<\/a>Like most dog adoptions, it began with an ad: “Lab puppies.\u00a0 Akron.\u00a0 $150.\u00a0 Call 970-xxx-xxxx.”<\/p>\n

So I brought him home, without a name, a black lab.\u00a0 Not only without a name, I realized as I pulled into PetSmart.\u00a0 Without a bed, a collar, a leash, food, bowl, or toys.\u00a0 That first night, he slept in\u00a0 cardboard box, padded by shredded newspaper, in the unfinished basement of the house I was renting.\u00a0 He went to sleep crying, and woke up crying.\u00a0 At 4:00.\u00a0 This was a dog who had spent his first three months on a farm, never even coming indoors.\u00a0 Suddenly, he wakes up in a room, in a strange house, no mom, no Man Who Milks the Cows, nothing familiar.\u00a0 Alone.\u00a0 Last time that <\/em>happened, I can promise you.<\/p>\n

Thus began an 11-year friendship, familiar to all dog owners.\u00a0 Eleven years, dozens of trips, hundreds of days in the car.\u00a0 Hiking, snowshoeing, carrying bags, swimming, camping.\u00a0 Sage probably saw more of the western half of the country than most people who live here.\u00a0 His last trip, a day trip over July 4th weekend, we took him swimming at Jefferson Lake.\u00a0 He could barely make it around the block for the arthritis, but he could swim for 15-20 minutes straight.\u00a0 God, how he loved to swim.\u00a0 Took him a year from puppyhood to learn to stop wading, but once he did, there was no stopping him from chasing the thoroughly unconcerned ducks.<\/p>\n

He wasn’t a big fan of the rides, never did like to hang his head out the side, and hated, hated<\/em> off-road travel, although the destination was usually to his liking.\u00a0 Once, on a shelf road down Comb Ridge in Utah, he almost got us both killed trying to climb into the front seat with me.\u00a0 I had to leash him to the Jeep’s frame in the back to keep him from trying it again.\u00a0 In fact, he was sort of an all-around coward; for a gun dog, he couldn’t stand fireworks.\u00a0 When he heard the vet’s voice, he scampered under the seats in his exam room.\u00a0 That’s a trick for 110-lb dog.<\/p>\n

Like all dogs, he was a bundle of paradoxes.\u00a0 He could break a marrow bone in half, but carry a balloon across the floor without busting it.\u00a0 He was a coward who took our mutual defense pact seriously, and jumped in-between my father and me when I asked Dad to fake a punch, to see what would happen.\u00a0 (Wednesday morning, with only minutes to live, he rose unsteadily to challenge the intruder who was there to help.)\u00a0 He loved to eat, but waited for permission.\u00a0 He took a long time to get used to the car, but put his head in my lap as a puppy when we were diving late at night.\u00a0 His was the model for the dog-squirrel relationship in Up<\/span>, even though he only got in-between a squirrel and its tree once.<\/p>\n

He got used to the fact that most of life was outside his control.\u00a0 We went camping one time, and when a wind came up and I had to lean into the windward side of the tent for half an hour to keep it earthbound, he just crawled over to a safe part of the tent to daven in his doggie way for the weather to clear.\u00a0 We took him to the Sand Dunes, and when wind kept blowing sand into his eyes on the way back, he just looked over to make sure I appreciated the sacrifice.\u00a0 When he went snowshoeing for 5 hours – about 3 hours longer than intended – he carried the food, treats, and water, and never complained.\u00a0 And when, on that last trip, I needed him to make it back to the Jeep, he did, even though he really wanted nothing more than to lie down in the cold, cold runoff for the rest of his life.<\/p>\n

If you’re the unsentimental type, the type that would need a scientific, rational justification for the human-dog connection, let Temple Grandin provide it in Animals in Translation<\/span>:<\/p>\n

Basically, two different species with complementary skills teamed up together, something that had never happened before, and has never really happened since.<\/p>\n

Going over all the evidence, a group of Australian anthropologists believes that during all those years when early humans were associating with wolves, they learned to act and think like wolves.<\/em> Wolves hunted in groups, humans didn’t.\u00a0 Wolves had loyal same-sex and nonkin friendships, humans probably didn’t, judging by the lack of same-sex and nonkin friendships in every other primate species today.\u00a0 Wolves were highly territorial, humans probably weren’t – again, judging by how nonterritorial all other primates are today.\u00a0 A lot of the things we do that the other primates don’t are dog things.\u00a0 The Australian group thinks it was the dogs who showed us how.<\/p>\n

…Fossil records show that whenever a species becomes domesticated its brain gets smaller.\u00a0 The horse’s brain shrank by 16%; the pig’s brain shrank by as much as 34%; and the dog’s brain shrank by 10 to 30%….Now archaeologists have discovered that 10,000 years ago, just at the point when humans began to give their dogs formal burials, the human brain began to shrink, too.\u00a0 It shrank by 10%… And what’s interesting is what part<\/em> of the human brain shrank.\u00a0 In all of the domestic animals, the forebrain<\/em>, which holds the frontal lobes, and the corpus callosum,<\/em> which is the connecting tissue between the two sides of the brain, shrank.\u00a0 But in humans, it was the midbrain<\/em>, which handles emotions and sensory data, and the olfactory bulbs, which handle smell, that got smaller.\u00a0 Dog brains and human brains specialized: humans took over the planning and organizing tasks, and dogs took over the sensory tasks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sage’s and my teaming up came to an end last Wednesday.<\/p>\n

Tuesday morning, he was fine, except for his arthritis.\u00a0 Tuesday evening, he was sick.\u00a0 Wednesday morning, we didn’t even need to put him down; I just asked him – gave him permission, really – to go to sleep, that when he woke up, we’d go for a walk, maybe even go to the park to go swimming.\u00a0 I left the room to call Susie, and as soon as I did, he went to sleep.\u00a0 I was told there was nothing to be done, but he saved me the doubt.<\/p>\n

Good boy, Sage.\u00a0 Sleep tight.
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