For years, I have said over and again that, “Dogs are a gateway drug to veganism.” This is true of cats, gerbils, guinea pigs and all other companion animals, too. I’m just speaking of dogs because that was my personal experience. I didn’t grow up in a home with a companion animal and hardly any of my friends had companion animals either. So it wasn’t until I was living on my own in college that I started to interact with dogs and cats and the idea of having one became appealing to me.
I graduated college in January 1993 and four weeks later adopted my first companion animal, a dog named Blackie. I adopted him from one of the New York City kill shelters. They estimated his age as being around five years old. He was rescued from a situation of abuse and neglect. Apparently he had been living with an elderly person who didn’t take good care of him and who often would discipline him with a walking cane. Subsequently, whenever someone made a sudden or startling move, Blackie would cower to the floor, tail and ears tucked down. Despite loving him and making him feel safe for the last twelve years of his life, he never outgrew that primitive instinct to cower to protect himself.
By sixteen years of age, he was turing grey all over his face.
Ten years ago today, Blackie lost his battle with congestive heart failure and I had to make the heart wrenching decision to release him from the misery of his ailing seventeen year old body. It’s really hard to wrap my mind around the passage of time- the decade of my life- that has gone by since I’ve seen my little boy. Even now, when I close my eyes and think of our final goodbye, they swell up with the tears of sadness, loss and longing to be with him. When people tell you that in time the pain goes away, that’s simply not true. The pain of his loss is honestly no different than it was on that day ten years ago. What’s different is that time has allowed me to adjust to the new reality and I have learned how to live with it.
Blackie always loved it whenI would play piano (or casio) to him.
In more ways that I could ever enumerate, Blackie opened up my heart to compassion and planted strong seeds that would one day grow into a deeply rooted sense that non-human animals are individuals, worthy of moral consideration rather than objects to be owned, bought and sold. Though I had never heard the word “vegan” back in those days, let alone know what it meant, the sense of connectedness to Blackie and all of my subsequent companion animals would eventually bloom into a powerful imperative to live a compassionate life as a vegan.
Tomorrow, we will be putting up a blog post I’ve been working on for some time. In it, I discuss just one of the many seeds of compassion and justice that Blackie and my love for him planted. As today is the 10th anniversary of his passing, I want to dedicate that piece to his memory.
