Years ago, our family had a Labrador Retriever named Pooh-Bear. He was our second Labrador Retriever, as our first one, Hershey had died in a car accident. Ironically enough, Pooh-Bear almost also died that way except for a couple thousand in medical supplies and lots of pro-bono work by the nice people at Central Veteran. At eleven years of age he would die a drastically different way, at the bullet of a gun. Violence on the farm has a remarkably different meaning then what we see on television and in popular culture.

Pooh-Bear was a great dog for the eleven years we had him. He was kind, friendly, loved to fetch, and was great fun from the moment we got him up at Lake Placid. I can just remember the drive up to Lake Placid back in 1989 in our little red Plymouth Colt 'E' sedan, and the excitement we had as that little puppy road back all the way to Westerlo. Playful from the start, he was great fun until two years later when the unthinkable happened again: he ran in front of a snowplow late one night. The driver never stopped, he might have been unaware that pooh had been hit.

This was particularly traumatic, as it was the second dog in a short period of time to have been almost killed this way. This time though, it wasn't ribs that where fractured, but his leg had been shattered. They put a plate in his leg, rather then cutting it off, as is the case with most farm dogs. They had no idea what bad shape it was truly in. It took months for the dog to recover and thousands of dollars. Pooh-Bear never could run or play the same way after the accident. He was a lot slower and more sedentary, and we always had to be careful about wrestling with him on that one leg. Amazingly though, he surveyed for another 11 years, though the last two years his allergies got worst.

He was literally a mess with hot spots over a significant portion of his body and little hair left except on the end of his tail and around his head where he could not chew. The vet put him on a variety of medications, and tried using a collar around him, but with little luck. We found that giving the dog Benadryl somewhat helped the dog's pain and was a lot cheaper then veterinary medicines. It was about the best our family could do with our limited resources.

Many people probably would not have kept a dog like this. Most probably would have left him out to die. We took care of him to his final day. We had talked for a long time about this day coming, but it came suddenly during April 2001. In February of that year my grandfather had passed away. That was a challenging moment, but probably less so then that when my dog died a month later. My grandfather died of ammonia brought on by mistreatment at the nursing home he attended, but my dog died a remarkable different death, by choice, by way of a conscience decision to put him down.

I came home that day of April after a long day in school. I found the dog on my parent's bed. He tried to move, but all he could do is yelp and groan like he all so often did. It was obvious that he had bent the plate in his leg. My parents told me during the evening that the time had come for Pooh-Bear. There was little that they could do for him at this point. It would be inhumane and impractical to take such an old dog back to the vet. Implicit in that were the financial ramifications of it all, as we didn't really have the money to spend on such an old dog.

My dad never told me to my face what was going to happen to dog. I guess I didn't really want to know, but I had my suspicions. The sound of my dad's twenty-two going off confirmed my suspicions. It was two shots, and he was dead. It was a sound I will never forget. Like many things on the farm, it was just another mercy killing. I remember going out the next couple of days and seeing the blood on the driveway, until the rain finally washed it away. There was not a lot of blood, as my dad had mopped most of it up with the blanket he wrapped my dead dog in, but there was enough to remind me for a while after the dog was buried.

The ground was still frozen, so it was impossible to bury the dog. Fortunately, we had just recently cleaned out the chest freezer. Pooh-Bear lay in the freezer for several days until the ground was soft enough to bury the dog, back in the field by the creek where so many animals in the past had been buried. Goats, chickens, and other dogs had come to rest there, including Hershey and Teddy, our outdoor dog that passed away so quietly the year before. It is a beautiful place down by our stream, and in the summer I frequently go there to rest, to think, and to write. My dad placed some stones over the dog to prevent other animals from digging him up, as a shallow burial is necessary due to the bedrock. I later fixed up the display and made it look far nicer.

When the snow melts this year, there will be a few stones left under the matted down hay. Many of them have long been removed to avoid damaging the sickle-bar hay cutter. Below the ground, there probably is some bones left, along with the metal plate in his leg and the bullet that killed him. Most of the dog probably has broken down and returned to the earth and only some traces left. I will go back there once again, and try to remember what that dog meant for me during my life and how he changed me as an individual.

I look back four years later with sadness to Pooh-Bear's death. I know my dad made the right decision, putting that poor dog out of misery. I can only imagine what it must felt to have been the dog, and what it must have felt to my dad to kill the dog that we had been through so much with. Literally, I was seven years old when we got the dog and I was eighteen when he died. I was living in a vastly different world and so was Pooh-Bear. Something died that day.