I recently learned that an old
acquaintance died — was killed, in fact. No, tortured to
death, actually.
It was a threatened desert tortoise I
knew in Yucca Valley, Calif., near Joshua Tree National Park. Its
home was the scrub and rocks near a former neighbor’s rural
home, and it would trek to her doorway every spring to search for
water and lettuce handouts.
My first year there, the
neighbor called to say her visitor was back, and I went down for a
look. I was stunned by the grandeur of its ponderous movements.
Every step suggested determination, and the leathery swing of its
beaked head hinted at ancient knowledge.
This spring, the
tortoise was met on its return by a pack of loose dogs. The
neighbor was out of town. When she returned, she found her yearly
visitor an upended shell, its limbs torn from body cavities by
marauding mutts.
The dogs were drawn to her house in
search of her own dog, one of their running companions. Like a lot
of rural residents, my old neighbors let their dogs run loose. And
why not? It is a neighborhood of large parcels and dirt roads,
without fences or traffic.
But loose dogs are among the
plagues that follow our sprawl into rural places, and fragile
habitats cannot withstand them.
Domestic dogs become
blithering idiots when allowed to run loose. Transplanted to a
rural area, the family dog is on the lam from years of backyard
confinement. It drinks in the wild landscape like a deckhand on
shore leave. Too many dog owners think their subsidized predator is
cute. But the threat is so great that the Desert Managers Group, a
panel of government officials in the Mojave, is studying the feral
dog problem.
I took some pictures of the tortoise I met
that day, and now they haunt me. The hard truth is that my own dog,
Molly, might have been among the killers.
Molly was a
stray. My wife and I took her in after seeing her running loose in
the area for weeks, wild-eyed and half starved. She may have been
abandoned. It’s also possible she was born to a feral pack.
Much of her behavior is not dog-like.
She bucked like a
wild bronco the first few times we leashed her. And she was utterly
unaccustomed to verbal commands, relying more on body language than
most dogs. She only became house-trained, for instance, after I
began an evening routine of demonstrating the correct habits
myself, out in the gravel driveway under the stars.
Molly
was content to stay near home those first months of her
domestication. Then she began to spend more time running with our
neighbors’ dogs. She’d be gone for hours, sometimes all
day. Finally, we faced a choice: Do we let the wanderlust prevail,
or do we force her to stay home?
We chose the latter, and
Molly basically stayed indoors unless we were outside, watching.
Even so, she would often slip away if I was distracted while
patching the roof or digging a hole. The pull of the pack was
strong.
Wildlife killing by dogs is especially tragic,
because it’s not a biological mystery. It’s not even a
reasonable predator-prey relationship. The cause is carelessness.
Many dog owners think Fido is just off “having fun with friends”
when they let their pet roam loose.
On the urban edge, it
turns out, dogs may do more harm to tortoises than coyotes and
foxes, according to Kristin Berry, a tortoise expert with the U.S.
Geological Survey. In some areas, tortoise numbers have plunged to
just 10 percent of their size in the early 1990s.
“One of
our hypotheses is that dogs inflict more damage to the shell and
limbs of tortoises than wild canids because they are involved in
play and chewing rather than in eating,” Berry recently told the
L.A. Daily News. “In contrast, the wild canids are interested in
the tortoise for food and will kill it and eat it rather than chew
on it and then leave it.”
We now live in the city, and, I
confess, we let Molly chase tree squirrels during our walks along
the river. I figure that’s OK, because Molly is now under
voice control, and she can’t climb trees. The squirrels stay
just out of reach, flicking their tails, taunting her.
That’s a relationship we can live with.
Matt Weiser is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a
freelance writer in Sacramento,
California.
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