I had given up wanting a dog sometime around the age of 8 or 9, when I met the resistance of a fastidious mother, whose aversion to pet ownership flowed from her obsession with pristine surfaces. When my son came along — like me, an only child — it seemed cruel to deny him what I came to view as a nonoptional booster shot, a daily jolt of dog love that would supplement the parental variant, giving him another base of attachment in our tiny ecosystem of three. So when he turned 4, a Havanese puppy entered our lives as surely as a box of Duplos.
The runt of her litter, Chicky was also heterochromatic — she had one blue eye and one brown one. With this unusual characteristic came another more mystifying one: a commanding, near Labrador-level energy and presence that defied her size — she was no bigger than a salad bowl — and made her a kind of cult figure in the neighborhood. That sounds like the sort of overstatement common to eulogy, but it isn’t. She walked in front of a pack as if she were leading a righteous movement. People asked us where we got her, all the time. Soon there were other Havanese puppies on the Brooklyn Promenade, some from the same Rhode Island breeder. Chicky’s niece moved in with friends across the street, who named her Minerva.
From the beginning, I feared the end. It came unexpectedly, 10 years later, on a Monday afternoon last month, when Chicky was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver who sped through a left turn in front of my son’s school. Our regular dog walker was recovering from surgery, so her husband, who was filling in, had taken Chicky and two other dogs to the park that day. He and the other dogs were also hit, the dogs sent into the air, and though he was bleeding from minor injuries of his own, he rushed them to a veterinary clinic nearby. Two people who had witnessed what happened went with him and stayed. The other dogs were fine, but Chicky bore the impact of the recklessly handled Jeep and died almost instantly.
We felt the sudden chill of a long-held fear that had now been realized. Cars had been getting bigger and bigger, drivers seemed to become more and more unhinged and Chicky remained small, vulnerable, low to the ground. We were devastated.
Brooklyn Heights, where we live, is home both to extreme dog reverence and a vast legal brain trust; an incident like this brings the otherwise genteel class as close to a wish for raw, country vigilantism as it is likely to get. In the days that followed Chicky’s death, I heard from many people I had never met who wanted to express outrage, sorrow, support, love, condolence, help or calls to justice, among them a former prosecutor and partner at one of the city’s oldest firms who offered his considered opinion in an active text chain that had sprung up around concern for Chicky.
Throughout our happy time with her, I had acquired a mental Rolodex of dog contacts — Astro, Atticus, Hero, Wellington, Willow, Ziggy — through which meaningful human relationships developed. It is fashionable now to talk about “the third place”: the sociologist’s term for the spaces beyond your house or apartment or office that lend themselves to serendipitous connection. Libraries and coffee bars are the frequently invoked examples, but in New York City, the best third place is the sidewalk when you have a dog, the communion organic and abiding.
It was Hero, a sandy blond terrier-poodle mix, who brought me to Liz. We kept running into each other walking our dogs at night. We turned out to have other dogs and people in common, so we started to plan meeting up. Long and frequent dog walks can fast-track a friendship. Not too long after we got to know each other, Liz’s living arrangement changed and for a while she stayed with us every Wednesday night when she wasn’t at her mom’s place in the Village.
A body of psychological and medical literature confirms what people with dogs already know: that contact with dogs is good for us in so many ways. For nearly 20 years, NewYork-Presbyterian has run a program that brings dogs to patients on the theory that the bond reduces stress, lowers blood pressure and can improve cardiovascular health. Two months ago, the city’s Department of Homeless Services announced the opening of a family shelter in the Bronx with 587 beds and the permission to bring pets. Part of the reasoning grew from a survey of victims of domestic violence showing that half would not leave households in which they were experiencing abuse if they could not take a pet with them.
The law, though, lags far behind any broader recognition of dogs as a social value proposition. The downtown Four Seasons may be dog-friendly — it offers nonhuman guests of the hotel “gourmet macarons by Bonne et Filou” — but the New York State penal code is not.
In some sense this goes against history. New York became the birthplace of the country’s animal-rights movement in 1866, when a German shipping heir named Henry Bergh spearheaded legislation banning animal cruelty, which was soon copied in most other states. Bergh was not sure the police would actually enforce the new laws as robustly as needed, so he got himself appointed as a prosecutor and gained a lot of attention when he brought about the arrest of a boat captain who shipped live turtles from Florida; to transport them, he pierced their flippers and tied them with rope.
Animal-welfare laws have obviously expanded since, but they would not apply in a case like Chicky’s, because we don’t tend to think of dangerous and erratic driving, and what comes of it, as intentional. Legally speaking, pets are classified as property. Stealing a dog is a crime — something you do because you mean to — but fleeing from the scene in which you have injured or killed an animal with your car, presumably by chance, is considered a traffic infraction. The penalty for killing Chicky, a police officer let me know when I called the local precinct, would in all likelihood be a fine of $100.
This, as you can imagine, is an especially difficult thing to explain to a child — that your priceless creature has a number. And it is one the law puts roughly in the range of what it costs to settle a ticket on an illegal U-turn.
The post A Hit-and-Run Driver Killed My Dog. The Penalty? Maybe a $100 Fine. appeared first on New York Times.
