We got Mike from a farmer in the hills somewhere south of Carthage, Tennessee. I don’t recall exactly where, but I do remember driving through a “holler” and down a long, rutted, gravel driveway and up to a compound of buildings that included barns and outbuildings in various stages of needing paint, a white-frame house, and a small but apparently active slaughterhouse. The farmer we bought Mike from – Mike is the only dog I’ve ever owned that had a cash value – seemed nice enough. He was raising sheep, goats, and cattle. It was quite an operation so far as we could tell as we drove up with our trailer and goat-tote. “We” included me, Vanessa, and a young Jordan. We still had the Subaru, so it was very early in our own farming operation.
After the appropriate greetings and handshakes, the farmer took us even further back into the holler to a large, old wooden barn that had never seen a coat of paint but was standing nonetheless to introduce us to what we all hoped would be our new Livestock Guard Dog. There were two dogs in the barn—both LGDs—and at first I approached the wrong one, a youngish-looking Great Pyrenees. “No,” the farmer said, “That’s Mike over there.” Mike was hanging back—a little leery. Though I had little knowledge of Great Pyrenees, it was easy to see that Mike was not purebred. He was an Anatolian/GP mix, the farmer told us. Mostly Anatolian. He was two and one half years old, sweet natured, and a bit shy at first. Two hundred dollars later, we loaded him into the goat-tote strapped on the trailer hitched to the back of our Subaru and started back down the long, gravel driveway, through the holler, past the fields, and eventually to pavement. When we got home a couple hours later, Mike had vomited and shat all over the trailer floor as he was so scared. The contents of his vomit consisted of undigested scraps from the slaughterhouse. The contents from his other end had been more thoroughly processed.
After the initial trauma of traveling, though, Mike was happy here, and he never got in or on anything with wheels again for the rest of his life. On many afternoons, he’d lie out on the hill that is our front yard, looking down toward the pond and the road beyond that and the hill rising up on the other side of the road, and he was as content as a creature can be. This was his farm. He had the perch to prove it.
He was never purely a Livestock Guard Dog. LGDs are trained to live with the flock and have minimal contact with people. The flock is their pack, but Mike wasn’t having any of those restrictions. No matter how many times we took him to the back of the farm where the sheep and goats lived and no matter how carefully we closed and locked the gates behind us, he’d find his way back to the house and wind up on the front porch. He protected the sheep and goats, and he liked the other dogs, but he loved us. That’s why, I think, when I approached the wrong dog back on the farm south of Carthage, the farmer was quick to correct me.
But as it turns out, the wrong dog for some people is exactly the right dog for others.
So, Mike became our FGD—our Farm Guard Dog. Guard dogs are largely nocturnal, and Mike spent his nights on the porch or on the driveway or in the yard listening. When he heard coyotes yapping in the distance—there are packs of them living in the wooded hills around this area—he’d bark a few times, then run to another part of the property and bark again, then a couple of other places. It’s apparently a strategy they use to convince the coyotes that there’s a whole pack of vicious dogs over here, so they best do their hunting in a different location. And it worked. Even though Mike never took up residence with the livestock, we never lost a single sheep or goat to predators. For the first couple of years, I worried about Mike’s barking keeping our closest neighbor awake at night, but eventually I realized I cared a whole lot more about Mike than I cared about our closest neighbor.
Mike was the Official Farm Greeter. Though he slept a lot during the day, when people came up the driveway he’d be in the parking area to greet them, barking. If it was someone who didn’t know Mike, I’d go out to tell them it was safe to open the car door, that he wouldn’t bite, “unless, of course, you’re a coyote in disguise.” People who knew Mike were by and large happy to see him. A big, fluffy, friendly, barky pillow of a dog who was tolerant of all forms of human activity, including a two-year-old who poked him in the eye repeatedly during a cookout one summer.
For nine years, Mike lived here with us, watching over the farm, making sure we were all safe and sound, and if that included the livestock he was okay with that, as long as he didn’t have to live with them.
Since Mike wouldn’t go to the vet for his annual shots, the vet had to come to Mike, so we had a standing farm call once a year for all our dogs’ vaccinations. Mike never trusted the vet for some reason—it wasn’t that the shots hurt him, because the vet was always gentle—so I’m not sure what the issue was, but when the vet showed up, Mike would start shaking and try to escape no matter how much I tried to calm him. It got to the point about three years ago, Mike crawled under the back deck where he liked to sleep on hot summer afternoons, and the vet and I had to crawl under there with him to give him his rabies shot. For the next two years even that didn’t work. Mike never snapped at the vet or got aggressive in any way. He just got scared. In the end, the vet started giving us the syringe full of rabies vaccine so Vanessa could inject Mike after he left. The vet said he couldn’t sign the form certifying that Mike was vaccinated, but Mike would still be protected, and since Mike never left the farm, the paperwork seemed unnecessary.
As most people know, large-breed dogs often suffer from hip dysplasia as they get older. For me, hip dysplasia had always been an abstract concept. As we watched Mike go downhill over the last year, it became a more tangible aging issue. Essentially, the hip bones start to deteriorate and the tendons and muscles connecting the hips to the legs and the spine start to weaken. A little over a year ago, Mike started having trouble getting up sometimes. He could still run down the hill to the road when certain trucks or tractors went by, but he was stiff legged and walked back up the hill slowly, probably in pain. By early summer, he had trouble getting up more often. He’d have to maneuver his hind legs underneath his belly and rock forward enough to gain momentum. Then he became fecally incontinent. Other than the day we brought him home and he shat all over the trailer floor, I never saw Mike poop for the first eight years he lived with us. He was a private pooper. Then one day last summer, poop just started falling out of him. I won’t describe the mess it made—either on the driveway or in his long, white hair.
We started giving him arthritis meds a few months ago, during the last vet visit, and they seemed to help for a while. Then about two months ago the vet upped the dosage to include pain meds. Those helped for a while too. Sometimes, he seemed fine. He often had trouble getting up, and sometimes his back legs would collapse while he was walking. He’d usually sit for a moment and re-collect himself, then he’d arrange his feet under his belly, and rock himself back into a standing position. When it rained, he liked to go into a covered porch we have on the back of the house—he especially liked it after we put a window AC unit in there for him—but he had to climb five steps to get there. Sometimes he could make it. Other times we had to carry him, which he seemed to find demeaning, or at the very least, uncomfortable.
About three weeks ago, Mike had a bad week. He was sleeping a lot, struggling to stand, falling regularly, pooping and peeing all over himself. He was still eating and still alert, but it was as if the back half of his body was shutting down completely. Vanessa and I had been talking about it for some time, and we knew this day was coming—had known it for a while—but it was getting harder and harder for me to ignore. So, I dropped the dime.
I asked the vet if we could get an oral sedative to give Mike before they came out, and the vet agreed. Then I went to Hartville Foodland and bought a big package of raw hamburger to spread like icing over his meals for several days. About an hour before the vet appointment, I gave Mike a cocktail of sedatives (seven pills, in all) wrapped in little raw hamburger sliders, hoping that he would go to sleep peacefully. But when the vet showed up an hour and a half later, Mike was still wide awake.
It took two more syringes and an I.V. of sedatives to get him somewhere in the range of sleepy. Then, kneeling over Mike, the vet explained the process to Vanessa and me. He would shave a front leg and inject the euthanasia drug. About fifteen to thirty seconds later Mike’s breathing should stop. Then the vet would check for a heartbeat and a retinal response, the final test of life.
Five minutes after the first injection, we were still waiting while Mike took long, deep breaths. A few minutes after that, the vet called for more of the euthanasia drug, which he administered. A few minutes later, he shaved another leg and tried again. Eventually, after enough of the drug to kill a two-hundred-pound animal—Mike breathed his last.
I had already dug a grave in the swale where I buried Clara, our long-beloved milk goat, a couple years ago, so the vet and his assistant helped load Mike into the scoop of my tractor and I drove him down the hill. Digging a grave, especially at the end of a hot, dry summer, is hard physical work. Covering up an animal that has meant so much to you is hard in a different way. As I shoveled dirt onto his deteriorated hind quarters, I looked toward the other end, the end that had remained alert through all of this, and I saw that Mike’s eyes weren’t completely closed. They remained open just a slit. I couldn’t throw dirt into his eyes, so I took out an old, blue kerchief I carry in my back pocket and covered his face. It was my oldest kerchief and the most worn, literally coming apart at the seams, with threads dangling from one corner. I loved that old kerchief, but it was the least I could give to Mike, who had given us so much.
