Dead Dogs Walking

Dead Dogs Walking

We’re a society that loves dogs, but in the wretched shadows, make a lot of them suffer and a lot of them die, for reasons a dog would probably never understand; for reasons many rational people would never understand either.

     I got my first Airedale terrier when I was eight. He used to chase cars on Ramp Road, trying to bite the tires with his big teeth. Back then everyone let their dogs run loose. The dog catcher wasn’t so strict like they are now. He’d follow my dog Murphy right to our front door and greet my parents politely, like a valued member of the community. “I think I have someone who belongs to you,” he’d say. Then he’d leave, no harm done. After all, a dog was a valued member of someone’s family. No one spayed or neutered their dogs either. There was no need, and it seemed far too cruel. When a female came into heat, the owners simply sequestered her from the males, and mostly it worked.

     We paid a high price for letting Murphy run loose. I think he was stolen and sold to a research facility, along with our neighbor’s dog Skipper. It was a common practice back then. Veterinarian schools and science labs need dogs to experiment on and they’re not all acquired legally. However, some breeders can legally breed dogs just to sell to research facilities. Beagles are a common dog used because they’re very trusting and docile around people, and easy to handle. They won’t bite when they’re being tortured, like a Chow would. A Chow would fight and bite for his life one hundred percent, until his very last breath, but a Beagle wouldn’t do a thing. Beagles die in research facilities, along with other breeds, some in experiments that really don’t accomplish anything. Some of those beagles live their entire lives without seeing a blade of grass or the light of day. They’re bred into oppression and sold to be tortured and killed, purposely. At least dogs who are euthanized in animal shelters were there by accident, not by some psychotic, premeditated plan of brutality. And I don’t buy that ludicrous argument that some dogs must suffer for some future good for an entire species, which may or may not come.

     It’s very traumatic for me to think about what could have happened to Murphy, even to this day. I searched a month for him, thinking he’d eventually turn up. I learned years later that when a dog is gone for more than a few days, he was likely stolen, killed, or critically injured. In some states, the pound will sell dogs to animal research facilities and veterinarian schools for a few bucks. Schools will practice all kinds of horrific techniques on your dog, though, the use of dogs is supposed to be dropping. The dogs are required by law not to be awakened after the procedure and killed humanely, but there have been many cases where dogs were kept alive to be experimented on again. The fear and pain dogs like this experience are off the charts.

     Let me make some important points. A family dog could be stolen or hauled off to the pound, then sold to a veterinarian school, and then experimented on and killed without the owner’s knowledge. Never put up an ad for your dog saying free to a good home, because there are people who go around scooping up these free dogs to sell into experimentation. Vet schools teach castration to sterilize dogs and virtually no other less invasive methods. Plenty of research shows that dogs without their reproductive organs develop a whole list of health problems. These altered dogs wind up in vet hospitals, costing owners more money than they would have if they had not been altered, so vet hospitals make more money off altered dogs. Money can be an incentive to keep a dog less healthy. They tell you it’s healthier for your dog to be spayed or neutered with no scientific data to back up this claim. This is called propaganda, and often muddles the truth.

     People love dogs. There are a lot of dogs because there are a lot of people, and the ratio is about three to one, one dog to every three people in this country. So people don’t really want to stop all breeding or there’d be no more dogs. There’d be no dogs for animal research, and this is a multi-billion dollar industry involving people with a lot of power and money. They need a lot of dogs or a lot of people would lose their jobs. Vet hospitals need sick dogs for good business, and altered dogs get sick. Dog rescue operations have to clean up the mess of industries who put out a lot of dogs, like greyhound racing and Class A breeders of Beagles. You can go on line now and find a Beagle to rescue, one who was originally bred for research but saved for some reason.

     Quite simply, there are two massive opposing forces working against each other here, both legal forces. One is the combined masses of normal citizens who simply love dogs and want to reduce the unwanted dog population, so they spay and neuter thinking this is the right thing to do. Sometimes it is, but mostly they’ve been duped. In some countries it’s illegal to spay or neuter your dog. The other opposing force, which may not contain as many people, but has a lot of power, are the industries and institutions that need a lot of dogs to make money or justify their existence, so they must ultimately support breeding dogs, which can lead to the unwanted dog population that the above force is trying to nullify. Veterinarian hospitals, veterinarian schools, research facilities, dog pounds, dog catchers, animal shelters, dog racing facilities, guide dogs, dog shows, police dogs, military, dog dealers, pet stores, dog spas, dog boarders, etc, all need dogs. The list goes on. Dogs are not just man’s best friend anymore. They make big money for a lot of people, so not only do average dog-loving people need dogs, but so too do institutions and industries who exploit them at various levels of barbarism for gain that usually doesn’t take into account fully the well-being of the dog. I don’t think we’ll outlaw dog breeders anytime soon, maybe just the hybrids, which are the ones we should breed. They’re more genetically sound. The powerful would never allow an end to dog breeding.

     If you step back and look at all this, it may seem that the whole spay and neuter propaganda machine, whether intentional or not, whether it does any good or not, is a diversion from the real problem, which is the harm big business is doing to dogs and the money they’re making because of this. Propaganda is good at hiding the truth, and the truth is, even though most people love dogs, some people make a lot of money off their suffering.

For the Animals

Animals don’t have rights like people. They should. We should look out for them, not torture them. Our entire society is set up for humans to dismiss the suffering of animals so that we can go on like everything is rosy and that their pain doesn’t exist. It does. Suffering is suffering. This weighs heavily on my mind, always has. I cannot ever lose my sympathy for people of course. This goes without saying. But also, I cannot ever lose my sympathy for animals. To do so, would make me a blight on the planet; a real asshole stinking up the place. In an ideal world, the only meat I’d eat would come from an animal who died naturally, say of old age or an unfortunate mishap like he drowned or something. Then in my mind I would not be adding anymore suffering. I rarely find these kinds of animals though. Eating happy farm animals who died of old age would work, if I could find them. Stores should label this info so I could check it out before eating them. Shooting an old buck in the woods, I could live with, if I truly needed to eat right then. I couldn’t lose the respect. When I find an animal lying by the side of the road injured, or any other place, it is my obligation to try and help him (if I’m not starving) and not pass blindly by. I do not want to fall into the trap of saying, it’s only an animal. Nothing can be done. Or that I shouldn’t interfere in the natural process. Because truth is truth, pain is pain, and the golden rule applies to everyone.   

            I’m trying hard these days to become a minimalist, and more importantly, a vegetarian. And to know where my goddamn food comes from; how the plant or animal was raised, how they lived, and how they died. Mostly, I’m just trying not to eat that much in general, to alleviate the tangled uncertainly of it all, the barbarianism of the market-place food. When I die, preferably very old and happy, I hope a poor starving polar bear and her cub can make a nice meal out of me, so I can give back, rightly so, to animals.

Why I Walk

Why I Walk

Once long ago when I was living in a dingy one-bedroom apartment working a dead-end job I started having panic attacks. They were far worse at night, when the gloom of winter had a tight grip on me. Each night without fail I’d wake up at about two o’clock shaking in terror. Remarkably, I learned that you could have panic attacks while sound asleep. I’d come to consciousness, not wondering if, but knowing with absolute certainty that in about an hour I’d be dead. That is the nature of a panic attack. You don’t think you’re dying, you know it.

I’d jump up, pace my room, get dressed, shoes on, keys and wallet in pocket, and get ready to rush off to the emergency room, if I could make it. Most of the time, I didn’t go. I simply paced until I regained control. I started sleeping fully clothed, shoes and jacket on and everything, in case I had to rush off to the hospital. Time was critical. Maybe in a last-ditch effort they could save me. That’s what I thought. A few times I actually drove there and walked around the parking lot for hours watching the bright neon light that read emergency. If it came down to it, I could go in there. You’d be surprised the things you see late at night in winter on the hospital grounds. There was the dense fog descending and the street lights trying to penetrate through, a lone raccoon, darkly silhouetted, waddling out from behind the dumpster, a lone car engine trying to crank over after the night shift, a slouching janitor shambling out of the automatic sliding doors to empty the trash, and me thinking I was going to die on my feet traipsing across the parking lot, which was much better than sitting around waiting for it to run me down like the grim reaper.

            I didn’t think anything could be done for me, to cure my terror-ridden mind in the dark hours of those long-ago frigid dawns. Sometimes I’d walk all night until it got light before the fear finally dissipated enough so I could drive home and get a couple hours of sleep before work. I had a dismal job in a windowless factory making computer wafers.

The fear always dissipated if I walked long enough. Sometimes in the day I’d have the panic too, but being around other people helped. The nighttime was always worse. I used walking to rid my fears of some phenomena I did not understand. It was like that movie Speed. If I slowed down a bomb would go off, probably in one of the arteries of my brain and I’d die on the spot. Or my aorta would implode. You see, when you’re in the midst of a full blown panic episode you’re not thinking straight, just in a state of flight or fight from the crippling dread. I would have run, but I was too afraid to muster the concentration for that. I needed it to battle the fear. I used walking to keep myself together, every day for hours until one day after about two months the panic vanished as mysteriously as it had come. I think the lack of nature had made my brain ill, and the walking healed it. In the years afterwards it never really came back. Oh, I get afraid sometimes. Who doesn’t? Of what, I’m not really sure, probably that I’ll sit around too much doing nothing and my life will pass me by. I vowed to keep walking so that it would never come back again. I wouldn’t wish that kind of terror on anybody.

            I walk long distances. I have too. I spent three summers walking across Alaska. I walked across Oregon and Washington, parts of Borneo, and s short stint in the Amazon. I go for a walkabout every year. If I can do it for two months I seem to remain pretty bullet proof to the panic returning. Now I’m on my way across Canada, from the Yukon River to Quebec. Well, of course I don’t really think I’ll get that far, and I don’t care. Maybe I’ll decide to go somewhere else instead. I just need to be on the move and this gives me a destination to shoot for. Walking is good, but other forms of bodily movement work too I think, canoeing, cycling, skiing, rowing, walking, whatever. The key is to use my body so my brain won’t get all jammed up and unravel out of control. I cannot let my mind get away from me ever again, so I’ll keep heading east every summer through the wilderness. I’d like to hike Mongolia, the Chaco Boreal, and the Tumucumaque Range someday. They say there are people there who still feel free. The wilderness setting works better for me than a city. There are no damn distractions, things to get in the way that really don’t matter one smidgen in the big scheme of things.

I have a Buddhist partner now, which is perfect for me. She says to the effect of what I already know; that you don’t have to really be anything, except a speck of dirt floating free in the universe; to reach a high state of nothingness so to speak. She tries to get that by sitting for long periods of time meditating, chanting; emptying her mind of all the garbage we fill it up with in the smart-phone modern world. Today is worse than ever for that. I tell her that what she is doing is virtuous. I told her about my panic attacks years ago and that I need to be on the move, steady and rhythmically to reach the state of nothingness, or tranquility, or whatever you want to call it, that she talks about. She understands. There is more than one way to reach this peaceful state. My favorite travel writer, the late, great Bruce Chatwin once said something like, people get depressed because they stay in one place too long. I understand those words better than ever, so this is why I walk in the wilderness every year. I made it across the Olgilvie Range this summer, my body suffering, but my mind becoming unbreakable, an immovable rock in a raging river.

I’m feeling as placid as ever at home now. I go for long bike rides daily, and I race every fall. It’s not for the ego aspect of it. It’s all for the sake of retaining my serenity. With a healthy body comes a healthy mind, and vice versa. Next summer when I start out from the middle north region of the Yukon and head east through the vast tundra and taiga, I’ll have that clearly on my mind while aiming for the empty horizon in the wild, northern sky. I walk for the health of my brain as much as for anything else.

Crossing the Great Unknown

Crossing the Great Unknown

I spent forty days crossing the Olgilvie Range in the Yukon this summer, from the Yukon River to the Dempster highway. It’s a huge stretch of mountains little known. Most the creeks, peaks, and passes don’t have names. No one ever went there, so there was never a reason to give them names; never a consideration for it. So, the major pass I crossed didn’t have a name. The bears, the wolves, the song birds, the moose, there were many. A lone wolf, darting through the shadows of the trees, followed me for a while, curious about my dogs. I almost ran into a grizzly who was hunkered down in a thicket on a cold, rainy day. They’ll stay in their bush as long as you don’t approach it. It’s such a remote place that I didn’t hear a plane for a month. I was out of the lanes, if that was even possible anymore in this day and age of crimp, crumple, and cram of nature.

            For the first half of the journey, towing supplies in a canoe upriver, I was afraid I’d have to turn back due to the ruggedness of the country and running out of food, but I pressed on despite my fear, figuring I’d somehow pull through and find a way. I crossed the pass, followed another river for a day, and then crossed a great expanse of taiga and tussocks until I hit the Olgilvie River twenty miles below its headwaters. Within the Olgilvies there are smaller mountain ranges too, also massive in themselves, like the Taiga Ranges and the Nahoni Range which I crossed or skirted the edges.

            I followed the Olgilvie River for days down to the Dempster Highway, running on fumes, nearly out of food. I stumbled down the road and eventually got a ride back to Dawson when I thought I was getting too thin, down over twenty pounds I’d later find out. But now, and this was the one thing I so urgently hoped for by going on this expedition, I had a glint in my eye knowing that beyond my struggle, there was a wild out there still, far bigger than myself. I so dearly wanted to be part of it, each year for a couple months at least, even if it meant suffering with the heavy load on my back, great loneliness, a nagging fear of desperation to make it through, and severe hunger bordering on starvation. It was worth the price to connect with wilderness again.

The day after I got back from the pristine solitude of the Yukon, they, somebody, was having a blaring car rally on the street right in front of my house. Just great. I don’t know why the city puts on such events. Normally this would have driven me through the ceiling, the irrefutable absurdity of it all. People sat in lawn chairs along the street watching these things bomb by, like they were living entities capable of feeling.

            I had reserves now built up from being in nature for so long, my spirit regenerated. So I sat in my backyard with my dogs drinking beer, tolerating the event. But it went on and on into the night, Jesus. Depending on the individual, I believe you only can tolerate so many frenzied dealings like this until your gone-ballistic switch triggers. I used up a good deal of my reserves on the drive home, people driving like their minds had gone totally off the rails, no composure or restraint whatsoever.

            After about two hours, a good beer-buzz going, I stumbled back into my house, shut the windows and blinds, and put on the movie Jeremiah Johnson. Shit, I wished I was in the Yukon again, where the only sane creatures were the animals, and the only insanity was where wilderness ended and civilization began.

 Heading east from the Yukon River up a small trib

 Last camp on the west side of the pass in the Olgilvie Range

 The pass I crossed

 The high pass

 Southern edge of the Nahoni Range

 Rest on the tussocks

 The Taiga Ranges

 Along the Olgilvie River, only days to go

 The Olgilvie River

 Late evening

 The Dempster Highway at last

 Down 20 pounds

Crossing the Yukon on Three Thousand Dollars

I splurged on some luxury items, like a life jacket for the canoe leg, cigars for way out in the backcountry to counteract loneliness, a satellite communicator to stay in touch with the frenzied modern world, and a brand new tent with a fresh, unbroken zipper so the noseams won’t infuriate me at night with their annoying, hard-to-find bites. I also bought two used canoes, one for a hundred dollars I had to patch, which I’ll use to haul myself, the dogs, and a mountain of food down the Yukon River out of Dawson City and part way up a trib heading east into the Olgilvie Range. The second canoe, which cost 350, will be used to float west back to Dawson City at the end of the summer. It’ll keep me from having to hitch hike. A two-thousand dollar charter flight back is out of the question for me, a poor non-capitalist who never gave a rat shit about money my entire life because I was always too busy thinking about wild animals and how to go somewhere really remote to see them. When I was a young kid I thought I could live on the coast of Alaska and have a pet whale.

            I also bought a new battery for the long drive up. I bought cocoa, and generic coffee in a big fat can, five pounds for a few bucks, normally tastes like crap, but not when you’re living on the edge struggling in the wild for weeks at a time. Then it tastes like heaven. I don’t know what heaven tastes like though. Heaven is probably where I’m headed, in the heart of the Olgilive Range. Our true nature, perhaps, is to always retain an inner calm and do no harm. Somehow this calmness has gotten lost along the way in the hustle and bustle of a world that has accelerated ludicrously off the rails. I hope to get this tranquil mindset back by around day sixty or so, and then really enjoy the rest of the trek with a rail-thin body and a clear-eyed mind. This is my only goal besides just being out learning about one of the last great wildernesses.

            What else did I buy? Oh yeah, a pair of fishing waders for hauling my canoe up the first trib, so my feet won’t throb painfully from the cold water. I spent a hundred bucks on contour maps. It’s nice to know exactly where you are on a trip like this, so you can complete the trek and not have to wander around the same region for days looking for a pass through like Bob Marshal had to do. Often, I don’t really care where I am, as long as I’m finding food and melding with the land, melting into it like a bear. I don’t want to be a menace to nature, a big fat ass just eating up resources and taking up space, but I know this isn’t entirely possible. By being alive, you displace other life. It’s only the scale of the displacement you can control.

            In the Yukon, my most prized possession might just be a piece of fishing line wrapped around an old plastic medicine bottle with a few shiny lures inside. This is my fishing gear, insuring that I can keep myself and the dogs fed if my food runs out prematurely; if I stuff my face too much and don’t stick to my rationing schedule. I should lose nearly two pounds a week over the course of the summer, close to twenty pounds. Then I’ll really be somebody.

            I bought a down jacket for the cold. Someone gave me a rain coat. I forgot who. Most my clothes were either given to me or bought at second-hand stores. My wool socks ae ten years old. I bought a ball cap for a dollar, and sunglasses too. I even have fuel for my stove this time for when I’m stuck inside my tent for a couple days waiting out a storm and can’t build a fire to cook. I like being in my tent, when the only sounds I hear are either animals, water, wind, or thunder, nothing else, no god-forsaken grinding of motor cars. They’re making us all crazy, consuming our lives and the world. I have antibiotics for the dogs, but not myself, in case of porcupine encounters. They can cause hideous infections. I guess I can always use theirs if I have to. I have one little cup, a titanium pot, a spoon, a head net for mosquitoes, the little bustards. They’re pollinators and feed an enormous quantity of migratory song birds, so I guess I can endure the buzzing and biting for their sake. Birds need to eat too. I have a small bar of soap, but no shampoo or razor. I want to see if my beard grows in grey yet. Not getting any younger so I guess I need to get moving.

            Most importantly, I don’t care one bit if I bring any of this shit back with me when it’s all over. It’s just stupid shit after all. You want to save the planet, stop buying shit. Buddhism teaches you not to have attachments to anything, not even the wilderness, not even your body. But it also teaches you not to have any aversions to anything, not even getting lost in the wilderness, and not even your body. Material things are meant to be worn out, lost, or just plain left behind, or better yet, never had in the first place. I’m trying to get better at this, you know, to be dust in the wind or something like that. The only things I want to bring back form the wilderness is a sense of relief knowing it is still there.