A trageic ending for a tragic life
To Luis, a beloved dog, a patient and beautiful pet, may you rest in peace.
I'm not much a fan of dogs, in fact I hate them. I hate how messy they can be, how noisy they are in times that I need silence. I hate it when they go about destroying things like cellphone chargers, head sets, bags, and whatever they can chew. I hate how hard it is to train them to know where to defecate. I hate it when your mood does not match theirs. I hate it that my siblings like dogs. But I have to live with these because of the fact that my family has been keeping pets since I was a little kid. But just because I hate dogs does not mean that I am a fan of being brutal to them, or treating them badly, though I myself have committed some mishaps in handling our pets, I don't, in any way maltreat them.
But there is this one dog in particular that I grew fond of. Luis was its name.
We acquired him after moving in our ancestral house, he was the added “bonus” to the house. He was nothing special, just a regular askal, but a cute one at that. He was fluffy, and he never lost his fluffiness even up to when he died. And there are a lot of things that happened to him before I ended up liking him, a lot of tragic things:
Originally, he didn’t have a name; we call him by making the “tch tch” sound. The name Luis just came along when my parents had a problem with this Luis person and wanted to get back at him by naming his name to our dog. Too bad for the Luis person, and a good thing for our beloved Luis, at least he got a name, even though it was 7 years late.
And while growing up, someone forgot to remove his collar, so he, including his skin, grew in the collar, much like how you make a bonsai, you wrap wires around it so that the tree won’t grow as much, but the wires end up being part of the tree. The collar became part of his skin. So come the time that the collar needs to be removed, the skin around his neck was also stripped, leaving a permanent ‘collar’ that lasted up to his death. This was one of the biggest, and probably the only mistake we ever did to Luis. So for that, we are sorry.
As for those who have not seen this dog of ours, he was one eyed. His right eye was blasted off by some kid who does not know where to throw fire crackers. God knows what kind of reason those kids have for throwing a fire cracker to our dogs face. Karma will have its way.
And it is through this dog that I have seen how brave my mother could be. Our neighbor had this Dalmatian, who, for some reason, likes to wrestle Luis. And it does not wrestle for play, it wrestles for kill. It was a very violent animal, who does not even respect its owner. So there was this time that it escaped its cage, and went for Luis, they fought until Luis lost its strength to fight, then, when the Dalmatian was stepping at Luis’ throat, and seems like is going for the kill, my mother, carrying a broom and a holding a hose ran towards the dogs, she was hosing the Dalmatian with water and waving the broom to scare the Dalmatian off, my mother seems to have forgotten how easily the Dalmatian could have switched targets, luckily the owner arrived just in time to calm their dog down. My mother immediately attended to Luis. Luis out lived the Dalmatian.
The reason why I had the urge to write this was not because of how tragic his life was, but because of how tragic his death is. How his death showed us how unreasonable people can be. And no matter how much love and care we have showed him after his tragedies, he would not be respected at his death, by people who do not respect themselves.
He died peacefully at home; we were expecting this as he has shown signs of aging and weakening. We were not there, only my mother and my father. They were to bury him beneath a tree near our helper’s house, they left him for a while as they need to dig a hole. Come the time for them to put Luis to his grave, he was gone. After some time, a neighbor told my parents that someone was cooking a dog.
So, if ever those ‘tambays’ have chosen to bury our dog at their stomachs, may you grow ill with it. And may Luis have his revenge on you guys by poisoning your system. I rarely curse, but I believe those people have chosen their own demise by stealing the dead corpse of our dog. At least our dog was beautiful.
