appetite for destruction

Good Dog
by T. edward nickens
Appetite for Destruction
S
A true story of a lovable Lab that ate everything
She marked the beginning of our marriage,
arriving just a few months after we walked down the aisle,
during that heady time when life seems so full of hope and
possibility. But no way were we having a kid, not yet, so
Sweet Emma Pearl curled up in a little yellow ball and
rode, whimpering, in Julie’s lap the entire four-hour drive
home from my buddy’s house. Seven weeks old. She
slept in our bed and lay down beside the tub whenever
either of us took a shower and laid her head in Julie’s lap
48 GardenandGun.com June | July 2010
for every meal we ever had at home for close to a decade. “It’s not
dirt if it came off Emma’s paws,” Julie liked to say, even when the
dirt was swamp muck or the red clay from a Piedmont dove field.
We loved that dog as only a young couple starting out in the world
can love a dog that’s all their own. So to us it was only a charming part of her canine nature that she had the appetite of a goat.
We’ve all heard about hounds that can’t stay out of the garbage
or refrain from chewing the television remote to bits. But Emma’s
gustatory excesses went way beyond a lack of self-control. She was
illustrations by John Cuneo
hardly a year old when we realized there was more to her munching than a puppy’s normal and expected oral fixations. Her first
serious meal of something that only marginally resembled food
was a three-pound bag of self-rising flour. We came home to
find her on the kitchen floor, panting, face dusted as white as a
mime’s, muzzle caked with marble-size globs of Martha White’s
best. She was panting from thirst, and we fed her teaspoons of
water at a time, fretting about the giant
loaf of bread rising in her belly.
And it was on. Over her nine years, no
amount of yelling, pleading, or chasing
could keep her from ingesting whatever
struck her fancy. She would cower at my
thunderous ovations of rage, licking her
lips. I doused the trash can with cayenne
pepper, which she enjoyed immensely. I
mined the kitchen counters with mousetraps to snap some sense into her paws.
Nothing doing.
She ate onions beyond counting. She
would hide them under her dog bed and
gum them in the middle of the night.
Used Q-tips were a treasure not to be
rushed, but slowly gnawed on like cud.
She could pick individual blackberries
with her lips.
Once, I took a frozen smoked turkey
breast out of the freezer, set it on the
counter, then ran to the grocery store.
When I returned, less than twenty minutes later, there was no turkey breast to
be found. Just one tiny corner of a plastic
bag and a single sprig of rosemary on the
floor. Emma looked as if she’d been blown
up like a pool toy. In the time it took me
to buy a box of rice, she’d eaten close to
eight pounds of turkey breast, bone, and
plastic bag. All of it frozen hard as granite.
She didn’t even break a tooth.
At the time, this was all a funny sideshow, but as Emma’s tastes were emboldened—and once we had kids—her feats of
ingestion became more problematic. Our
children learned to walk around the house
like gibbons, arms stretched overhead,
fingers grasping crackers out of Emma’s
reach. Our solution to dirty diaper storage
would have passed the security protocols at
Fort Knox. She had a love for beaver poop
that was undeniable. This was a particular
offense to my hunting buddy, who often
shared a seat with Emma on the odiferous
ride home from the duck swamp.
Perhaps her most impressive infraction occurred the year I
started fly fishing for striped bass. On my Christmas wish list were
dyed bucktails, flashy tinsels, and strips of glittery foil—just a few
of the ingredients for Clouser Minnows. “It never occurred to me,”
my wife has said, many times since, “that the dog would be the
least bit interested.”
When Julie walked into the house, she thought she’d stumbled
onto a murder scene. In the middle of the
living room, Emma had feasted on a fivepack of bright red bucktails, grinding the
crimson ink into a three-foot circle of carpet. Elsewhere, blue and green orbs of color
marred the floor, and everywhere was the
shrapnel of chewed-up tinsel and foil. We
had to rip up the Berber carpet. For a week
I shoveled brilliantly ornamented poop
from the backyard.
I’m absolutely convinced that Emma’s
garbage-hound habits led to her ultimate
demise. The official diagnosis was pancreatitis, and we never wondered what might
have caused that. The first time it hit her
hard, I was in the Alaska backcountry,
unreachable for two weeks. Julie rushed
Emma to the veterinarian with a request
that he was all too willing to grant. “I don’t
care how much it costs,” Julie told him.
“But keep this dog alive until my husband
gets home.”
She held on for another week and a half,
then collapsed on the living room floor. This
time Emma curled up in a big yellow ball,
and lay whimpering, once again, in Julie’s
lap. We sat there together, the three of us on
the floor, just like in the old days, marveling
at all the love we’d managed to hold since
Sweet Emma Pearl came home.
The next morning I had to cook seven
pigs for a church barbecue, and once I got
the coals started I carried Emma to the
car, and Julie and I drove her to the vet.
I dug sweet Emma’s grave while bawling
like a baby, hands slicked with hog fat, the
vinegary tang of barbecue sauce wafting
over the backyard.
Every now and then I catch a glimpse
of her headstone in the backyard under
the tulip poplar, and I get the urge to take
a greasy paper towel or the cut-off ends of
onions and toss them on the grave. Some
might figure that for a sacrilege. But I’m
pretty sure my Emma would appreciate
the gesture. G
Emma’s first
serious meal of
something that
only marginally
resembled food
was a threepound bag of
self-rising flour
June | July 2010 GardenandGun.com 49