The long flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles can seem unending if the stranger sitting next to you will not shut up for a blessed minute so I have gotten really good at identifying potentially chatty seat mates so I can take evasive actions. Personally, I start to get nervous when someone makes a clearly invasive, inappropriate statement before they even buckle their seat belt; this was the case on a recent flight to LA when a chubby, middle-aged man sat down next to me and said, “Hello!”
Confronted by such an offensive display of affability I went right into Airplane Mode: I made myself as small as possible against the window, put on my sunglasses and my head phones and ignored him. To his credit, he got the message and retreated into a frosty silence. I sighed happily and opened my laptop.
Everything was going swimmingly until somewhere over Arizona when I had to use the restroom. Clearly ready to forget past wrongs, my neighbor was extremely gracious about letting me pass; as I settled back into my seat, against my better judgment I said, “Thank you!” and all was lost.
“I see you’re a dog lover,” he said. I wondered how he knew that but then I realized he had looked at my screen saver, which is a picture of my puppy, while I was in the restroom. “I’m a dog lover too,” he said, and he was off.
He told me that he ran a dog rescue operation in the rural hinterlands about 90 minutes north of LA and, faced with his noble calling, I was ashamed of myself for treating him so shabbily. “My dog was a rescue dog,” I said, and his face lighted up. “I’m Jim,” he said.
Jim told me he specialized in rescuing pit bulls and Chihuahuas and that when he lived in LA he would foster upwards of a dozen of each breed. But his neighbors started getting testy about having a pack of pit bulls next door, and the code compliance folks were threatening to sanction him. To make matters worse, his adoption rate was low because competing with puppy mills and retail pet stores was tough, so he decided to move to the country where he spent a small fortune constructing open air pens for his wards. From here he segued into an extended diatribe about puppy mills and retail pet stores, both of which he equated with animal cruelty.
As we were preparing to land Jim invited me to drive out and see his ranch on my next trip. “No point coming this trip,” he said sadly, “I don’t have any dogs to show you right now.”
“Lots of adoptions?” I asked brightly but he shook his head morosely. “Lots of coyotes,” he said shortly.
My voice scaled up. “Coyotes?”
He nodded. He was not used to living in the country, he explained, and it never occurred to him that a coyote did not consider a Chihuahua to be a kindred spirit so much as lunch, and his pack of Chihuahuas was rapidly decimated. Feeling that the situation called for extreme measures, Jim decided that a coyote was no match for a pit bull, so he started letting the pit bulls out at night, so they could protect the Chihuahuas.
“But every day I had one or two fewer pit bulls,” Jim said, describing how he learned, too late, that the pit bulls were terrorizing a couple of nearby chicken farms, and the farmers, showing a breathtaking lack of consideration for their new neighbors, shot the pit bulls as casually as they would shoot a coyote.
“So you see,” said Jim, “I have nothing to show you right now.” I nodded, speechless.
As we got ready to deplane, a woman walked by with a tiny little teacup poodle in a specially designed, jeweled carrying case.. Jim glared at her; “There out to be a law,” he muttered. “That’s animal abuse.”