The Global Slowmad

One of the most difficult things most of us will ever do in life is say farewell to a childhood pet. Alex lost the dog he grew up with earlier this week, and it breaks our heart that we were not there to support him through the experience. It’s a good reminder that life goes on – until it doesn’t – even while you’re away.

Cooper lived to the ripe old doggy age of 16 and was a pain in the ass from the very beginning all the way to the end. He was a cute, loving and blissfully happy dog, and that’s pretty much where his good traits stopped.

• He was an anxious dog that would bark furiously anytime he saw as much as a leaf blow across the lawn. We had to come up with all kinds of creative ways to distract and/or drug him whenever there were fireworks or a thunderstorm to avoid having to clean up puddles of urine around the house. One morning while Stu was still working, Cooper wandered into Stu’s closet about 4:00 in the morning during bad weather and went into full rotating sprinkler mode.

• He would bark and whimper anytime his humans were out of sight. This made it nearly impossible to leave him alone in a hotel room while traveling and resulted in an inordinate number of noise complaints over the years.

• He was spectacularly dumb. Or stubborn. Probably both. He learned nothing in puppy school. He was completely befuddled by even the most basic of commands.

• He refused to take medicine. We tried every trick in the book. When we would coat pills in peanut butter, he would go so far as to suck the peanut butter off in his mouth, then spit back out the pill.

• He never learned to socialize properly with other dogs, so he was always behaving inappropriately and inadvertently annoying them. Echo, an objectively better dog that we adopted in 2014, would use his innate herding skills to keep Cooper under control and away from other animals when we took them on walks together.

• Even before he began losing his vision, Cooper would regularly run into people, walls and other inanimate objects.

• Even before he lost his hearing, he would not come to us on command if off leash. Whereas other dogs might take the time to greet their owners returning home, Cooper seemed to take great pleasure in escaping out the garage door and off to the neighbors before we could even get out of the car.

• He never learned to fetch properly and would obsessively chew and destroy any toy he could get his mouth around.

• For some reason, he felt compelled to pee repeatedly on the one nice piece of antique furniture we owned, forcing us to close off our formal living room with child gates for more than ten years.

• On the rare occasions we tried to crate train him as a puppy or transport him in a pet carrier, he would promptly pee on the floor and then roll around in it for good measure.

• Few things brought him more joy than rolling around in goose poop.

• Although he was hypoallergenic (theoretically meaning that he was safe for humans with a dog allergy to be around), Cooper himself was allergic to most normal dog foods. He could not eat grains, chicken or dairy without developing a rash that apparently could only be calmed with incessant itching. To make things even more fun, pretty much anything he wasn’t allergic to still gave him terrible gas.

• His doodle fur would clump and mat regularly, requiring frequent visits to the groomer. About a year ago, his groomer told us he was no longer welcome back at their establishment for unspecified reasons.

• In his later years, he developed an obsession with chewing his own butthole. This may also have been allergy related, but who really knows.

• He also had a bad habit of eating random things he would find in the yard that would result in him vomiting on whatever our nicest rug happened to be at the time.

• As he grew older, he no longer thought it was necessary to go all the way into the yard to poop and often would just go basically wherever he happened to stop.

But we loved him. He was a mess, but he was OUR mess. He was part of our family. He will be missed. A lot.