Beautiful Nixie

Beautiful Joe was a dog whose owner beat him and cut off his ears and tail. In 1894, Marshall Saunders wrote “Beautiful Joe”, a novel based on the true story of this tortured dog. Her book led the charge for the humane treatment of animals everywhere.

My apartment is across from where Saunders lived back in the 1940s. Throughout her life, she kept a lot of pets, a number of them strays which she named for the places where they were found. She once owned a bird named 38 Front Street.

If we had named our dog for where we found her, her name would be Kijiji.

My youngest daughter had always yearned for a dog, but as a writer and single mother, I didn’t think I could afford one. But when adolescence took her down a rocky road I sensed that having a loyal companion along for the ride would be not only desirable but essential.

And so, at age fifteen, she set out to look for an unwanted dog because she wanted one so much, a pooch being traded off to an uncertain future in a classified ad, a dog who would need her as much as she needed it.

She found Nixie: five months old, shiny black rottie-shepherd mix with brindle legs. Also included: crate, blanket, unwavering devotion. Her owner hadn’t realized what he was in for caring for a pup, so he hoped to find a loving family to adopt her. He did. And we did.

It is said that Beautiful Joe was a very gentle dog. If his portrait, which was replicated on postcards throughout the world, is any indication, that would be true. He looks gentle, if a little frightened in that shot - his lack of ear flaps give him an aspect of a pooch with ears flattened in fear. But his eyes tell a different story.

Nixie resembles Joe in appearance and she has the same gentle disposition. She loved our cat, Seven (RIP), who had the cleanest ears in town, compliments of Auntie Nixie and her expert grooming. If we’d let her, Nixie would clean our ears too. As it is, she takes care of us in other ways. Through all sorts of emotional duress and stressful times, she’s been there for us with wagging tail, licks/kisses and bountiful love.

Nixie became a joyous inventor of obstacle courses in the dog park, leading packs of friends around logs and under picnic tables. Stealing a ball became a favourite game; hanging on to it was even more fun.

I often think of Marshall Saunders and her bestselling novel about Joe as I walk Nixie along the same paths where she must have walked her own dogs so long ago. She became an animal rights activist and would go on to write many more books, all of them about animals.

When Nixie was five years old, suddenly she couldn't walk those paths anymore, nor could she go to the park and play. She yelped with pain when she walked a short distance and especially when she climbed the stairs to our second floor apartment. Eventually, she refused to go up them. At ninety pounds, lifting her was not easy but with the help of neighbours we did it.

Because I couldn’t afford the two and a half grand for the MRI, necessary for a diagnosis, our vet told us we could do “the poor man’s MRI”. “What is that?” I asked. “Time,” he replied. “Give her pain meds, keep her comfortable, watch and wait.”

We made her a bed of blankets on the living room floor, as she could no longer get up on the couch. And we created a “porch potty” in the nearby sunroom for her. Fortunately, she could walk there and use it then return to her blankets. But from her vantage point she couldn't see the outdoor world that she loved so much. She could still smell it when the windows were open, as she has a super sniffer, but visuals were not accessible. So -

I’d sit at the window and describe the scenes to her: trees swaying in the breeze, people on afternnoon strolls, dogs wagging tails, cats lying in the sun, red roses in the garden.

And looking across the way to the place where Marshall Saunders had lived, I told Nixie the story of Beautiful Joe. I spared her the sordid details of how his first owner starved and beat him and mutilated his body. I just told her the part about how one day when Joe was a year old, he was taken in by a kindhearted minister, and that he lived out the rest of his years with the minister’s loving family.

About a month into the poor man’s MRI, I sat watching my daughter hug our invalid dog. Tears sparkled like watery diamonds on her pale cheeks, and I knew then that I had to do more for Nixie and her devoted human.

In her time, Saunders worked tirelessly to set up clinics where low-wage earners could get care for their pets at greatly reduced rates. How I wished there were such now but of the scant charities I could find, I didn’t fit the requirements to apply.

So, without resources or cash, I waded into the unknown waters of online fundraising. I didn't know what I was doing, but I kept thinking that if Joe could overcome what happened to him, then Nixie could overcome this too. And I would help her do that.

Two days following my research, I launched the “Beautiful Nixie” campaign, reaching out to animal lovers everywhere to help get Nixie back on her prancing paws.

The funder started off like a train chug-chugging slowly out of the station. But we worked it day and night - on social media, on neighbourhood bulletin boards, through email, and any way we could get it out there. Soon, it began to pick up steam.

I'd often look at the postcard of Joe - the pure sweetness in the eyes of that long ago dog, surviving starvation and mutilation, catapulted me forward in my efforts to get Nixie medical attention (her own big brown eyes had quite an effect on me too). I learned that making a fundraiser interesting with updates and stories helped to move it forward. So I tied Joe's history in, along with Saunders' own life story, and donations spiked.

Five weeks after the campaign was launched, we were off to a nearby town that had an MRI machine available for dogs. Friends lent us their car and helped Nixie into it. We set out with a pocketful of donor love and a dog in the backseat who adores car rides: wind in her face, a thousand scents in the air - this was her incredible journey.

Her MRI revealed a protruding disc. The vet said such an injury could happen for any number of reasons but that surgery was the only cure. He gave us an estimate of five thousand dollars, and made an arrangement wherein we could pay half before surgery and the remainder thirty days later.

I felt like I’d tapped the world out, pestered friends and badgered strangers to the limit, and dried up all the goodwill in the land. I was wrong.

A month later Nixie was convalescing with a twelve-inch, neatly stitched-up incision on her lower back. On her bed of blankets, she had to rest for six weeks, just enough time for us to carry out the last stretch of fundraising.

Today, Nixie is back jumping onto the couch, sleeping on our beds, running to the park, fetching sticks, creating obstacle courses, climbing stairs and giving us lots of love. We are so grateful for her and her boundless love.

We are also grateful for family, friends, donors, neighbours, the vets and their assistants and everyone else who helped - and for Beautiful Joe and his champion, Margaret Marshall Saunders.