Haley

Although mine was a dog-loving family and I grew up with a variety of family dogs literally since birth, Haley was my first “own dog.” It was love at first sight when I saw her in the fall of 1988 at the Farmers Market in Davis CA, where I was just beginning my junior year at UC Davis. After living in the dorm and then in an apartment my first two years of college, I ached to have a dog in my life again and a few friends and I found a small house with no pet restrictions to rent. We moved in at the end of the summer and the plan was to wait until we got settled into our new home, new classes and our routine before beginning the search for a dog.

Early one weekend morning I set off for the farmer’s market intending only to buy some bread from one of the local vendors. I passed the local animal shelter’s booth and took one look at the little 6 month old sheltie/terrier mix and knew she was the dog for me. I told the shelter volunteer I would be back with my housemates and raced home on my bike (hey, this was way before the days of cell phones!). We all went back to look at the little dog and agreed that we would like to take her home with us. We passed the screening, so home she came.

Haley was officially my dog, and my responsibility, but my housemates and friends delighted in helping to care from her, and she was rarely ever left alone in those days. Either I would take her to school and sneak her into class with me, or one of my housemates or friends would take her. I will always remember our early morning walks to campus, the air still cool before the blistering California sun rose high enough above the horizon to produce the 100+ degree days for which that area is famous. It was not unusual for me to come home from school or work to find a note on the fence that a friend had taken Haley out for a walk and would bring her back in time for dinner. Haley was rather popular and had many more friends than I did, and it was always funny to have people approach on campus and greet her by name and ask who I was because they had met her being walked by one or another of my friends.

Although dogs were officially prohibited from the campus buildings, most of my classes were large and it was easy enough to sneak her into the back row relatively unnoticed by my professors, if not by my classmates who mostly enjoyed sharing their class with her. I will never forget the time in anthropology class when she was sleeping like a baby in my lap and I suddenly felt a warm wet spot spreading on my jeans. Not wanting to draw attention to myself, I sat there in abject misery for the rest of the two hour class while she slept blissfully. A trip to the vet diagnosed her with spay incontinence and a prescription for PPA prevented that unhappy incident from being repeated!

Haley loved to run, and her nickname from those Davis days was “Haley, the Fastest Dog in the World,” which ironically predicted my involvement with the true canine speedsters, the sighthounds. When I got my greyhounds, she loved chasing them as they raced around the park, not quite as fast but every bit as game. When I became involved in lure coursing, Haley discovered her true love and was a regular fixture at our practices where she screamed at and chased the lure with as much intensity as any sighthound. She was first an honorary greyhound and then an honorary whippet. Although Wren never had much use for her, my younger whippets Nori and Ringer worshiped the ground she walked on, and to her dying day she delighted in roaring at them and watching them throw themselves at her feet in abject adoration.

I can’t say that Haley was the perfect dog for me… In many ways she perhaps taught me more than any other dog in my life, not the least of which is that the herding personality isn’t quite my cup of tea. But we were in it for the long haul, and with a lot of mistakes on my part and a lot of forgiveness on hers, we made it. She was with me for a long time, through college, graduation, moving to another state, my young adulthood, love and loss, and more. She was with me for nearly half of my life and by the time she died at the age of 15+ from congestive heart failure secondary to mitral valve disease, I was hard-pressed to remember a time when Haley hadn’t been around. I always thought Haley would be the one who would live forever, but I guess she was mortal afterall.