Simon the Psycho

A couple of years ago we got a call from a rescue group alerting us to a very difficult situation. A family in the San Fernando Valley had a ten-year-old golden mix named Simon. He had been theirs since he was a puppy, and they loved him and provided a good home for him.

Then one day, for no apparent reason, he bit the woman, inflicting a small but significant amount of damage. They had two young children, and they instantly and correctly decided that they couldn’t keep Simon and risk injury to those children.

But they overreacted. Rather than moving cautiously, they brought Simon to the East Valley shelter and turned him in. Not wanting to entirely abandon him to the system, they notified rescue groups and asked them to intervene if Simon didn’t get adopted through the shelter.

Unfortunately, the system isn’t set up to work that way. Since they reported the bite and the woman got medical care for it, the shelter was not allowed legally to adopt Simon out to anyone other than a registered rescue group.

The normal procedure in situations like this is for them to hold on to a dog for ten days to make sure it doesn’t have rabies. Then, after that period and if a rescue group hadn’t put in a claim for it, it would be put down.

So Simon’s only chance was a rescue group, but that was a slim one. Simon was a mix and therefore didn’t qualify for breed rescues. The few groups that take mixes are generally overcrowded, and with all the great dogs in the system, why would they use a space on a senior who bites? For obvious reasons, he would be extraordinarily hard for them to place.

So we took Simon. He was adorable and friendly, and exhibited no aggressive tendencies whatsoever. That’s not to say he didn’t have his idiosyncrasies. For instance, he went crazy whenever he was on the other side of a closed door from Bernie, the Bernese mountain dog. We would put Bernie into a room by himself to eat, to prevent him from taking everybody else’s food. Simon would bark like a lunatic outside the door until Bernie came out, and then he was fine again.

Simon seemed to like me more than he did Debbie, and he followed me around all day. This made him quite unusual; almost every dog we ever had preferred Debbie, and we’ve had a lot of them. His favorite spot was on the chair in my office, where he stayed while I was working on my computer.

He was in that position one day when Debbie came into the office. She went over to Simon to pet him. He was looking right at her, so he wasn’t taken by surprise … but she was. He bit her on the arm and hand. The wounds required twelve stitches.

I reluctantly came to the conclusion that we needed to put him down; we simply couldn’t keep such an obvious danger to life and limb. I contacted his previous family, who had occasionally been coming to visit him. They didn’t resist; as much as they loved Simon, they agreed that we needed to do what we needed to do.

The only one who didn’t agree was Debbie. Simon has this sweet, friendly way about him (when he isn’t ripping humans apart), and she couldn’t bear to kill him. We’d just have to be more careful.

And we have been. As of this writing, it’s been two years since Simon bit Debbie, and there hasn’t been another incident. This is a surprise, since by other standards he’s even nuttier than he used to be.

For instance, in the Maine house there’s a staircase to the second floor that has a railing alongside it. Whenever there’s any kind of barking, Simon runs up the stairs, and Bernie runs to the side of the railing on the first floor. They then bark furiously and angrily at each other, venting their outrage while secure in the knowledge that the railing is protecting them both.

But it is amazing how few times we’ve been bitten by any of our dogs. The worst bite I suffered was from a collie mix named Sadie, a crotchety old lady who was one of the first dogs we ever took into our home. Sadie considered herself royalty, and she did not suffer fools easily.

She didn’t like anything about me, and she made that quite clear one day when she bit me on the elbow. And she didn’t just bite me; she dug her teeth in to the point that when I lifted my arm in pain, she hung on, and I raised her off the ground.

Even with all that, the damage wasn’t particularly severe, and I didn’t even go to the doctor. That presented something of a problem, since it left me with no credible way of garnering sympathy from Debbie.

She was coming in from a business trip that night, and I went to pick her up at the airport. I wasn’t in that much pain, but I decided that a sling would be the best way to demonstrate the trauma and suffering I had experienced. So I created a makeshift one and wore it.

It was, of course, the first thing that Debbie noticed, and she asked what had happened, her voice reflecting real concern.

“Sadie bit me,” I said. “And she dug her teeth in so hard that I lifted her off the ground.”

“What did you do to her?”

“Nothing yet,” I said, hoping to be praised for my restraint.

“No, I meant what did you do to make her bite you?”

So there it was … out in the open. Debbie was taking Sadie’s side against me. She was siding with the predator over the victim.

I would like to say it was an isolated incident, but alas, this book is nonfiction. In Debbie’s view, dogs can do no wrong.

If a dog takes something off my desk and chews it, her view is I left it too close to the edge.

One of them pissed on the floor? Must be a bladder infection.

Barking too loudly and too often? They must have seen an animal outside.

Simon bites her and gives her twelve stitches? She startled him and he was reacting in understandable self-defense.

Suffice it to say that when I screw up, I don’t get that much consideration and understanding.

Not even when I’m wearing a sling.