This one's going to be hard.
A couple of weeks ago, I took the sweetest, nicest, friendliest dog out of the Orange County shelter.
Snickers is about 5, so he's still got lots of life left. He loves nothing so much as to curl up in someone's lap and, if you get a part of your body close enough to him, give kisses. Thing about his kisses is they aren't like a lot of dog kisses: slobbery, wet to the point of annoyance, nonstop. They are sweet, gentle little things, almost tentative. And after a few, he's content to just curl up again.
He's adorable. Labeled as a Pekingese mix at the shelter, he's really more Tibetan spaniel than Peke. He has a muzzle, which Pekes lack, and he doesn't have the rolls of skin in front of his eyes that are part of the Peke's look.
Whatever he is doesn't matter; he just is, and he is, like I said, adorable.
But he has one issue that most potential adopters would consider a big one: He's blind.
So what? is my response. Blind dogs, unlike blind people, adapt. Oh, do they adapt. I've had several, and not a one has been in the least handicapped by his "disability." They have all found their way around, using their noses, which are so much more powerful than ours, and their ears, and some – I'm convinced – mysterious sense that we humans know nothing about.
Snickers is amazing. If you couldn't see that he is missing one eye and didn't look at the other one long enough to realize it is permanently fully dilated, you would never guess this little dog cannot see a thing.
Just this morning, before I sat down to write, I watched him discover that he was on a porch with stairs, and that if he wanted to get into the yard, he would have to navigate those stairs.
I know what you're thinking. He fell down the stairs, or at least tripped, or I had to pick him up and put him on the ground so he could explore.
He started to step off the porch, realized there was air under his foot, and reached that foot down until he touched the stair below. He then quickly – as quickly as any sighted dog I know – ran down the stairs and out into the yard.
Let's see the average blind person do that.
Not that I would expect a blind person to do that, or that I'm saying there's anything wrong with the fact that an unseeing person would be much more tentative navigating those stairs than Snickers was.
Here's the difference: We humans are so dependent on our sight that we have mostly pushed our other senses out of the way. Oh, we taste, hear, smell and feel, but we do those things, almost always, with a nod to our superior eyesight, with an eye (sorry) to how these senses relate to what we're seeing.
Dogs aren't like that. They use whatever they are given to its fullest. They adapt.
Here's another difference: We humans know we can't see, if we can't. We know what we're missing (although I'd say that's more the case for someone who loses his sight than someone who is born blind). And we agonize over it. If only we could see those stairs, know how many there are, how steep they are and what lies at the bottom, we'd be fine.
But dogs aren't like that. They don't bemoan the fact that they can't see; they just utilize their other senses to get around. And boy, do they get around.
I'd wager that Snickers has been blind a long time, possibly his entire life. One of my friends had a blind poodle who had lost his sight at 8 weeks. You would never guess Ruggie couldn't see. I swear that little dog got around better than some sighted dogs. And that's how Snickers is.
One of the canine students in one of Jitterbug's first nose work classes was a completely blind cocker. Now, rule of thumb with blind dogs is to keep furniture and such in the same place so the animal can learn its way around and, knowing what's where, will avoid bumping into things.
Well, we purposely moved things around in nose work class. The idea was to give the dogs a different picture every week, sometimes several times within one week's class. That way, they learned more quickly that the game wasn't to navigate the stuff, but to find the odor that was hiding someplace in all that stuff.
This cocker, blind as a bat, navigated all that stuff as if he had eyes. He never once bumped into anything, never once tripped, never once stopped in confusion to try to figure out where he was or what he was doing. He hunted and hunted until he found what he was looking for, and then he celebrated that find with his owner.
Disabled? I think not.
Yet I know, as I try to find Snickers, the most lovable dog in the world, a home, that I will fight the "oh, but he can't see" fight. Tell some folks that a dog (or any pet) is blind, and they immediately anthropomorphize. Now, putting human characteristics and feelings on a dog isn't the bugaboo we once thought it was. They do, after all, have feelings, and when we're trying to figure out what's causing them to act a certain way, knowing what they're feeling and why can be extremely helpful.
But they do not share one feeling we humans have: self-pity.
And that's why we can't, and shouldn't, feel sorry for a blind dog. Or a three-legged dog. Or a dog who has to use a cart because it's had spinal damage that makes its back legs useless. We just shouldn't.
Because I don't know a dog in the world who's sweeter than Snickers. And I would hate to see him not get a home because someone is afraid of what having a blind dog entails. In Snickers' case, it entails having the best friend one could hope for.