Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir

by Carrie Brownstein

Buffy, who followed us around the cul-de-sacs while we engaged in dirt clod fights with the neighbor kids, and trotted after us while we rode Big Wheels and eventually bikes. Buffy, who suffered the sting of the archaic idea that you could punish a dog by smacking it on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper and whose tail was run over by my mother as she backed the car out of the driveway. And Buffy, turned back into a stray in her own home on account of the rest of us surrendering to emptiness, drifting away from anything we could call familiar, her skin itching and inflamed, covered with sores and bites, like tattoos, like skywriting, screaming with redness, as if to say Please, please pet me! But we didn’t. When we decided to put her down, not because she was sick but because she was old and neglected—a remnant of a family we no longer recognized—my father asked my sister to do it. My sister was sixteen. She drove the dog to the vet one day after school by herself. No one else said good-bye.

This says a lot. No judgement; I don't like this one bit. I can think of several dogs -- across all the households I've spent time in -- who have this kind of life. 😶