Giant George (5 page)

Deep down, I knew I needed a new venture. It had been selling my shops over a period of eighteen months and
that had given me the capital to buy the first property in Tucson. It had been logical to base my new plan in Arizona, because the price differential between there and California was substantial, and I knew my investment in property there would give great returns.

I loved that our new home was a place where we could make our own mark, set down some roots, build it the way
we
wanted it to be (if
a little slowly…) and create a proper family home—not that I was up for doing the family bit
quite
yet. We’d been married no time at all; we were still finding our feet, and moving into our first proper home was just one step along that road. We needed to get settled, make friends, get to know our new neighborhood—and perhaps get to know each other a little better too. I was also very conscious
that though this was my hometown, and to me felt familiar and easy, it was new territory for Christie.

It had been a pretty big deal for Christie to agree to come here with me, away from the beach, away from all the fantastic restaurants and the huge choice of shops that were right on our doorstep in LA. Most of all, it had been no small sacrifice for Christie to move away from her family and
friends. Sure, she got along just fine with my family, and they adored her, but was that enough? I hated to think she might be lonely in Tucson, and I was worried she didn’t have the kind of job where she’d be likely to find many new girlfriends. She worked in a mostly male-dominated industry: her company had over eight hundred sales reps nationally, and Christie was one of only eight women. She
was on the road most of the time, meeting with clients, and though her clients were friendly, they were clients, not pals.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized what a stupid thing I’d done even
suggesting
we give George away. She needed her puppy every bit as much as he needed his mom. I resolved to keep that in mind at all times.

Our puppy no longer looked much like a puppy, though.
He clearly was one—he still acted like a puppy, turning circles to chase his tail, playing endless games of fetch, as well as tug-of-war with his favorite bit of rope, out in the backyard. In fact, he was about the most playful puppy you could find. But at just five months old George was already the weight and size of a fully grown Labrador. When we’d moved into the house, he’d weighed fifty-three
pounds, and since then, in just a month, he’d put on another twenty-four, which meant an average gain of just under a pound a
day
. It was unbelievable to think that George was now a whopping seventy-seven pounds. And it wasn’t just Christie and I who were amazed at his growth rate: our new veterinarian, William Wallace, was too.

“For his age,” he’d told me, right off the bat, when George and
I went to meet him for the first time, “that’s the biggest Great Dane puppy I’ve ever seen.”

And he’d certainly seen a few in his time, because Doc Wallace was a respected large-breed specialist. He was very well known in the dog-owning community and had been practicing for four decades. He was in his late sixties, but still had a full head of blond hair, and you could see he was in pretty good
shape. He was a colorful character, and easy to spot too, because he had a fondness for wearing plaid pants. He’d been recommended to us by a number of people, including professionals who worked in the pet health care industry, so it wasn’t just his charm that made us choose him as our vet—his reputation was impressive.

Doc Wallace ran an office and surgical facility ten minutes
from our house,
and toward the end of April I headed over to see him to get George fixed up with whatever inoculations he needed so we could start getting him out and about.

There were also a whole load of questions I needed to have answered, as Great Danes, like any other special breed of animal, come with their own set of unique challenges. One of these was their potential, given their great size, for having
serious problems with their hips. Happily, that potential could at least in part be spotted after a simple examination when the dog was still a puppy.

George (and I would come to realize this was also the case with almost all the dogs our veterinarian saw) took to Doc Wallace right away, and wasted no time in making his admiration felt, by wagging his tail and leaning his ever-growing frame against
the doc’s legs. George loved to lean against people he liked. It was one of his favorite ways of feeling close. It’s a real Great Dane thing, this love of leaning up against people. As it turned out—understandably, I guess—George’s affection would slowly begin to dissipate as he made more visits to the vet, as soon as he realized that going to Doc Wallace’s would invariably mean lots of poking
and prodding and needles.

But when George liked you, you knew about it. Now that he was getting bigger, his displays of affection could have you pinned temporarily against a wall or a piece of furniture. It was his version of a bear hug.

Right away you could see that our vet had a gift. It seemed he could do almost anything to an animal without it getting angry and growling or biting. I’m not
sure I’d have reacted with
such grace and equanimity had a man in plaid pants laid
me
down on my back and immediately splayed my hind legs, even if it
was
to investigate my hip joints. But George didn’t so much as huff at him. And his hips, the doc confirmed, seemed just fine.

“But you’ll need to get him neutered,” he told me, as he righted George. “And it’s important that we do it at the right
time,” he added, “because if it’s left too long, it can result in his bones not fusing properly and then overgrowing, which could give him all sorts of other problems.” I assured him that that’s what we’d do. “And at the same time,” he explained, “we can do his gastropexy—that way he’s only under the anesthetic one time.”

The gastropexy, he explained, was an operation to staple George’s stomach
to the inside lining of his abdominal wall to prevent something nasty called bloat from happening. Bloat is a well-recognized problem with large breeds—most commonly in Great Danes—due to their size and the dimensions of their chests, and is caused by a buildup of swallowed air in the stomach.

Swallowing air when stressed is very common in Great Danes. They tend to do it most when they’re feeling
anxious, and that happens when they lack company. They’re not great dogs to get if you’re going to be away working all day, because they really do hate to be left alone, as we were well aware.

Bloat not only creates pressure on the surrounding organs, it can also lead to the stomach flipping over on itself and cutting off its own blood supply. It’s dangerous if that happens,
as it can kill a
dog in hours; even with professional intervention and treatment, around thirty percent of dogs with bloat die. The gastropexy, therefore, was a sensible option, especially since he was going under for his sterilization anyway. It might also take his mind off an even more distressing scenario: having some human, however friendly he appeared on the surface, put him under and then cut off his manhood.
It was just as well George didn’t know what we were talking about right then, or I swear he’d have bolted for the mountains.

A more sensible option still, and I remember this did cross my mind as George and I left the vet’s office, would have been not to have a Great Dane in the first place, given this huge potential for heartache that came with them. Like many large dogs, their life span wasn’t
that long. Anything over about seven or eight years was pretty good going for a Dane—something we’d known from the outset. But now I had a bunch of new pictures in my mind of the horrible things that could go wrong with our pet—the potential for hip problems and the dreaded bloat—which could take his life at an even earlier age.

For the moment, however, George was pronounced fit and well, and
as fine a specimen of a Great Dane puppy as the doc had ever seen. And, as I pointed out to Christie that evening, so far—given his current growth rate—the biggest…

Once George had begun his inoculations and was free to socialize with other dogs, we were finally able to unleash him on the world and let him explore a little farther afield. Since
there was a dog park not too far from where we lived,
it made sense to go and acquaint ourselves with it.

But first, being responsible parents, we decided we should get him a little training. Christie had seen puppy-training classes advertised at the pet store we usually used to buy our ever-expanding supplies of puppy food, so she signed up to join some group classes.

George proved himself to be a model pupil, and took to the training with real
enthusiasm. The system was based on Pavlovian-style conditioning, using clickers to reinforce various commands. He took to it easily, soon learned the commands “sit,” “stay,” “down” and so on, and graduated from class in no time. However, Christie felt, since he was such a large breed of animal, some private tutoring would be beneficial too.

We’d chosen a Great Dane partly because they are temperamentally
quiet, well-behaved pets, but we’d also read that they could be emotionally fragile if not properly trained from the start, and this could lead to them becoming difficult to manage. We had no idea at this point just how big George was going to get, but it made sense if you were going to have a big animal in your home to train that animal to obey you at all times—not to do so would have
been irresponsible.

So George had five sessions of training with a private dog trainer, and he loved every minute of that too. The private trainer used something called a “pinch collar,” which looks, if you don’t know about them, like an instrument of torture, since it’s a chain-link collar with blunt spikes at regular intervals that face inward, toward the dog’s neck, but it’s actually
much
kinder than a choke collar. Whereas the choke collar does pretty much what its name suggests and constricts the throat, the pinch collar simply gets the dog’s attention, making the process of getting him to know his place in your “pack” much quicker to establish. And since the key to having happy dogs is for them to know where they stand, we felt the training was money well spent.

With the help
of the pinch collar, our boisterous boy became, once again, a model pupil. So we were done. Our ball of cuddly blue fuzz had come a long way since we’d picked him up from the Phoenix airport. As well as being bigger—and,
boy
, was he getting bigger—he was also confident, socialized, obedient and good to go. He was ready to meet the world, play and make some new doggie friends.

We just had no idea
how tricky that was going to turn out to be.

Like any new parents who dote on their baby, we thought George was lovely—the perfect family pet. Okay, so that may be a little bit of an overstatement, to be honest, since he was still big, and getting bigger, and chowing down huge amounts of food, and making a mess, and doing poops, and taking over
the whole bed
, but even so he was a real nice puppy.

And like any new parents, when we started taking him to the dog park, we hoped everyone else would think he was a nice puppy too. Why wouldn’t they? George was totally gorgeous.

I guess we just hadn’t figured it out yet.

In Tucson there are several dog parks—places where people can take their pets to run around off the leash, play with other
dogs and generally enjoy some downtime together, safely away from any roads. Our nearest one was the Morris K. Udall Park, which was named after an esteemed Arizona politician, Morris King Udall, who’d served in the House of Representatives for thirty years. Morris was a bit of a local hero by all accounts.
The state of Arizona was always at the forefront of championing the rights of Native American
Indians anyway, and Morris, together with his brother, Stewart, was responsible for several political initiatives to support them. He was also an enthusiastic and committed environmentalist and saw through a lot of important legislation. It was a nice park; I’m sure he would have liked it.

The park was a five-minute drive from our new home and was split into two big areas: an area for puppies
and small dogs, up to around thirty pounds, and another area for adult and bigger dogs. Right away this gave us a problem: George, at just a few months old, was still very much a puppy, but already weighed more than the maximum thirty pounds for the puppy area. Still, since he
was
a puppy, we figured he should be in the small dog area. After all, you wouldn’t leave a young child in a schoolyard
full of teenagers, would you? But right away, on our very first visit to the dog park, it appeared he wasn’t welcome in the puppy part. Though he wasn’t doing anything wrong—he was just doing what puppies do: running around, having fun, getting to know the other dogs—he was clearly the object of disapproval.

“Did you hear that?” hissed Christie. She was sitting at one of the benches in the shade.
I’d been throwing George’s ball for him and had just sent it soaring. He galloped off to get it, and I sat down.