Today was a very sad day for me and my family. We had to put our beloved family dog, Scooter, to sleep. Since earlier this year, she has been getting rather vicious, showing her teeth and (occassionally) trying to bite anyone who pets her. She nipped my arm back in June, but things got worse last week. On Sunday, November 27th, she severely bit my father on the hand, requiring him to go to the hospital to get the wound stitched up. The photo you see above was taken minutes before Animal Control came to take her away today.

I had mentioned her abnormal behavior to her vet at the Oceanside Veterinary Hospital (in Oceanside, New York) when we brought Scooter in for her yearly vaccinations this past July/August. (Although she's been going to that clinic for years, this vet has only been seeing her since last year, I believe.) The vet didn't seem too interested in completely diagnosing these new symptoms, attributing it to poor eyesight (cataracts) and loss of hearing. Yes, it's true that Scooter was an old dog (fifteen years old), and that her health was failing her. She had arthritis in her back left thigh (which made it hard for her to get up off the floor, climb stairs, and walk) and a large benign lump on her left shoulder/side (and smaller lumps on her tail by the base and on her stomach). However, to say that she's getting vicious with us because she's having trouble recognizing us is asinine. I could stand across the room and look at her and she'd get vicious when my eyes met hers, but not if I looked elsewhere (though in the past month she'd gotten so worse that she'd get vicious to an area where no one was standing). Hard to attribute that (originally) to poor eyesight. Even more asinine is that the vet didn't do anything for Scooter to help her, and more importantly, help us in dealing with her. Surely there's some type of medicine to help in this case. There has to be a more sound reason for why a dog would, all of a sudden, get vicious with family members whom she has known and lived with for all fifteen years of her life. Some people we've spoken to have said it was Dementia. Not the vet of course, but friends and neighbors.

Scooter was born on my sister's eighth birthday. She was given to us in May 1990 by a then-client of my mother's, whose dog had a litter of puppies. My mom didn't want Scooter, as we already had a three-year-old female dog named Mickey (named after the Walt Disney creation Mickey Mouse). Although my mom kept saying no, eventually she relented, and carried little Scooter home with her in a box on the public buses. We decided to name her Scooter in honor of the then-recently-deceased Jim Henson, whose Muppet Show featured a character named Scooter.

Although they were fine at first, as Scooter got older, she started to get into fights with Mickey. In early-to-mid June 1999, it got so bad that Mickey was lying near-dead on our porch. In late June, Mickey was stolen from us by a friend who we had called to help us with her, seeing as how the Nassau County Police were absolutely useless when she was lying in a bloody mess on the porch. We never saw Mickey again after that, but we know that she's long since passed away by now.

Mickey and Scooter are now reunited up in Heaven, where I hope they are co-existing peacefully.

[Edit, 12/15/2005: My sister's tribute page can be found here]