The Good Ol' Days

When I was a kid, our neighborhood dogs all lived to be about 16 years old. There were no cancers, no cruciate ligament failures, no surgeries unless they got "fixed" or hit by a car.  Sometimes they had to be put to sleep because they bit someone's little brother or because they had a terrible case of mange, which was incurable at that time. Sometimes they were put to sleep because they were in their late teens and just got too feeble to get around anymore. If anyone's dog had something so rare as a visible tumor, you all went over to that kid's house to have a look at it, while the owner of the dog proudly stood by his strange prize. We saw an occasional case of distemper, one belonging to a sweet, yellow dog that found its way into our hallway one cold night while we slept. By morning his running nose was stuck to the floor. We were three little girls, Christmas was around the corner and as far as we were concerned angels had sent us our very own dog. My father said he was going straight to the pound. We cried and Dad was defenseless against our tears. One trip to the vet and one bottle of pills later, Sandy was our dog. He lived a healthy happy life with our family for many years. He was never sick again until the end of his long life and I cried like a baby when he died.

In the nineteen fifties this is about as complicated as the business of owning a pet was. There was only one kind of dog food at the local grocery store. It came in big 16 oz cans that were full of large cubed chunks of horsemeat that looked like stew beef. We had no leash laws. Dogs and kids ran around outdoors all day and came home tired when the streetlights were lit. If you played cowboys and Indians your dog played too. When you were too tired to drag your sled up the hill one more time, you tied it to your dog who was happy to make a game of pulling it up for you. Where we ran they ran. When we fell asleep they fell asleep.

Different times, they say, call for different measures.

But, when I see the industries that have grown around servicing today's pets I remember a simpler and better way. The horsemeat in that can was real chunks of meat without all the chemicals we see in pet foods today. No one would have ever suggested that supper's leftovers would upset the balance of any dog's nutrition, in fact it was regularly half their meal. There were very few vaccines and there were very few sick dogs. Old Yeller was the only dog I ever knew who got rabies. There were no doggy treadmills and no animal psychologists. Nobody went to obedience school because a tired dog was a good dog. The SPCA only had two or three strays at any given time. When we went to the vet there wasn't anyone else in the waiting room. Raw meaty bones were the norm, not the latest discovery. And if someone had tried to tell you then that a bag of hard, dried kibble was filled with delicious, healthy things to eat, you would probably have replied "Hey, you must think I'm stupid!".  Oh, for the good old days!