To the point: I recently rehomed my dog. Raylan just turned five years old, and I’ve had him since he was seven weeks, a humane society rescue. This has been months in the making. Specifically on Tuesday of last week, I gave him over to a trainer to keep for six weeks to help him with his severe fear aggression and anxiety. At the end of that period, he will go live with my ex-husband.
I thought about keeping it on the down-low, but after all of the shaming I encountered directed at people who do this (give up an animal) when I started trying to see what my options were, I decided to write about it. I think the personal inevitably creeps into an informal publication like this, but the value of the personal is also something I believe in pedagogically—I ask my students to write in the first person and share their opinions, and my dissertation has elements of memoir in it. So, here you go: what it is like to give up an animal. This is also something of a meditation on failing another being and trying to find the line between choosing one’s self and honoring commitments.
I grew up with dogs, but Raylan was special. He had no accidents after his first week at home even as a young puppy, learned commands quickly, and was incredibly affectionate. He was friendly with strangers and other dogs. He was great on car trips, settling quickly and falling asleep for hours. At the vet, he didn’t even flinch during vaccinations or blood draws and was fine with being handled. And then, at about 6 months, a switch flipped: he started barking at people, the smell of cigarettes on friends who smoked seemed to upset him, if another dog was too rough with him he would escalate to a fight, and he began to act protective of me. Where social outings had been easy (I could take him to a brewery and he would sleep in my lap or under my chair), now it seemed I had a different animal.
I don’t know when I started crying when I looked at him. I think probably when he was nine months old—that was the first time he bit someone. It was often when he was asleep beside me that it hit. Those moments of peace and sweetness, where I wondered if he was sleeping because, well, he’s a dog and sleeping is what they do, or if he was groggy from the meds I had him on to keep his anxiety more manageable.
I decided that I’d need to find him a new home back in February when he bit someone without warning in my house, someone that he’d expressed no previous adverse reaction to—Raylan had snuggled, fallen asleep in this person’s lap, done all of the things he does to show affection and ease, multiple times. Considering that his usual reaction to anyone he didn’t meet in the first six months of his life (and even some of those) is to bark and lunge, I thought we were safe. We were not. After nearly a year without a bite incident under my watch, and after following all of the rules of gradual introduction and trust building, the training and precautions failed me. Failed Raylan. Almost no one has been in my house since then.
Raylan has been territorial of me for a while. When I was married, he was more likely to bark at strangers or stand in front of me if it was just the two of us than if we were with my husband. It’s been just the two of us since last July, and it seems that has bonded him to me stronger than ever. While I am more relaxed and at ease in the last year, his anxiety seems to have increased even more. Even maxed out on prozac, gabapentin, and trazodone he jumps at the sound of people on the street, moving from asleep to hackles-raised bark-screaming in seconds.
I carry some guilt about his behavior. I do think there is something just off about his brain chemistry, that this is like psychological issues that hit in adolescence for humans. His behavioral vet told me as much—that possibly his mother being a stray meant he didn’t get the right stuff in the womb, but either way, some of this was inevitable. Still. I wonder if my anxiety made his worse. If living in a house with palpable tension conditioned him to assume that there is always something bad about to happen. I was on edge the first four years of his life—the stress of a bad relationship is real. Raylan loves my ex-husband, so this is not to say that he was mistreated by either of us. Just that a sensitive animal picks up on stress. And stress was rampant in our house.
Giving him up, as with any failure, has meant re-examining how I define myself. I grew up with animals and thought I knew how to care for them. I thought I was an “animal person,” had those instincts, but maybe I’m not. The people around me who know me and know Raylan, even those whom he loved and was affectionate toward, have all been supportive and understanding. I thought I could put off the rehoming until after I finished my PhD and moved somewhere less urban, that maybe a change of venue, somewhere where he could get more exercise, encounter fewer people, where he could age out of his issues, might be the answer. It might be, but it probably isn’t. He is a difficult animal, I’ve tried my best, and sometimes saying goodbye is the best thing for everyone involved.
And knowing that I have the support of those who love me made it easier when, during my research on what to do with him (which was bleak—a dog with a history like his is not a good candidate for anything but being adopted into a no other animals, no children, possibly no men household preferably in the country by hermits or else euthanasia) I was bombarded with people on the internet likening the decision to give up a dog to abandoning an adopted child. I had chosen this animal, had probably made it the mess it was (because these voices also insist on the “no bad dogs, only bad owners” mantra), and was now too selfish to see it through. The thing is, I do generally think that most pet behaviors are human-inflicted problems. It’s just not the whole picture.
So, I decided the best thing I could do was to see what the limits of training were. While I could no longer trust him not to bite the people around me, I thought it might be easier to find him a new family if he had acute care. Like inpatient treatment to get him over the hump. Who knew, he might end up a totally different dog. Though my ex is happy to take him, I wasn’t always sure that would be an option (Raylan is difficult to have a life around). I started researching trainers in June.
One person told me that my dog didn’t feel safe with me. As a child, I had a Jack Russell Terrier who was protective of me, and so I mentioned that. “Well,” he said, “as my dad would say, if you get married and divorced nine times, you might be the problem.” In my desperation to get someone to take him, to help him, I accepted that. I took the blame, the title of bad owner. Maybe I am.
Maybe he would have been fine with someone else. I hope he’ll be better with my ex, that at least the guarding instinct will be lessened. And I have faith in the trainer I did end up going with—a woman name Eloise who spoke candidly with me about the limits of what she could do and the goals of helping Raylan regulate his emotions.
My decision is selfish: I don’t want to live alone for the rest of his life. Which will probably be another decade—apart from his brain chemistry, he’s an incredibly healthy, active dog. Even being badly attacked last summer when he was not in my care hasn’t left any permanent damage—just skin grafts, and a new, profound fear of and aggression toward other dogs.
I’m nearly thirty. I want the option to have children. I want to be able to live with a romantic partner again some day. Raylan pretty much hates men (except in scrubs at a vet’s office), and unfortunately, I seem to be attracted to only men, so we’re at an impasse. I can’t have people in my house anymore—even in his crate, he screams and cries for hours if he can hear other people in the house. It’s like I’m forcing him to have a panic attack because I want a social life.
I know there’s a world where his symptoms could get better, but it’s one that requires far more training than I can give him every day, and probably an environment with fewer stressors. My ex-husband loves Raylan. I have to hope that together they can be happy and safe. To remember that, while Raylan screams every time I leave him for boarding, he won’t miss me. He won’t pine for me. He didn’t pine for my ex in the year that it’s been just the two of us, but he’ll be so excited to see him when he does.
I also wonder if holding on to him this long has also been selfish. He’s bitten my father, twice. Though he seems fine with him the last three years, I’m afraid to leave them alone together, and my father is always careful not to move too suddenly, make a loud noise around him. The last time I visited my parents with Raylan, we were hanging out in the kitchen when someone walked in the side door. In a panic, I grabbed Raylan before he could lunge and try to bite. The surprise of the unexpected guest shot him into anxious aggression. It turned out to be my aunt and uncle whom he has known for years, though he vacillates between being friendly and wary. I muzzled him, tried to let him understand who the visitors were, but after he snapped at my uncle, I removed him from the space.
In my frustration, I silently blamed my parents for forgetting to mention that guests might come over. But just because I live my life constantly planning for the worst, keeping my doors locked so that no one comes in and startles my dog, so that no one gets hurt, doesn’t mean that the rest of the world should.
For the last few months I felt as though I was pre-grieving his absence. I stopped posting Raylan to my social media anymore, didn’t mention him in conversations unless explicitly asked. The day he was picked up, I seemed to vacillate between wanting to hold him close, to make the most of the last few moments together and also to not do anything abnormal so that he wouldn’t become worried.
I’ve never had a dog who loved me that hard. It feels like a sort of co-dependency, though, his need for me, his anger at the world. I try not to anthropomorphize, to be logical about the differences in how dog and human memory, emotion, understanding work, but I can’t help it. I’m caught by how my generation loves our animals. My generation is closer to their animals than our parents were: we spend more on premium dog food, puzzle toys, and day care. It might be because we can’t afford children as easily, and so pets have become our surrogates.
In a 2021 article in The Atlantic reflecting on not only the pandemic pet-adoption surge, but also that millennials have surpassed boomers as the generation most likely to own a pet, it is clear that pets have become emotionally more to us than to generations that came before:
“The 2020 pet-adoption surge was sharp…Among adults under 40, who accounted for the majority of pet adoptions, the pandemic-era spike in demand was anomalous in its intensity, not its trajectory. Millennials recently overtook Boomers as the largest pet-owning cohort of Americans; by some estimates, more than half of them have a dog. The pet-ownership rate is even higher among those with a college education and a stable income—the same people who are most likely to delay marriage, parenthood, and homeownership beyond the timelines set by previous generations. Dogs, long practical partners in rural life or playmates for affluent children, have become a life stage unto themselves.”
From the outside, it looks like I spent most of my twenties hitting these life-goals (marriage, homeownership, dog parent) only to undo most of them (I still have the house, so there’s that). With the help of therapy and the popularization of therapeutic understandings of growth and development, I can now see at least one of these undoings as a success in its own right. But that mindset doesn’t negate that certain dreams had to die, certain accomplishments needed to be revised.
More than a few people who know me, the dog, my ex, see my giving the dog up as the final step in moving on from the marriage. I’m not sure how I feel about that mindset. In many ways it seems right: love alone can’t fix an unhealthy dynamic, and we got the dog just three months after our wedding, making him a fixture of the marriage itself. But such a mindset runs the risk of reducing this being, my dog, to collateral, a last anchor to cut loose, not what he is: a commitment I made. That we made to each other, owner and animal, that I’m sure he believes he is holding up his end of.
In that Atlantic article, the author talks about pet ownership as the natural outlet for a part of human development: the desire to care for another. That impetus is a wonderful thing, but for some of us the desire to caretake is almost pathological, something that serves to allay fears about ourselves, our worth, who we are. I think I come from a family of caregivers and, based on the codependent nature of my longest romantic relationship, my relationship to my dog, even the roles I played for my college roommate, I find my comfort zone in offering myself up to help further the dreams of another. I like to think that I want to help others because I am selfless, because I truly believe that acts of kindness make the world better, that I treat others how I wish to be treated. But that is not all of it. At some point, probably even before I was a teenager, I decided I wanted to be the kind of person who would always rush in to help. I don’t know if this is to counterbalance my tendency to be judgmental, that I am generous but not always nice. Or if this is because I’m less confident in my ability to do other friend things like basically anything social. But I will make you dinner and drive you to the doctor and listen intently while you tell me things that you should probably be talking to a qualified professional about to prove my friendship. Or at least, this is how I’ve operated in the past.
I don’t like thinking of giving up my dog as some step in my healing because it indicates a tolerance for a high body count in the service of self. The intensity of this animal’s fear of the world, his fear for me, had begun to pull me back away from the life I felt I was finally getting to reacquaint myself with after the isolation of the pandemic and my failing marriage. So yes, this is a loss that will demonstrably improve my quality of life.
But I also have to believe it will improve his. I struggle when I think of his warm body curled against my legs at night, even the way he noses me awake to lift up the covers so he can get under; the incredible softness of his fur; the way his warm brown eyes seem to deepen and half close as he gently licks peanut butter from a spoon now thrice daily to take the psychiatric medication that keeps him at all able to cope with the world.
In this week, the strangest things remind me of his absence or how I have trained myself to him. The noises outside my house that used to make him bark and get upset—dogs barking, people talking—now light up a quick panic jolt in me before I realize that his bark doesn’t follow, the need for me to try to bring him back down gone. I don’t have to be back home by 2:00 every day to give him his midday gabapentin.
I am upset and relieved. Guilty but following the narrative that I have made the best choice for all of us. Because at some point, there is no way to know what path is going to end up best.
This one seems pretty good, so I’m taking it.
This is a powerful, vulnerable, incredibly honest essay, Sarah. As a dog lover, and dog walker by profession, I felt compassion for your complex journey with Raylan. I'm imagining that most of the judgmental comments you received were online and on social media. A lot of people there think they know what's best for other people.
It's hard not to anthropomorphize. From my view, you made the right decision for both you and Raylan. A change of scenery, where familiar triggers are not around every bend, can do wonders.
I hadn't thought about the increase in dog ownership for Millennials and GenZ, and how dogs, for many, have become defacto kids. That could be an interesting article itself!
I don't know if this helps at all, but dogs are resilient and are much quicker to adapt than most humans to new life situations. Thanks for sharing this.
I’ll be honest, before reading this, I was one of the folks like you described, that would have confidently said that there’s no excuse for ever rehoming a dog - I now think there are still very few, but I do indeed think you and Raylan had a compelling one. I so sincerely admire the lengths you went to in efforts to improve Raylan’s quality of life and his chances of staying with you, and appreciate the amount of sacrifice that must’ve taken for years on your part. I also just scientifically agree that it sounds like he may have just had one of those brains that are damaged goods from the start, and I admire the amount of medical attention you provided for him to help him as best you could adjust to the world with the brain he was given. Not that my opinion matters a bit, but it sounds to me that you made the best decision for you and for Raylan, and a very, very hard one to make. It takes a lot of courage, and costs a lot of sorrow, sometimes, to make the right decisions such as these. I’m thinking of you as you mourn the loss of his presence in your life, but I do hope you soon gain an increased quality of life, and peace knowing you did right by Raylan, which to me it sounds like you did. And dogs tend to adjust easier than us humans, anyways, so I’ll be rooting for him in his next adventure.