report that Rex lived to be old and his last several years with us were good ones. When the day came that he needed to be put down, we took him to our vet, who was a great guy. He squatted down, opened his arms, and said, “Come here, Rex.”
Rex walked right into the vet’s arms—straight across a linoleum floor.