Animal rights activists returned to Oshkosh with a vengeance, raging protests against Alyssa Brandt, even though her dog, Princess, was rehabilitated at the Humane Society and quickly adopted to a loving and more capable owner. Charged with being party to the crime of mistreatment of animals resulting in death and intentionally mistreating animals, Brandt faced twenty-seven months in prison. The judge received hundreds of letters with local, national, and international postmarks, advocating a tough sentence.
Brandt was a young woman with no criminal record, on track to attend the technical college in the fall. Inquiring minds wanted to know: what was her excuse? She had adopted Princess to save her, the runt of the litter, from being killed—an obvious gesture of compassion, the same as Fern’s benevolent act in Charlotte’s Web. Irie and I were so touched by the 2006 cinematic adaptation of the novel that we decided halfway through our first viewing to name our next girl Fern, in honor of E. B. White’s animal liberator, and of course, we did. Now here was Alyssa Brandt, who had shopped at Walmart for formula, a full-fledged mother who had bottle-fed Princess hourly, humming sweet lullabies into the puppy’s ear.
Nothing seemed to explain why she slowly began limiting Princess’s food and water after Fredrickson bought Rocco via Craigslist, and nothing explained why she never stepped in to prevent Rocco’s gruesome death. The tipster working with police described Brandt and her “husband” watching movies, talking, and laughing while Rocco wasted away in his crate. This friend—this spy—developed a ritual of biting her chicken nuggets in half and pushing the fried McDonald’s morsels between the slats, Rocco snapping them up and swallowing them whole. One explanation in this case is that Rocco was hostile; he would bite Fredrickson’s hands and attack Brandt when she opened his cage. But at what point do neglect and hunger begin to manifest as a vicious dog?
More than preoccupied by Brandt’s behavior, though, I was worried about my own lack of moral outrage, desensitized to animal cruelty after only two high-profile cases. As the wife of a criminal-defense attorney, I wondered, was I becoming numb as a matter of self-preservation, and would I continue to make a decent mother?
Admittedly I found myself baffled by friends who compared their cats and dogs to children. Colleagues would discuss dropping their Labradors off at doggie day cares as if feeling the same separation anxiety that mothers of breastfeeding babies experienced. I politely smiled, knowing we were comparing the equivalent of apples and some exotic fruit like the African horned cucumber. Other professors stormed through the department, “overwhelmed” by their students’ requests, mounting stacks of papers, never-ending to-do lists, but I knew, secretly, work was a vacation from child-rearing. Pet ownership was not the same rigorous boot camp parenthood was, even if a couple of my fellow professors were busy managers of their cats’ Facebook pages. Sometimes, when I’d tell people I wanted another baby, they’d say, “Get a dog instead.” Not only did this preclude my active role in conception, pregnancy, and birth—animal mothers got to conceive, grow, and nurse those puppies and kittens—but plainly, bluntly, I did not believe animals equaled people on the continuum of living things.
Our dog, Mr. Owen, was an impulse buy when I was pregnant with Leo, but we loved him as most families love their pets, because he was jolly and dopey. We gave him outrageous haircuts like Mohawks or buzz cuts with leftover leg warmers, and Irie dressed him in T-shirts. Mr. Owen participated in every imaginary game she wished, though he also liked to be naughty, bolting off in parking lots and jumping into strangers’ vehicles, a regular Houdini dog. Ryan once received a phone call from the YMCA parking lot, where Mr. Owen had leapt into a stranger’s car. The good Samaritan who had found Ryan’s phone number on Mr. Owen’s tag said, “I think I’ve got your dog here,” but after a moment’s delay, he followed up with, “Wait, he just ran off and jumped into some lady’s van.” Ryan hung up and called me, flabbergasted to realize I hadn’t even noticed Mr. Owen leave and return. Our magician pooch resembled the dog who swallowed the canary, and this goofy half golden retriever, half poodle made us laugh out loud.
In spite of our affection for Mr. Owen, back when I’d begun lobbying Ryan for a fourth baby, I had eagerly exploited our lovable pooch for leverage. “You’re right. The only way I can see having a fourth baby is if we give up Mr. Owen,” Ryan had told me. “We just won’t have the time or space to be good pet owners.” I hesitated very little. Comparing children to dogs did not require a balance scale. We quickly relinquished him to my stepmom Nancy’s sister, Anna, with the unusual perk of keeping him, marginally, in our lives.
After several happy months with his new owner, Mr. Owen was diagnosed as having a stomach tumor. Thanks to Anna’s devotion, he received surgery and post-op veterinary care, but on a June morning shortly thereafter, the exact day Francis was born, Anna found Mr. Owen dead.
