David Beresford
ANOTHER COUNTRY
Piet the mongrel is dead and buried at the bottom of the garden, I am told, under the loquat tree. Most pets tend to have been special, post mortem; it is perhaps the selective nature of memory. But, although some might say the quality is not discoverable among animals, I think he could be described as courageous.
He was not big, but showed a complete indifference to the size of any dog squaring up for a fight. And he would stagger away from even the most savage mauling with his tail wagging – his regimental colours, in a sense, held aloft to demonstrate all was not lost. Knowing it, I guess that’s where I let him down in the end.
He had a rough time of it towards the end. He had been reduced to a three-legged dog by some mysterious accident when he went missing for three days, and an operation had failed to help. He was supremely indifferent to the handicap. Then he got cancer. The vet gave us painkillers and the advice: “It’ll take about a month. When he can’t bear it any more bring him in and I’ll give him an injection.” That was six months ago.
When I left, before Christmas, I hesitated over whether to allow him to drag himself into the 21st century. I suppose it was an evasion of responsibility not to have him dead and buried before I went. But large in my mind was a rebellion against the expectation.
George Orwell captured it best of all in that wonderful essay of his describing how, while a policeman in Burma, he had been called out by frantic villagers to shoot an elephant which had run amok. He caught up with the beast to find it peacefully grazing and no threat to anyone, having apparently passed through the period of “must” familiar to elephants. Nevertheless, he felt compelled to shoot the harmless animal by the sheer pressure of expectation among the villagers.
The expectation that one should put down an animal in pain is strong in South Africa which is, in many respects, a “no-nonsense” frontier society where “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do”. One of the things he is expected to do is blow away the family pet from time to time. Fresh out of an era in which misbegotten paternalistic duties – born of a sense that “the master knows what’s good for you” – have created a pain-filled wreck of a society, my rebellion against such expectations is perhaps a reflex.
There is a superficial contradiction in the “no-nonsense” approach to animal euthanasia, in that its strongest proponents tend to be of the same school who insist that in the wild “nature must be allowed to take its course”. As a result, television audiences are treated to sights such as a wildebeest literally being eaten alive as it runs despairingly from a pack of wild dogs. It will be a wonder if the upcoming generation doesn’t insist on kneecapping Rover before he is put out of his misery, considering that such footage is customarily broadcast during children’s viewing hours as educational.
But the contradiction is superficial, the obvious answer to this apparent paradox lying in a distinction between life in the wild and that around the hearth. If an animal is brought into domesticity, it is brought under an umbrella of domestic, cultural and human values. The corollary is that when an owner decides to put down a pet he is offering something of a statement of those values, which is also part of the reason why we hesitated before having the dog put out of his misery.
The gap between the value one puts on a dog’s life and a human life is huge. Yet situations can bridge the gap. Recently I read an account by Australian art critic Robert Hughes of how he had been trapped in a car accident and had begged a would-be rescuer to kill him if a fire started. “Put him out of his pain.” The phrase resonated in the excited debate which attended a Johannesburg car accident not so long ago in which a passerby stopped at the scene, pulled out his gun and blazed away at the driver caught in the inferno. One could almost sense the frisson of pride – “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” – as the country debated whether the passerby should be charged. The pride turned to embarrassment when a pathologist reported the gunman had missed.
That leads one to the question of euthanasia, a subject which always takes me to one of the most remarkable and revealing books I have read on the human condition, Into That Darkness by Gitta Sereny. It is a study of the life of Franz Stengl from his days as a worker in a euthanasia centre to his command of Treblinka extermination camp.
One particularly haunting episode from that book is the story of the Jewish kapo, Blau, and the Lazarette. The Lazarette was a small building camouflaged as a Red Cross clinic in which impromptu executions were carried out. Inside, a low earthen wall ran the length of the building, a burning pit on the other side. Victims undressed, sat on the wall, were shot in the neck and pushed into the fire.
One day Blau approached Stengl and asked a favour: his 80-year-old father had just arrived on a transport. Instead of being gassed could he be dealt with by way of the Lazarette and could he give his father a last meal? Stengl agreed. Later Blau approached him again, Stengl recounts. “He had tears in his eyes. He stood to attention and said: ‘Herr Hauptsturmfuhrer, I want to thank you. I gave my father a meal. And I’ve just taken him to the Lazarette – it’s all over. Thank you very much.’ I said, ‘Well, Blau, there’s no need to thank me, but of course if you want to thank me, you may.'” But I digress; they were human beings and I was writing about a dog.
In our absence three friends were worthy companions for Piet’s last minutes: a film producer, a university lecturer and a newspaper editor. Of course, the dog was not interested in their social standing, but does seem to have been appreciative enough of their presence to summon up a few final wags.
If there had been occasion for an oration under the loquat tree I would have wanted to say of him: “Whether it was the business of living, or of dying, he did it with indifference to what he could not control and for the rest, as far as he was able, he did it with style.”