How I Moved On After My Dog Rolled In Human Feces
When I was 23, my dog Grunt and I moved from Kentucky to Seattle. Within a month, I was riding a bus to work, eating Chinese food from paper cartons, and dating a Jewish guy. It was a world I had only seen on television: a 1990’s sitcom that remembered Asian people.
Seattle had everything — hiking, museums, ferries, cool bars and restaurants. My favorite thing, though, was the dog parks. Parks just for dogs! I was blown away. These parks were substantially nicer than most of the parks for people in Kentucky. They were cleaner, more amenities — they even had fewer dog turds.
That’s what made what happened that day all the more shocking. As we were leaving my favorite park, Grunt bolted from the car into a wooded area where homeless people camped. After a few minutes stomping around the woods, I found her performing that almost graceful movement dogs make when they bow their heads to perfume their necks with filth. I recognized it immediately, having washed bear scat and decomposing snapping turtle carcass from her fur earlier that spring.
This time was different, though. This time, the feces caked on Grunt’s back and neck were human. You might be asking yourself how I could have been so certain. It could have been raccoon, coyote, possum, even dog if you’re a glass-half-full kind of person. Well, I’ll tell you how I knew: corn. Whole kernel. If I were a betting woman, I would say canned.
Maybe it was hysterical amnesia, but I don’t remember how I wrangled Grunt back into the car and home. I didn’t have a cell phone back then, so I couldn’t call anyone for help. The advice my family gave me later ranged from “you should have driven off and left her” to “you should have shot that fucking mutt in the head and driven off and left her.” I could never have done that because I didn’t own a gun either.
I remember later that afternoon, crying and dry heaving as I leaned over the bathtub to wash her. To the untrained eye, it probably looked like one of those Lifetime Original Movie post-assault shower scenes, only with a 50-pound hound mix covered in a homeless person’s shit. I’m not implying homeless poop is worse than non-homeless poop, but it’s not better.
I scrubbed Grunt with everything under my sink: the harshest cleansers the Puget Consumers Co-op sold at the time. Seventh Generation’s products were finally tested on animals that day. Grunt lived to be 17, so it’s fair to say they’re safe.
As I watched a stranger’s feces swirl down the drain, I knew whatever sense of peace or cleanliness I ever had from showering there was going with it. Not everything went down, of course. Not to beat a dead horse, but there was a lot of corn stuck in the drain. The same way it would stick in my throat, months later, when I tried eating it again.
We never went back to that dog park. A couple of years later, I moved into a new apartment and traded in my car. Eventually, I ate corn again, starting with spoonbread and working my way back to the cob. It felt safer seeing it come straight from the source.
As for Grunt, excluding maulings, I was probably as angry as a human has ever been at a dog. Not that she cared, but I forgave her. Forgiving an animal is good exercise for forgiving people because you only do it for yourself anyway.
Upsetting as it was, I finally had to “just get over it,” as they say. I did so without much processing since nobody wanted to listen to this story. When people turn away and shake their heads like toddlers refusing food, you know you’re wasting your time.
Writing it out has helped some. And maybe reading it is easier. Or maybe not.