CHAPTER THREE

It was a night in late September, I think. We’d had Esther for only a few weeks. I was at the computer; Derek was cooking dinner. We usually ate dinner around 7 p.m. I’d always have the TV on in the background when Derek cooked, but I’d sit close by at the dining room table with my computer to keep him company while Seinfeld or King of the Hill would ramble away in the background. The dining room overlooked the kitchen, separated by a counter, but otherwise they were right on top of each other. So I’d sit there where we could talk and I could see, hear, and smell everything he was doing.

Fall was a pretty good time for the real estate market where we lived, so I was fairly busy running around and getting new listings up before winter kicked in and things inevitably slowed down. Derek has an awesome eye for design and great style, so he’s always been a huge help to my real estate business. He has helped me stage my listings, and we often discuss my feature sheets (the little flyer with photos for buyers to take when they view the property) and how they should be laid out. Another reason I think we make a great team.

On this particular night, we were having breakfast for dinner, something every adult should do on occasion—because you can. I was at the dining table, working on a feature sheet for a new listing. Derek was at the stove, Esther by his feet, wondering what he was cooking. (Just like a dog, as I said.) And I was watching them both. Esther would always honk, squeal, oink, and wag her tail when we were cooking because she wanted some of the food. And we weren’t the best disciplinarians—we were known to share on occasion.

So there we were as Derek prepared the meal. He started to gather everything we needed for our breakfast sandwiches: toasted English muffins, cheese, eggs, and of course… bacon.

In the time we’d had Esther in our lives, we’d been eating the same way we’d eaten before her arrival. We had burgers. We had pepperoni on pizza. But we hadn’t had bacon in a while. It hadn’t been a conscious decision. We just hadn’t had bacon. The connection hadn’t even occurred to us.

On this particular evening, however, Derek was cooking bacon.

And suddenly something switched in my brain.

I recalled our vet specifically referring to Esther as a “commercial” pig, meaning her intended lot in life was to be food. That’s the only purpose for a commercial pig. They don’t pull sleds through the Yukon or carriages through the park. They become pork chops and ham hocks and link sausages and…

… yeah.

I heard the bacon crackling on the stove. The unmistakable scent wafted toward me. That smell, so wonderful to me (and let’s be honest, to all carnivores) for my whole life up to that point suddenly smelled like something awful.

Like death.

I watched Derek cook, glanced at Esther’s happy face, took in the whole scene. Derek was looking at the stove and occasionally down at sweet, happy, oinking Esther. If I could read her thoughts, and I’m pretty sure I could at that point, they’d go something like this:

Hey, Dad! Whatcha cookin’ up there on that stove, and are you making enough for me?

Oh my God.

What were we doing?

When you eat meat every day (or at least most days), you try to justify it to yourself every step of the way. Or at least you do if you’re me—I know plenty of people who devour meat three meals a day without giving it a second thought. You hear that it’s bad for you, or at least excessive amounts of it can be, but that’s true of everything, right?

Of course it’s okay to eat meat, you think. Most people do.

Bringing a pig into the house hadn’t been enough to make me want to shun animal meat overnight, like some vegan superhero turning his nose up at carnivores. (KaleMan: able to leap tall cornfields in a single bound!)

But realizing Esther had once literally been intended to be someone’s dinner removed my ability to compartmentalize eating bacon while having a pig as a family member. Eating bacon now would be like eating one of our dogs. Or any dog. I started having little flashbacks in my head. I could see the dogs running around in the backyard and me rolling around playing with them, and then little Esther would run over to join in the fun.

Wait a minute, I thought, sitting by the kitchen. I glanced over at Derek and wondered whether the wheels were turning in his head too. He was looking at the meal he was cooking and down at Esther, back and forth. It was a heady scene. The little voices she was making, the smell in the air… specifically the smell of pig flesh being cooked. Right there in our kitchen.

I wouldn’t eat dog. And I couldn’t eat bacon anymore.

I didn’t hesitate at all. I stepped into the kitchen, got Derek’s attention.

“I don’t think I can eat that,” I said.

He asked me to repeat myself, so I did: “I can’t eat that, I’m not eating that bacon, it’s creeping me out.”

His response surprised me: “I don’t think I can either.”

It was eerie. He didn’t even question me. It was like he was thinking the exact same thing.

We still enjoyed our egg sandwiches. As I said, we weren’t instant vegans. For the moment, at least, it was just: We can’t eat “Esther.” We carried on and ate our eggs and cheese, made a few jokes about how that wasn’t the same as eating pig. We didn’t know any cows or chickens, so they were just farm animals to us. There was no emotional connection with them. We had been researching pigs so much and learning how smart they were. Just by the way of the Internet, when you search for info on pigs, you obviously come across some not-so-pleasant info on how they’re raised for food. That’s where our love for Esther cemented the connection. When we looked at bacon, we saw Esther. But when we looked at a burger, we still saw a burger. All of a sudden Esther was on a different playing field, but our minds hadn’t made the leap yet to her other farm “friends.” It’s a prime example of the disconnect and the walls we had built up.

Later that week, Derek and I were scrolling through the online Netflix menu when a documentary called Vegucated caught our attention. It followed three content carnivores in New York who agreed to adopt a vegan diet for six weeks. We’d never intentionally gone looking for that type of documentary before—slaughter scenes are too graphic for me to take—but this one was described as light and comedic. I’d always been an “information” person. I loved documentaries of pretty much any kind. I was fascinated by films about engineering and history, and, of course I always enjoyed nature or animal films—unless they took place in Africa. No “circle of life” predator-and-prey stuff for me, thank you very much. Those things always end with a beautiful zebra getting tackled by a lion, and even though it was nature, I hated watching that.

When the option to watch Vegucated popped up on our TV, all I was thinking was that it looked like something worth checking out. Derek wasn’t even paying attention to what I was picking, which was typical. He had his nose in his phone to read emails. So I just hit the start button and away it went. But when Derek realized this wasn’t one of the usual documentaries I enjoyed, films on building the Airbus A380 or how wind turbines were built in the North Sea off the Netherlands—stuff he didn’t much care about—his interest was piqued. He put his phone down and started paying attention.

By the end of that film, we had both begun to rethink our meat-eating lifestyle. From there, we watched other documentaries. Food, Inc. was about corporate farming in America. Blackfish investigated the lives of captive killer whales. We learned so much about where our food comes from, how animals are treated. There were so many cruelties, even in the things we used to think were okay.

I’d always thought I was a huge animal lover. But suddenly I felt very misled. I was angry about what we’d been told, how we’d been made to believe “they’re just farm animals.” I guess the information had always been there if we’d wanted to go looking for it. But we hadn’t. It was too easy to just accept it and enjoy our carnivorous lifestyle.

So that was it. Simple as that. No more meat for me. It was time to go full-on vegan, to put my carnivorous lifestyle behind me and learn to love the produce section.

Okay, that’s not true at all. Actually, as much as I wanted to stop eating meat from an ethical standpoint, there was one big obstacle in the way:

I’d always hated vegetables.

To be honest, I still do.

I could sniff out a sliver of onion in something and would pick around to get rid of it. God forbid if I got one in my mouth and crunched it, the meal was over. I was the simplest of simple eaters. Take me to a fancy restaurant and it’s wasted on me—I want a burger or the pasta. Sometimes I would actually eat at home before going to a restaurant, because I knew I probably wouldn’t like what was offered. Better to fill up before going out.

Derek asked me whether I thought we should go vegan, and of course I hemmed and hawed. As a tried-and-true veggie hater, I had a lot of trouble wrapping my head around the idea. I like what I like. I was afraid of having to eat things I didn’t like, or even worse, foods I had never tried before. It would all be new, and new food is scary. A lot of what you hear about vegan food was scary to me too: couscous this and quinoa that. What the hell is quinoa and why would I want to eat it? Acai? I wouldn’t even attempt to pronounce it!

I knew I didn’t want to eat animals and was finally accepting the fact that chickens and cows really weren’t all that different from dogs and cats (or pigs, obviously, who also stood on the “pet pedestal” we had built). But now I had this chilling question bouncing around in my head: If I can’t eat meat, what will I eat? I hate salad. I hate weird vegetables, which to me is most of them. What was left? Was I going to be stuck with seeds and nuts? Would Derek come home one day to find I had morphed into a bird?

But I didn’t say this to Derek. I eventually just said sure, we could do it. I didn’t want to be the one to stop us from evolving.

So I made some small steps: I shifted my diet away from meat. It was no longer the bread and butter of my diet, if you will. (Come to think of it, without meat, I ended up eating a lot more bread and butter.) But I’d still have a burger here and there. Milk was also hard for me to give up. I always tried to find a way to make it okay, and I was pretty good at convincing myself of things. I always had been.

But deep down, I knew I was trying to justify it to myself. The harder I worked to keep the blinders on, the more things kept sneaking into my line of vision. I would let myself get sucked in by industry marketing words like free range and grass fed. I’d think, Oh well, if it’s a happy cow, it’s okay to eat it, or Those chickens lived in beautiful rolling green pastures and had awesome lives, so I can eat them now.

And then there was my one big crutch, the one I held on to for months: They don’t hurt the cow when they milk her.

Oh my God, was I wrong.

I’d always pictured milking a cow as happening on some beautiful farm on a lovely green pasture among rolling hills. Some sweet little Dutch girl with pigtails heads out with a bucket to milk ol’ Bessie. Poor ol’ Bessie probably wants to be milked. She’s happy to provide milk for the family, and they love her for it. That’s the story of milk, right?

Once again, a little bit of learning goes a long way.

From watching videos, I learned that cows on modern dairy farms are treated abhorrently. I started to find myself making comparisons I had never made before. I learned that human beings are the only species that drinks milk after infancy. We’re also the only species that drinks another species’ milk. That’s a bizarre thing to do. You hear jokes about how weird it must have been the first time somebody decided to milk a cow… and then drink it? Forget the guy—what about the cow? What do you think she was thinking? She was probably like, Uh… excuse me, but what are you doing?

Early in our vegan transition period, for lack of a better term, Derek and I would go to a party and eat whatever was there. We had our supposed justifications.

I didn’t buy it.

It’s here anyway.

It’s going to go to waste.

It’s already prepared.

It took me a few months to realize that regardless of who buys the meat, there’s nothing okay about it—at least not to me. As I got to know Esther better, as our bond grew, I couldn’t help but compare her to a cow—or any animal bred to be food.

Where would Esther be if not here with us? In a gestation crate. I’d wonder what had happened to the rest of her litter. How do I know that pack of bacon in the store isn’t a member of Esther’s family? As far as I know, that could be her sister’s litter. And even if it’s not, it’s still the flesh of slaughtered pigs. Pigs with intelligence and personality and affection and love—just like Esther.

When Esther first arrived she was a novelty, but as time went on and we started to learn a little more about the food industry, Esther became a trigger for the awful images we had seen online and in films we watched. As I watched her play outside, my mind would flip to the image of a baby dairy cow chained to a veal crate. I’d make her dinner and watch her loving every bite of her watermelon or mango and then find myself picturing a sad and broken pig in a gestation crate. I was feeling like a proud papa watching her reach these milestones of using her litter box and playing with toys, developing her larger-than-life personality, and then I’d be in the meat aisle at the grocery store, feeling physically ill because suddenly everything in there had a face. I couldn’t see a steak or a slab of bacon as nothing more than a product anymore. Any one of those pork chops could’ve been Esther, and that was so upsetting.

The more time we spent with Esther and watched her character come to life, the more we realized that this whole “they’re just farm animals” notion was bullshit. She had every ounce of the character and personality you’d find in any dog. There was so much more to her than I could’ve imagined, and every day she did something else to show us (even though some of it was super maddening, like opening cupboards and stealing food). Her heightened intelligence was key to our making the changes we did. If she’s this smart, we figured, every pig is.

What’s funny is that even once we know all this stuff, it doesn’t always sink in. It’s just like smoking: You know it’s incredibly bad for you. You know you’re killing yourself with every cigarette. But you keep doing it. People contrive reasons not to stop smoking even when they know they should. They continue until they finally land on a reason that truly matters to them.

Esther gave us the reason to search out the truth, to completely revamp our behavior—and to stick to it.

I’m not saying that going vegan is immediately the easiest thing you’ll ever do. There’s a learning curve, and it can be annoying. Grocery shopping takes longer at first. Looking at labels takes longer. People will make excuses like I don’t have time or It’s too hard. But honestly, it’s not that hard. You just have to reteach yourself things you’ve been taught your entire life.

And if you want to make a difference, to my mind, you have to give up all of it. No meat, no animal products. (And you know how hard that is for me to say.) Derek and I knew we could never eat animals again, and we knew we wanted to make a difference.

Once we made the decision to truly go vegan, the process was pretty interesting at first. We’d go grocery shopping and think we had done really well, only to find out our favorite brand of Doritos had milk in them, or that some other weird chemical-sounding name was actually made from cow tendons or something crazy like that. Giving up meat was relatively easy compared to learning just how many other things contain animal products. That’s what really messes with a new vegan. I can’t even tell you how many times one of us brought something home from the store only for the other one to notice something on the ingredient list that was verboten for our new lifestyle. Grocery shopping had been annoying enough back when we ate meat, but shopping vegan turned a one-hour trip into a three-hour marathon. We would spend forever standing in the aisles with two seemingly identical items, trying to figure out if they were vegan or not.

And while this dietary change was taking place, Esther was growing… and growing… and growing. Housetraining was proving to be a little more difficult than we’d anticipated, and even more stressful days were on the horizon. Specifically in the form of a prodigious amount of piggy pee and poop.

We had been told litter training was really easy. You just show her a couple of times and that’s it. We first used a cat litter box with pee pads in it. (We couldn’t use kitty litter because pigs will eat it, so we were told to use pee pads or wood shavings.) We bought the largest litter box we could find with a dome over it. Obviously, the plan was for her to go inside, do her business, and come out.

The first part worked out fine: She had no problem getting inside, but then things got tricky. Because of how the entrance was shaped and how Esther was shaped, she couldn’t turn around when she got inside. When she peed, the stream would go… right out of the box. She was doing the right thing, just not having the right result. So we got a box that was two feet bigger and had to train her to go inside, turn around, and then squat and do her business. That proved to be exceptionally difficult. And as she got bigger, so did the litter pan. I’m talking a pan the size of a couch; if you can imagine building a box around a couch, that’s how big her “bathroom” was. (If you’ve ever lived downtown in a big city, you’ve probably had a smaller bathroom, sink and shower included.) And each time we made the box larger, we had to retrain her. We’d lead her in, she’d turn around and do her business. We lined the inside of the cage with old plastic real estate signs, and the base was a baleful of wood chips.

As you can imagine, this was a nightmare to clean. And because the structure had a top on it, you couldn’t just stand back and clean it with our version of a litter pan scoop. (You guessed it: a full-size shovel.) No, you had to climb right on in there. It was pretty labor intensive—and let’s be honest, pretty gross—and we had to clean it no less often than every couple of days.

At that time, I guess because she still was growing, she drank way more water than she does these days. In one visit to the water bowl, she’d drink about three gallons of water. (That alone tells you how big a bowl we needed.) Of course, her bathroom habits weren’t exactly perfect during those learning stages, and three gallons of anything is a lot when it’s coming out where you don’t want it. We tried to recognize her needs and have the box available when she needed it, but we were all learning then. Accidents happened, just on an exponentially grander scale than if you were housetraining a kitten or puppy. It was more like housetraining an NFL lineman. Possibly two.

When Esther’s bathroom spot—you couldn’t even really call it a box at this point, more like a port-a-potty—reached its maximum size, we moved it down to the unfinished basement, and that’s where it stayed. We created a playpen area there for when we had to go out, because we couldn’t trust Esther to be upstairs alone.

Problem solved, right?

Not exactly.

Even with Esther as contained as possible, with all of our improvised engineering and attention to as many details as we could fathom, there were more accidents. The cleanup was a Herculean task: backbreaking, dirty work. Afterward, we’d think we were in the clear for a few precious moments. We’d spend an hour down there, take the cage apart, sanitize everything, remove the pan, mop everything up, and enclose all the waste in garbage bags. We’d be covered in mess, of course, having been down on our hands and knees cleaning and disinfecting. But at least everything else would be pee- and poop-free for the moment.

So we’d get changed and exhale and sit down to rest, and five minutes later Esther would come down and miss the mark by this much, and once again there would be a ton of backflow under the crate. And we’d have to start all over again.

We’d try not to lose our cool. As I’ve mentioned, in the beginning Derek put most of the cleaning on me, and it wasn’t like I could argue the point because I’d brought Esther into the family without consulting him. But in time, to my great appreciation, he stepped up and shared the brunt of the work with me.

As she learned, Esther’s bathroom habits improved substantially, but she still wasn’t batting a thousand. No matter how well trained we thought she was, every so often she’d wander into the living room, squat right in front of us, and… release a flood.

We’d immediately start screaming “No!” in an instinctive reaction that often made things worse. Esther would realize she’d done something wrong, clench it off as best she could and start racing away, pee spraying out as she ran from one end of the house to the other. And away we’d go with the rug shampooer running, washing machine churning, tempers flaring. We’d put Esther downstairs in her pen because she’d been “bad” and that was how we reprimanded her, and hard as it might be to believe, that wouldn’t even be the end of it.

Because Esther would just start screaming.

When Esther screams, she sounds like a jetliner. It’s just wide-open wailing.

Honestly, it’s heartbreaking. I’d sit in the living room and try to carry on with whatever I was doing, but I’d hear her cries, which—let’s be real—were impossible to ignore, and I’d want nothing more than to let her out and tell her it was all okay. It’s like that phrase puppy dog eyes, where a dog gives you that look that just gets you in your gut, or, of course, a crying baby: All you want to do is comfort them. I knew good parents sometimes (probably often) needed to tell their kids how to behave, that we had to discipline her or we could end up with a terror on our hands. I just hated seeing and hearing her so upset. It sounds so cliché, but I needed to be strong.

At the same time, a part of me worried that this would be too much for Derek to deal with. I knew Derek loved Esther by now, but in the back of my mind, no matter how remote I considered the possibility, I always felt there was a chance he would just throw his hands in the air one day and say, “This isn’t going to work.” I was still afraid I’d have to get rid of her if I couldn’t get her behavior under control.

So I knew I had to get tougher. We would have to enforce some stronger discipline with Esther. It wouldn’t be easy. She’d be miserable and we’d be miserable, because we knew she didn’t mean to do anything wrong. But we also knew we had to reprimand her in some way.

We set her punishment: a half-hour timeout. We’d set the timer on the stove, endure thirty minutes of the jetliner, and then let her out. It was not uncommon for her to forget why she was put down there in the first place. (This seems to be common among all sorts of pets, but what can you do?) We know this about Esther because she would finally come out after her dramatic half-hour, come upstairs, and immediately do the exact same thing again. And then go right back down for another thirty minutes.

And that was her training.

We had a tough time with it. It went on for weeks, and as with any teaching/learning experience, it was often two steps forward, one step back. Or one step forward, five steps back. One day it would seem like we were making amazing progress, only to have a major backslide the very next day. I couldn’t get the pattern down. Was it something I was doing wrong? We were so good yesterday, now what fresh hell is this? I’d think.

And of course there were other challenges. Just when I thought I had Esther figured out, she would outgrow the litter box or eat something of Derek’s that she shouldn’t have, which of course would piss him off to no end. We lost an endless stream of phone cords and computer chargers—she took a real liking to wires, and it was growing tiresome (and expensive) very quickly. We knew she didn’t want to be “bad”—she was just acting on instinct, much the way dogs and cats do when they tear up items in the home. But we had to get the message across that this wholesale damage couldn’t continue.

So we dealt with it. And we disciplined. And she wailed. And we’d start each new day hoping timeouts would be kept to a minimum.

Right before Christmas, Derek and I decided to take our first trip together since we’d gotten Esther. We were going to the home of Derek’s parents in Barry’s Bay, a small town between Toronto and Ottawa. Leta, my trainer from the gym and a good friend of ours, often puppy-sat for mutual friends and was great with Esther. She said she’d be happy to watch Esther for us and that we shouldn’t worry about a thing. We were only going for three days, and we knew Esther’s bathroom would be bad, but of course we didn’t expect Leta to clean it. We really needed some time away, so we agreed to let Leta watch the house.

This was the first time we’d felt anywhere near comfortable taking a vacation since we’d gotten Esther. I say “vacation” even though it was only three days because our life had become so full of responsibilities that this was a vacation to us—and a desperately needed one at that.

The four-and-a-half-hour drive to Barry’s Bay was uneventful, as was the visit itself… at first. But at one point, Derek dropped a bombshell:

He told me he thought we needed to get rid of Esther.

I couldn’t say I was completely surprised after what we’d been through, but nevertheless, it was incredibly painful to hear. I told him it would be fine, that we’d figure it out. In reality, all I felt was a sick feeling deep in my gut. I understood where he was coming from, but it ruined the rest of the trip for me. I worried that as soon as we got back, Derek would be on me to cast out our not-so-little girl. And I couldn’t even let my brain start to ponder about what that would mean for Esther.

The drive home wasn’t exactly tense, but the Esther issue hung in the air. We didn’t speak of it aloud, maybe afraid that would somehow jinx the peace, but we both worried about what we would find when we returned. I knew Esther could be a handful, but I had reasoned it out in my head the way you rationalize when you really want something like a couple of days away. She’s been so good lately. It’s just a couple of days. What’s the worst that can happen? (Never ask that, by the way.)

At times leading up to that point, I’d try to let Esther have more freedom. While Derek was gone, I’d leave her out of her crate and then leave the house to do some errands. I’d make sure to get home before Derek, hoping I’d later have the opportunity to tell him how good she’d been while we were out, but it virtually never worked out that way. Each of these little experiments ended with me frantically trying to clean something up before Derek got home to see it. My stress always came from trying to keep Derek from knowing about something she had done. I needed to justify all the “I can do it, don’t worry, she’ll be awesome” lines I’d fed him at the very beginning. And I meant it when I’d said it. I just had no idea what the hell I was promising.

On the drive home, my heart was in my throat the whole way. I was hoping for the best—not just for our sanity and the pleasant fantasy of coming back to a perfectly kept home with zero problems reported, but because I was nervous about what Derek would do if this little experiment was a bust. He’d opened the door to getting rid of Esther, and I didn’t want anything to push her through it. I wanted nothing more than to walk in the house and find both a happy Esther and a happy sitter playing together in a perfectly kept living room. Maybe Esther in an apron, having learned to cook during our time away, just putting the finishing touches on a welcome-home dinner.

And then we got home and reality set in.

The term that comes to mind is rock bottom.

The house was a pit. Litter box shavings were spread everywhere. Every inch of the house smelled like urine. Scratch that: not smelled, more like reeked, like with an unbelievable, make-your-eyes-water stink. It was a disaster.

I felt sick to my stomach. I knew how badly this would play with Derek. The outcome wouldn’t be good.

I’d already secretly been having these moments where I’d question everything: Are we going to keep her? Did we do the right thing? How big is she going to get? She’s ruining the house. She’s ruining our life. She’s ruining our relationship.

Now, here we were.

This would also probably be a good time to mention that Derek has always been a super clean person—as in bordering on OCD. A bit of untidiness bothers him. A mess gets under his skin. A huge mess is practically more than he can handle.

And this was a mess like none other.

This was such a mind-blowing departure from what our house (and our life) had been. I could see he was on the verge of tears, which crushed me. He didn’t seem mad, exactly, but clearly he was hugely disappointed. And of course I was beside myself. I was partly upset because I’d let the house get so bad in such a short amount of time, but I was also embarrassed because now our house sitter knew exactly how bad it was and what we had to deal with. After shooting me an uncomfortable glance, she left us alone.

I had done a fairly good job of hiding messes from Derek, but there was no hiding this.

Derek and I walked around the house to survey the damage while Esther tagged along at our feet, no idea how close she was to being exiled. Her smile beamed, and she was full of joyful energy and curiosity, just as always. But for the first time I looked at her with uncertainty about what to do. I felt I was failing miserably, and she would be the one to suffer if I didn’t make it right, and fast.

Neither Derek nor I wanted our house to be a place where you’d walk in and get hit with a brutal wave of stinky animal smells, of course, but for Derek to walk into this after we’d come so far was just too much. Even for me—you know, as a real estate agent you deal with a lot of smelly houses—you never think your house will be the smelly house. I’m the guy who leaves a place and says, “You wouldn’t believe the shithole I was just in.” Now my home was the shithole, and not just figuratively.

I didn’t think I could be more mortified.

Then I went downstairs.

We’d been gone only three days. Urine was puddled on the floor, shavings were everywhere, and because the basement was unfinished, the urine had soaked into the porous wood and completely permeated the entire place.

Derek grabbed some cleaning supplies and got down on his hands and knees in her pen. Everything he touched or moved was covered in urine. Her bed, her litter box, her toys, and now Derek. He had rolls of paper towels and cans of Lysol and deodorizer all around. As he would pick up paper towels to put them in a garbage bag, they would just drip everywhere. It was so gross. He had a mortified look on his face. I had no words, because no words could make this better. There was no simple I’m sorry for this.

I think we were both thinking what neither of us really wanted to admit: She had beaten us. In my heart I knew this couldn’t continue, and I know Derek felt the same, but he also knew how I felt about Esther and how upset I would be. I think he was hoping I would come to the decision myself. I’m sure if I’d gone ahead and been the one to say enough is enough, to make the call to get rid of Esther, Derek would have swiftly agreed.

It was a somber experience. I kept going upstairs to check on Esther while Derek stayed in the basement. I looked at her, wishing she and I could just talk like people, wishing I could explain how she was on the way to peeing and pooping and rutting and wrecking her way out of our home—her home.

I tried sending her brainwaves—when you’re desperate, you’ll resort to anything—to let her know this was getting dire and she needed to clean up her act.

During one of these trips upstairs, I had my first meltdown. I was looking at Esther, but my mind was on Derek. The man I loved was in the basement, up to his elbows in her urine, and it really was all my fault. I sat down at the top of the stairs, looking out at the backyard, and I just starting sobbing. I felt completely hopeless and broken.

Leading up to this, I’d had many moments of secretly crying when Derek wasn’t around. Because I’d taken on the brunt of the cleanup chores in the early days, there were times I totally lost it. I’d tried to keep a brave face because I didn’t want Derek to see me freaking out.

I was terrified that if Derek saw me feeling so overwhelmed, that would be reason enough for him to say she had to go. And I couldn’t lose her. The thought of losing Esther was unbearable.

I kept going upstairs and down for about an hour while we cleaned her pen. When it was done, we went upstairs and sat on the couch. Neither of us said anything. I was too scared to speak, too scared to give an opening to what was surely going to come next. But then Derek turned to me, and I could see it in his eyes: the genuine fear of broaching the subject we both knew had to be tackled, the sadness of someone who now loved her as much as I did.

“What are we going to do?” he asked.

As soon it was out there, we both started to sob. Things had been escalating for so long. We’d both been hiding how we felt about it. I wasn’t the only one who’d been crying in private somewhere; now I found out he had been too. But in that moment, we came to a conclusion:

We have to get rid of her.

I curled up in a ball on the floor, bawling like a baby. Shelby came over and lay next to me, and one of the cats climbed on top of me. Derek joined me on the floor, both of us crying, with all the animals crowded around us.

I don’t know how long we were there.

I just know it felt like someone was dying.

Here’s the funny part—not funny ha-ha, obviously, but funny unexpected: That point, that lowest of lows, was exactly what inspired us to keep Esther. The destruction she left in her wake made us miserable, certainly. It just couldn’t go on like this. But that was nothing compared to the thought of actually getting rid of her. That idea was devastating. As bad as it had been, we needed to find a way to work it out, because we knew we just couldn’t live without her.

So we needed to find a way—some way, somehow—to live with her.

We were going to fix this or die trying.

Thus the new housetraining plan. We got rid of the litter box and decided to take Esther outside every twenty minutes. Even if Esther didn’t have to go. It didn’t matter. Twenty minutes on the clock? Esther goes out.

And yes, I know that sounds like an insanely inconvenient solution, and you’re damn right it was. But like I said, we were going to fix this or die trying. Even if the smart money looked for a while to be on the “die trying” side.

We started rewarding her with a treat whenever she peed outside. And she tried to help us help her. She’d go to the door and let us know that she had to go. Of course, we’d reward her if she did her business. But even if she didn’t have to go, we’d still take her out at that twenty-minute mark.

But then she got smart and started to play us: If I go out and squat and pee, I get a little treat. So twenty minutes started to become ten minutes—she’d go outside and pee just a tiny bit, making sure not to let all the guns fire at once, if you catch my drift. She could milk it and get yummy snacks every ten minutes if she played her cards right. And we went along with it for a while, because she was doing her business outside and that was the ultimate goal.

Then she got cocky.

She’d go to the door and wail like she had to pee. We’d take her outside, she’d squat and pretend to pee, and then she’d look up at us, pleased with herself and expecting her reward. (She’s always been very smart.) Most of the time we just laughed in her face because it was so funny, but it was also frustrating. Especially if it’s three in the morning and Esther has a hankering for a cookie, so she wakes you up and you go outside for a garden tour in your underwear, only to realize she’s doing a fake-out. So we stopped the reward plan entirely and ultimately, thankfully, she got the hang of it.