October 28, 2004

• Loose End

  I’m preparing to go to town, but can’t leave for a few hours, must wait
  for the mail to come to see if there’s a pickup notice to stop at the
  post office and take Greyfox’s knives in to him.  Thursday, two
  weeks since I drove the rehab van, my turn again and other reasons
  still more compelling than that to make me feel I need to go. 
  Greyfox needs things.  I have them.

  This was yet another night of little sleep, interrupted often enough
  that I know there was little if any real REM sleep.  No dreams, no
  rest, just a bunch of times of rousing enough to wonder what time it
  was, and then at one of those times to finally realize I wasn’t going
  to doze off again, and then I got up.  That was interesting, since
  as soon as I moved I realized that even though my brain was wakeful,
  one arm was dead asleep.  It went from no sensation to intense
  sensation in a microsecond.  I reflexively froze and the sensation
  subsided.  A moment later, I experimentally moved again and the
  arm answered me with just slightly less intense sensations.  We
  went back and forth like that, my arm and I, six or seven times before
  the sensations subsided enough that I could just go ahead and crawl out
  of bed.

  It is way too early to know what kind of day this will be.  For
  now, sensorimotor stuff is working as well as usual.  Eyes focus,
  fingers know where the right keys are, I didn’t bang into anything or
  fall down on my way across the room from the bed.  So far, so good.

  ---

  I’m still working on Sunday’s news, the second of the two stories I wanted to share from the Outdoors section of The Anchorage Daily News. 
  This one is about someone who lived in this neighborhood for a
  while.  In fact, until I read the story I hadn’t known that he had
  moved nearer to Cantwell, up the highway a hundred miles or so. 
  The last I’d heard about him before Greyfox told me in a Xanga-gram
  that he’d been busted for animal cruelty, he’d been just a few blocks
  away, involved in a feud with another neighbor over his dogs running
  loose.  It’s the same author as the preceding bear story, Craig
  Medred, the ADN’s Outdoors columnist.  Partially because he writes
  on a topic of interest to me, but also because of his perspective,
  Medred is one of my favorite writers.

  Musher did best he could for dogs

  (Published: October 24, 2004)

  There is little doubt that Dave Straub loves his dogs and that his dogs love him.

  As long as Straub has been in Alaska, they have been his family. He has
  lived on a shoestring to support this family, taking odd jobs swinging
  a hammer here and there, trying to make a go of it by giving tourists
  dog-sled rides, or seeking sponsors for his team to enter the Iditarod
  Trail Sled Dog Race.

  The Iditarod has been Straub’s dream since he was a teenager back in Kansas.

  “Sometimes I go out at night and lay in the straw with (the dogs) and
  sleep in the straw with them,” Straub told me shortly before his first,
  unsuccessful journey up the trail in 2000. “It’s weird, but I really
  love it.”

  I remember thinking at the time that it appeared unlikely Straub and
  his 16 dogs would make it 1,100 miles to Nome. He was a rag-tag musher
  with a rag-tag team facing an uphill struggle.

  Twice he tried and twice he failed.

  When he finally made it to Nome on the third try, it was all the proof
  I ever needed that the real athletes in the Iditarod are the dogs. A
  determined string of huskies pulled Straub to Nome in spite of his
  limited finances and marginal capabilities as a musher.

  None of this is meant to pick on Straub. He is a nice guy. But where
  men like Martin Buser and Rick Swenson fit into the wilderness behind a
  dog team as if they belonged, Straub was always a square peg trying to
  force himself into a round hole.

  Thus it came as no big surprise last week to learn that the Iditarod
  dreams of the Kansas City transplant were dying among accusations some
  of his dogs were found on the verge of starvation at his kennel near
  Cantwell. Animal control officials in the Susitna Valley took the
  animals into protective custody.

  When I called Straub to talk about this, he broke down.

  “I’m losing everything,” he said as the tears flowed.

  At this, the lowest point in his life, Straub traces all of his
  problems back to the summer of the highest point in his life. That was
  2002, the year he finally completed the Iditarod.

  That summer he was working construction when he fell off a roof. He
  landed on his rump and crumpled vertebrae in his back. He has been in a
  fight with insurance companies over treatment ever since.

  At times, he admits, he has been strapped for cash.

  “I was borrowing money from my family, and doing whatever it took to
  keep the dogs fed,” Straub said, “thinking that every couple months,”
  the financial picture would improve.

  It didn’t. He fed the dogs as best he could. Some of them got awfully
  skinny, he admits, but he’s adamant they weren’t starving. In fairness
  to Straub, there is a fine line here between skinny and malnourished.

  It is worth noting that a 14-year-study completed by scientists at the
  University of Pennsylvania in 2002 found that dogs fed a
  calorie-restricted diet lived an average of 1.8 years longer than their
  fatter litter mates and suffered fewer chronic diseases.

  “The lifespan figures are only part of the story,” said Gail Smith,
  professor of orthopedic surgery at Penn and chair of the Department of
  Clinical Studies at the School of Veterinary Medicine’s Philadelphia
  campus. A lean body “forestalls some chronic illnesses, most notably
  osteoarthritis, and diet can either mitigate or exacerbate … genetic
  diseases.

  “This study should reinforce for dog owners the importance of keeping
  their dogs lean, with palpable ribs and an obvious waistline.”

  I don’t know about the situation in your neighborhood, but in mine
  there aren’t a lot of dogs that fit the description above. One of my
  Labrador retrievers does, but the other is at least 10 pounds
  overweight and has been since knee surgery a year ago. She’s lacked for
  necessary exercise since then, and it’s simply hard to further cut back
  on her food.

  She’s always hungry, even after she’s just been fed. And if you love
  dogs, it’s hard to ignore those brown-eyed pleadings to “feed me, feed
  me, feed me.”

  In talking to Straub, it’s pretty clear he wrestled with this. He was
  advised, he said, to get rid of some of his 32 dogs so he could better
  care for the rest, but he was afraid to take them to the animal shelter.

  “Do you want a 7, 8 or 10-year-old sled dog?” he asked. “I don’t want them destroyed. I still love them.”

  Love is really is at the heart of Straub’s difficulties, and if there
  is a problem in any way associated with the Iditarod, this is it: There
  are people with affections for dogs greater than their abilities to
  finance them.

  This problem is not unique to The Last Great Race.

  Earlier this month, city health officials ordered an Anchorage woman
  out of a house where they found her living in filthy conditions with
  more than 100 cats, chickens, dogs and exotic birds. By all accounts,
  she felt sorry for strays and took them in until they overwhelmed her.

  Straub’s situation is in some ways similar. He has more dogs than he
  can care for, either physically or financially. He tried to give a few
  away to other mushers, he said, but that didn’t work out.

  No surprise there. The market for over-the-hill dogs of any sort is
  limited. If you own an old dog, you love it because it is family. If
  your neighbor owns an old dog, it is just an old dog, and you really
  could care less what happens to it.

  Straub found himself in that sort of predicament. He couldn’t find a
  way out. The authorities ended up taking care of the problem for him.
  He doesn’t like the way they did it, but the rest of us should take
  solace in the fact that at least the system worked.

  The outcome was far better than what I remember from when Buser,
  Swenson, a couple other mushers and I went to a dog lot near
  Chistochina years back to try to rescue dozens of dogs in a similar
  situation.

  In the end, we decided that though the dogs were obviously underfed,
  they weren’t starving either. That left little that anyone could do but
  notify the authorities of the problem with this particular musher
  wannabe. It took months to get anything done. And when the state
  finally did intervene, 81 dogs were in such poor shape they had to be
  put down.

  I don’t know whatever became of the woman who owned them. Sometimes,
  though, I still think about her and those dogs and hope that she has
  given up her joint dreams of saving strays and running the Yukon Quest,
  because it wasn’t working for her, and it certainly wasn’t working for
  the dogs.

  Dogs need more than our affection. All the love in the world won’t make
  up for a shortage of food. Straub would likely argue with that, but he
  is wrong. Still, it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for him trapped
  there in his Iditarod dreams.

  “Yeah, I fell a little bit behind,” he said. “They didn’t give me an
  opportunity. There are other crippled people who’ve got down on their
  luck. They’ve taken them food. They’re working with some people. They
  don’t want to work with me.

  “I was trying to deal with it. I take full responsibility. If they want to lock me up in one of those cages, I’m willing to go.

  “Yeah, my dogs were skinny. Lock me up. Don’t lock my dogs up. I feel
  more sorry for my dogs than anyone. You think I’m worried about me? I’m
  not worried about me.

  “These dogs aren’t used to being handled and stuff. They’re going to
  take my dogs and euthanize half of them and give the other half away.
  That’s ripping my heart out.”

  Then he started bawling again.

  I don’t think there’s much I could add to that.  I had thought I
  would excerpt it, edit it down a bit for length, but I also could not
  find anything to leave out.
  

  • 12:30 pm
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