A two-week-old puppy is about one of the cutest creatures on the earth. He has just developed the ability to hear, so he cocks his head at various sounds and often makes sounds in response that are as similar to a bark as margarine is to butter. His eyes are in the process of opening, so his eyes are generally pretty squinty that week. His new senses are giving him the bravery to wander on wobbly legs around the den. He walks into walls and climbs over siblings, doggedly perusing an objective that he cannot remember.
In person and in your hand, a?two-week-old puppy is almost impossible not to fall in love with. The average person who takes one look at the puppy is going to want to take the puppy home with him. This makes puppies very vulnerable to people who are impulsive.
Another reason that puppies so young and small are vulnerable is because caring for them is a great deal work if you take the wee thing away from its mum. It needs to be fed every two hours around the clock, kept warm and close to a body, and it is still in the phase where it will need some help eliminating urine and feces (a warm, damp cloth rubbed over the pelvis).
This brings us to the situation faced by Cynthia Andersen, a 52-year-old woman who needed to fly to her home in Florida from Nebraska, where her parents lived. When she arrived at the airport the first time, she had her two adult dogs in their crates and three two-week-old puppies.
There is only one way that a two-week-old?puppy can be safely transported on an airplane: In the arms of his caregiver or in a small bag held by that person. And frankly, this should not be an issue. A two-week-old?puppy is much quieter than a baby, and it does not wander out of the bag or off the lap of its owner.
The FAA’s rules about animal transportation state that no puppy that is less than eight weeks old can travel on an airplane. Andersen waited a day so that her parents could come and pick up two of the puppies. Why they did not take the third puppy is unclear.
A couple of days after she first tried to board the plan with three puppies and two adult dogs in crates, Andersen came back to the airport. This time she checked in her two dogs and hid the puppy in her purse. Frankly, if not for the TSA screening, this would have been a perfectly reasonable plan. As someone who has fostered puppies and kittens, I can tell you that the puppy would not have bothered anyone.
I am not sure what went through Andersen’s brain after TSA officials found the puppy and she was told that she could not board the airplane. I imagine that she felt something akin to desperation. If she missed yet another flight, she would have to spend the night again. I imagine that she was beyond short on money. She realized that she was just going to have to give up the dog, and she was going to have to do it the fastest way possible so she didn’t lose seat on the plane.
So she drowned the puppy in a toilet. It was a horrific act which makes dog lovers like me want to fly wherever she is and hurt her. I cannot tell you how many times I have fantasized about holding her head under water while she struggled for air.
And then I remember that drowning puppies was a part of American life as recently as 30?years ago. My late mother-in-law ordered my brother-in-law to drown a litter of puppies when he was just six. My brother-in-law has never recovered from it. But until she died, my mother-in-law saw nothing wrong with it. That was just how unwanted puppies were dealt with in their society.
A lot of people born before 1980, particularly in rural areas, do not understand that animals are anything other than animated lawn ornaments. They euthanize animals that are ill or inconvenient by using whatever mechanism is at hand. Our society needs to acknowledge its shameful past when it comes to animals, and we need to make it unquestionably clear that animals cannot be killed however, by whomever and for whatever reason.
One Facebook commenter, responding to a post of this tragic story,?claimed that all Andersen needed to do was call the local ASPCA, and they would have taken the puppy off her hands. And that is the second problem: Surrendering an animal is not that simple. For starters, one has to surrender during certain hours, fill out paperwork, and endure the scolding and contempt of animal lovers.
Here is what we can do to prevent such things: Places where people can surrender animals without facing a lot of questions and the horrible shame inflicted by well-meaning animal lovers. We need people who will volunteer to get an animal to safety. If Andersen had been able to surrender the puppy to TSA officials, she could have made her airplane, and the puppy would now be falling in love with a new family.
We can prevent incidents like the one in the Nebraska airport if we make it very clear what is and isn’t?acceptable in pet euthanasia. And we need to make the surrender of animals easy and shame-free.
