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Rusty Stinky Wrinkles 1999-2011 RIP
I suppose it seems silly to some people that I would sit down and write an obituary for a dog. But Rusty was never just a dog. I know every owner will say that about their pup, but Rusty was, at times, human, feline and canine all rolled into one. She could be dumb as a post and sharp as a whip, also both at the same time.
And like all owners, we loved her deeply and will always miss her.
Rusty was part of the family. As a friend posted on Facebook when we first learned her cancer was terminal: “Dogs aren’t our whole lives, but they make our lives whole.”
And that she did. So, indulge me as I say goodbye.
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Rusty Stinky Wrinkles |
I first found Rusty at the pound where she was just coming out of isolation because of a case of kennel cough. I worked nearby and I would go over a couple of days a week looking for a dog. My last dog, Bear, was a huge pure bred German Sheppard I’d had to give away because, newly divorced, I just didn’t have time for him.
Giving away a dog is also hard but I knew Bear would have a better life with someone who had time to play and exercise with him.
One day I went in and found this little bag of red wrinkles. I swear she looked like a Shar-pei. It was love at first site and I brought Tracy down so we could adopt her right there and then. Rusty was a bundle of energy, loveable and desperate for attention.
We scooped her up, gave her a new name, Rusty – well it seemed obvious given her red coat and nose – and took her home to the delight of the kids.
Rusty was our name for her. Stinky Wrinkles was her jailhouse moniker at the Toronto Humane Society where I found her as a five-month old bag of wrinkles. She had other names too: Boo Boo, Hoodoggy, Crusty Rusty, Rusticles She deserved them all because she was the most enigmatic hound I’ve ever had.
Over the years, I’ve had two Japanese Spitz (I grew up in Japan), a Sheppard Cross, a pure CKC’d German Sheppard and Rusty. In between I’ve been surrogate master to a corgi, a hound, and a Sheppard, so you can say, yeah, I’m a dog guy. Cats don’t do much for me and I’m allergic to them anyway, they’re too aloof and they don’t like riding in the front seat hanging out the front window or romping through the bush so what good are they?
For the kids, Rusty was a fixture in their lives. She was someone they could hang out with watching TV when no one else was around. She was always happy to give them a lick and play when they were down and she was always excited to see them when they came to stay with me on weekends growing up.
By the time Meaghan turned 25 she’s spent half her life with Rusty; Jon, at 21 had grown up with her. Her passing was hard on them because it represented one of those bridges and first painful life experiences.
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Somehow she looks evil in this one |
Rusty wasn’t the perfect puppy by any stretch. She had some issues. You see, Rusty was a pitbull. Not just any pitbull. She was a red nose pitbill, aka Texas Devil. I know this because while walking her or driving around in Scarborough where I live, greasy-haired men with scruffy baseball caps and missing teeth would randomly accost us and say: “Hey, man, great looking red nose you go there. Ya wanna breed her?”
To which I would innocently respond: “Oh, no she’s from the pound and she’s already fixed and she’s an American Staffordshire.”
“No bro, she’s a pitbull, a red nose.”
Of course, after a half dozen encounters like this I took it upon myself to Google this concept.
And there she was: At least her “kin,” all red noses, red hair, cropped ears, studded collars and bobbed tails posing muscularly in front of a Johnny Reb flag, the cliché design of web sites where breeders boasted of their litters’ prowess and battle worthiness.
And then it dawned on us. We had a pitbull.
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Me? I wasn't gonna chew those sneakers, honest! |
I called on the counsel of my long time friend Jerry Cudahy who has been breeding, raising and training Belgian Malinois for years.
“Send her up here for a few weeks,” he said.
And so, Rusty Stinky Wrinkle, barely 10 months old, was packed off to Doggy Boot Camp where she learned the essentials of socialization, walking on the leash, sit, lie down, speak and how generally to behave. However, she did not learn fetch, stay off the couch or bed.
Six week later she was back holding down a job as head of security at Christie’s SkateEx, a new and use skate store my then partner, Tracy Parrott and I owned on Kennedy Road.
She was the official greeter, companion and distracter. People would come to the store just to say high to her and she made quite an impression on everyone. Playful and mischievous, she would let the kids chase her around the aisles and made sure everyone who came in got a lick even if they didn’t buy anything.
She retired to domestic duties when we closed the store and was quite happy to lie around on the hot tub cover or lurk in the tiger lilies to cool off. Sometimes she seemed more like a cat, hiding in the weed, waiting,waiting as those squirrels got closer and closer or licking her paws and fur like a feline does. At those times she was a lioness, her reddish fur gleaming in the sunshine, patiently sitting at the waterhole and waiting for prey.
It was at this point we discovered she had a hidden talent as an escape artist. Young dogs are always curious about what lurks in the outside world and pitbulls are no different.
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Her perch on the stairs where she could watch me work |
The difference with pits is that they are strong dogs and stubbornly persistent. Rusty managed to dig under the chain link fence and when that was blocked, jump over it. She would then proceed to jump over two or three other fences of neighbours’ yards and then work her way over the back fence of a yard to gain access to another yard where another older pit bull, Ben, hung out. There the two would wrestle and play fight until they fell down in a drool drenched heap. At some point Rusty would reverse her path and find her way home.
I think this is why humane societies are inundated with pits. They are curious, strong, love to explore and then do what dogs (and humans) love best – procreate.
Sometimes on these forays, she wouldn’t come home and we would panic because at this point we really hadn’t figured out where she was going or even how she was getting out. We found her once up at the area we call the Snake Pit, which is a patch of land wedged between the rail line and the back yards of houses up the street and which was one of her favourite walks.
Houdoggy, as we called her, was a very slippery escapist.
One day I was riding around the ‘hood on my bicycle looking for Rusty who had gone AWOL again and I found her on the street behind our house being led on a piece of string by a woman.
It turned out they bred schnauzers and had a chip readers and had found Rusty’s microchip but when the called into find out where it was registered, they found out it wasn’t.
This caused some consternation for me since as part of the fees at the Toronto Humane Society she was micro-chipped and registered – or was supposed to have been. Of course I took care of that detail immediately.
I also had to build a new, eight foot fence around the yard to keep the dog in. Since my neighbour on that side was a bit crazy, instead of asking about replacing the chain link with a six foot wood fence, I opted for the idea of building framed lattice panels about four by eight and then bolting them to the chain link posts with C-bolts.
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She loved the kids and they loved her |
It actually worked very well, until Rusty decided to chew through the lattice, thinking it was the only thing that stood between her and exploration. Over about 18 months I had to replace all the larger lattice with the smaller “privacy” lattice which was so closely spaced she couldn’t get her jaws around the wood.
Speaking of wood, Rusty was a chewer. She would take a two-by-four off-cut and sit on the grass and gnaw on it until we took it away from her because her gums were raw. Every dog loves to chase tennis balls but they never survived 10 minutes with Rusty. She chase them, then decide she didn’t want to play that game any more and would chew them and grind the ball into a pile of rubber crumbs.
She loved to chew; over the years she demolished five or six remote controls, three pairs of glasses, a pair or two of (visiting) ladies’ boots, a pair of bamboo cross country ski poles and two couches, the most recent being the basement couch last January.
We figure the glasses and the remotes were attractive because they either had scent on them or, in the case of the remotes, tasted like chips or pizza because that’s that the kids would eat while watching TV and changing channels.
She was, of course, a huge part of the kids’ lives. Megs was 14 when we got Rusty and Jon was about 8. She’s been there for half their lives.
People often used to sneer at us because she is a pitbull, especially when the Ontario government changed the law to outlaw them. She was forced to wear a muzzle and be leashed when we went out and she was specifically banned from the City of Toronto dog parks simply because she is a pitbull.
We saw a dog who was gentle and loving and even tempered. But we also saw the power and primal instinct lurking below.
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A young Rusty - before she got "grey" |
Rusty did not take being “ranked” that is the canine practice of establishing pecking order and dominance. Most dogs will submit to a larger dog. The issue arises when the dogs are either the same size or when a smaller dog decides to assert dominance because it gets away with being dominant in its own house hold with its people.
Dogs will engage, nip and growl and fight to establish who is top dog. Pitbulls and terriers, especially, I have observed, can never agree on protocol and tend to engage more often.
I have seen Rusty play with a pack of dogs at the Quarry, which was her favourite spot and where her ashes will be sprinkled, and never come into conflict. She was built for power not speed and in the game of chase-me-chase-me she usually ended up at the back of the pack, yelping in a strange tone. Other owners worried she was hurt but in reality it was her way of saying: Wait for me! Wait for me!
I have also seen her turn and grab any dog which dared to nip or otherwise challenge her and force her into submission. Rusty did not tolerate fools lightly and it was a foolish dog that engaged her. She was strong, muscular and with the large jaw of the breed able to grab hold of the loose skin around the neck of a challenge and hold it down very quickly.
This tendency did get her in to trouble a few times. Sometimes she would see the other dog as a threat to her pack, which in most cases would either be my girlfriend at the time (Rusty had three loving “moms” over her lifetime) or my son or daughter. She rarely bothered to defend me, since being the “alpha” in the pack, it was assumed I would fend for myself.
When she did engage she would always hold the other dog down by the loose skin until it stopped fighting and surrendered. It was as if she was saying: “Look, you pissed me off. Just be smart and quit struggling and we’ll call it quits.”
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Not built for speed but she loved to run in the Quarry |
This cost me a few hundred in vet bills since in an argument over whose dog started the fight even in a field where every dog is off the leash, the pitbull is always going to be blamed.
Not always though. About 18 months ago however, a woman I was dating brought her toy poodle over for the weekend around Christmas time. Now, the dog had been here before and played with Meaghan’s miniature Doberman pincher, Roxy, but I had insisted on putting a cage muzzle on Rusty to be safe. We had Thanksgiving dinner and all was good. Except when the little pups got too boisterous and Rusty disappeared upstairs to get away from them.
A few weeks later, however, we came into the house and as went to get the muzzle my girlfriend said: “Oh, no it will be fine.”
I wasn’t so sure but went to open the door to let Rusty our for a pee in the back. As she walked past the poodle and onto the deck, the little bugger followed her and nipped at her h thigh, right at that sensitive spot behind the knee. Rusty, turned slowly and looked at the poodle in seeming disbelief.
Things seemed to move in slow motion and I lunged trying to grab either dog before it escalated but as I did the poodle nipped again. This time Rusty turned, charged and managed to get one side of the poodle’s head and the other side of the neck into her jaws and clamped on.
Now, I have to say here that the myth about pitbulls is that they have extra special jaws that crush and clamp on to their prey. Its not true. What pitbulls – indeed all mastiffs – have are big jaws and strong muscles around the neck which give them not only a bigger bite area but the ability to bite down hard because their jaws open wide and they have strong upper bodies. Remember, they were bred to kill rats and pests.
You separate a pitbull by grabbing at the base of the tail and the collar and lifting them off the ground. With no feet on the ground they generally lose interest in what they’re doing as getting back down becomes a higher priority. That, along with the drop or done command does the trick and it did after maybe 10 or 12 seconds.
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Shamless! |
The poodle went into shock but the wounds were superficial. It can’t be much fun to assert yourself and find out how big those jaws really can be.
We took him to the vet and $2,000 in bills later he was fine.
She had insurance and it covered it. I offered to pay half the deductible but she refused, saying it was her fault and by extension, her dog’s action. He clearly started it. I felt we should have had Rusty’s muzzle on but there’s the lesson.
Yes, Rusty was the sweetest, softest most cuddly pitbull in the world. She would run at the sound of the vacuum cleaner, the ironing board or if anyone pulled out a camera to take her picture.
But she was a dog at her core. And, as the three raccoons, two skunks, one groundhog and assorted rats which dared to cross her yard on her watch, she had no compunctions about taking executive action with extreme prejudice.
While she never ever showed any aggression to humans – we couldn’t even get her riled enough to bit during play fighting – she did not tolerate incursions.
Aside from killing two skunks with obvious repercussions, she also nailed raccoons, ceremoniously burying them in the flower beds - or in winter once, a snow bank - for future consideration. She also hated cats and squirrels with equal passion.
One day I sent Meaghan down to the store to get something for dinner. She decided to put her inline skates on and take Rusty and it was all fine and good until they got back to the house and spotted a cat in our driveway. Rusty, of course, took off like a rocket while Meaghan went ass over teakettle.
It all taught me that owning a dog is a great responsibility. Not just to the dog but to the people and other animals she comes into contact with. I couldn’t stop her sitting up at night in the yard during the summer to nail invaders but I could be cautious around other dogs and I was.
I would run her off leash at the Quarry, which is this 50 acres of brownfield in the Victoria Park Ave. Gerrard St. E area of Toronto, walking distance from the house.
She loved it. She would crash through the underbrush, head down, bulldozing her way around to stampede any critters into breaking cover. They never did and though she came running out of the woods one day with a squirrel in her mouth to the delight of the half dozen other dogs who immediately thought it was a great game of chase-me-chase-me with an even better prize.
I think the critter was dead to begin with but I wouldn’t put it past Rusty to have nailed it, she wasn’t the quickest over distance but on short strikes she was in her element and she was only a year or so old at the time.
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Watching TV and hanging out |
Anyway, as she got older, she became less tolerant of other dogs who wanted to rank. In the end I just adopted a policy of leashing and muzzling her when out, and only letting her off the leash when there were no other dogs around. If we encountered another dog, I’d bring her to heel and put the leash back on.
It wasn’t that I thought she might go for the other dog but that she was unpredictable if she felt threatened or, if she felt her pack was threatened. And being the strong dog she was, it was a safer policy for everyone.
Of course, there will be some who claim this is the nature of pitbull and this justified exterminating the breed. But every dog has primal instincts. Some are stronger and bigger and more likely to assert those instincts in some situations.
Dogs are pack animals. The pack is their family, their support structure and this is a primal code wired in since they evolved from wolves. The domesticated canine is also a pack animal. It has evolved to instinctively anticipate our every need and want and that’s why they have become integrated into our lives.
They love their pack and they defend their pack, sometimes in ways we don’t quite understand. We have become their pack as much as they become our kids or spouses or companions.
Who doesn’t want to be loved unconditionally? Who doesn’t want to be greeted morning, noon and night by someone happy just to see you want share a few seconds or a rub between the ears? Who is thrilled to ride in the car with you, even if you’re just going to get groceries? Not the kids.
Her qualities were in her loyalty, tenacity and determinination. As a reporter, I supposed, I identified with those traits. She became the inspiration for Pitbull Media.
Rusty had a language of her own but we all understood her and she understood us. Walk, was clearly a word you didn’t use in front of her and she could hear the ding of a morsel hitting her supper bowl from two floors up such was her sharps sense of hearing.
She would bark to be let out and then open the sliding glass doors by herself to get back in . This was a dog with an extensive vocabulary. One growl-bark for “hey, get out of my territory for dogs walking by the front on the street, a grrrrrr when the raccoons were messing with the garbage cans in the middle of the night and a rorrrror-rorrrow-rorrow when she had a rawhide bone, ball or other toy in her mouth and she wanted to show you what she had and underline that you couldn’t have it.
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Rusty was game for anything - as long as there was love |
There was the query-bark, soft and whiny at the same time to ask permission to get up in the bed whereupon she would curl into the smallest space available but as we fell back asleep, she would expand to hog as much space as her frame would allow. Waking up still half asleep and being crushed or pushed off the bed by a 70 pound dog is some challenge, since she would be a dead weight and I rarely had the energy to argue.
Then there was the single short, imperial bark when she wanted out or a cookie because she had just been out for a pee or poop and let herself back in by nosing the sliding glass door open or had graciously gotten off the bed or couch and come downstairs to see who’d run the doorbell and greeting them with a wagging tail and a lick.
Rusty was insistent on attention. Stranger or family, it made no difference to her. She’d sit beside them and put her paw forcefully but gently on their arm and drag it toward her to trigger some petting, scratching and attention. When the stopped she would put her paw up again and drag it back. If they resisted she would give them the short imperial bark: “Hey, you’re not done yet.”
She’d leave presents around the house too, usually in a laundry basket. Rawhide chew toys, toys, balls, smoked bones would show up under the pillow or in my clothes hamper. There was a massive smoke thighbone someone gave her two years ago still in my closet because it was too big for her to eat and she wanted to tuck it away for a rainy day.
That rainy day never came. But who can put your life in perspective better than a dog? They are eternal optimists. All they want is to love and be loved. It doesn’t get simpler than that and in this complex world, sometimes we need to strip things down and look at the essentials.
Rusty was all that, my faithful redhead who grumbled quietly when another woman took her spot in the bed but who gleefully bounded back into bed when she left or when she didn’t show up. She knew all the women in my life and she greeted them all as if they were the only one I had ever known.
As a single guy, I think I got laid quite a lot over the years because of Rusty’s charm. She was a great wingman!
Over the years she was a healthy dog. She had some nail issues because her quicks grew long and the nails often split but otherwise she wasn’t high maintenance.
Pitbulls are mutts. Pure and simple. There is not recognized standard for a pitbill and for the most part they are mastiffs mixed with English Staffordshire terrier (the original pitbull) along with a Heinz 57 of breed. The good news is it tends to breed out weakness and though they aren’t the prettiest of dogs to some eyes, usually they are remarkably healthy.
At 11 she developed cataracts and dry eye and a bit of a heart murmur and then in March she started limping. The limp got worse despite our attempt to rest her and give her anti-inflammatory drugs and the vet warned us that if it wasn’t a muscle tear – since she could find no other symptoms – then the next thing to watch for was a lump on her leg.
Two weeks later a lump popped up on her left paw. It was small but it was a lump and her limp got worse. By the time we went for Xrays the first week in May it was growing daily. The Xrays confirmed our worst fears: Osteosarcoma, the most common form of cancer in dog, especially mid and large breeds – aka bone cancer.
Amputation was an option but at her age – dogs her size have a life expectancy of 12 to 13 years and she would be 12 June 1 – the stress would be too great on her heart. We were also concern that since we now had visual evidence of cancer, it most likely had metastasized – spread – through her body.
There was only one decision to make: when.
We put it off two weeks because Meaghan was away and we wanted everyone in her life to have a chance to say goodbye. As it turned out I brought the date up by four days because she was obviously not herself. Between the pain killers and the cancer, she was bewildered and was having trouble walking, let along getting up and down the three sets of stairs in the house.
She had lots of visitors in her last week who brought love and treats. She dined in steak several times and she spent her last days lying on her bed in the backyard in the sunshine.
When the moment came we went as a family into two car loads to the vet. There were six of us. Megs, her boyfriend Jamie, Jon, my girlfriend, Suzanne and Tracy.
She left this world knowing she was loved and we left that night feeling a little less loved for her passing.