Hardcore Bonnie

On this episode, Rachel tells us about a very special girl named Hardcore Bonnie.

Transcript

Dead Pets Podcast

Episode: Hardcore Bonnie

Content Warning: This episode contains descriptions of a dog getting hit by a car.

HOST: Welcome to Dead Pets, the podcast that celebrates the lives of the creatures who have changed ours. Today, Rachel joins us to tell us about a very special dog named Hardcore Bonnie.

RACHEL: Bonnie was a little 12-ish pound tan Chihuahua that was on the euthanasia list in a shelter in North Carolina. My husband and I were dealing with infertility at the time, and so fostering was, I think, for me, in a lot of ways, just a big distraction. It was something that I could do. I felt productive.

And I think my husband's thought process was probably, "Well, at least she's not crying every day anymore." So I could pretty much come home with whatever, and it was just like, "Okay, we'll take care of it." I was pretty good about seeing the fostering almost as like a job—I could see the end goal, I could see the purpose of it. So yes, there were obviously scenarios where we would keep one, but for the most part, if they were adoptable, they moved through our house. I could pretty much show up home with whatever, and he would be okay with that, because he knew eventually it would be moving on to somewhere else.

She was eight years old when we got her. So pretty much already set in who she was and what she wanted to do and not want to do. She was a picture on a website at a shelter that needed somewhere to go, and we were fostering dogs like crazy. And it just felt like, you know, a middle-aged Chihuahua at eight years old—they've still got a good decade probably left. She's not going to be that hard to place, so we'll just get her here. There's crazy Chihuahua people everywhere. We'll have no problem finding her a home.

We were pretty open to anything with Bonnie, because she was coming from out of state, and we didn't really have a whole lot of specifics on what she was good with, what her personality was like. Especially having a lot of other animals at home, we tend to—if it's going to be a dog of significant size—want to see how those things are with other animals first before bringing them home. Being a Chihuahua, being the age she was, the size she was, it just felt like this is going to be an easy place. We'll be able to find her somewhere to go that's not my house.

We did everything. I mean, we did hospice fostering, puppies, pregnant dogs—just everything. So she was supposed to be just another one in a long line of dogs that we're gonna find somewhere else to live forever.

It sounded like her owner surrendered her and another Chihuahua to this shelter, but there wasn't any explanation as to why. If it was something where there were behavioral issues, or if they were losing their home—we just really didn't know anything other than she came in with another Chihuahua.

Kind of after the fact, trying to piece together what was the likely scenario, she seemed—after fostering a lot of dogs, you could kind of tell the ones that had a stable home, probably from the time they were a puppy, and then going somewhere else. You could just see how that really flipped their world upside down, versus a dog that maybe had been bounced around or been moved at some point or another. She gave us the vibes of someone who probably had someone that cared a lot about her, which is typical with the small dogs, that just for whatever reason, couldn't keep her and she ended up in the shelter.

THE PICKUP

RACHEL: It was quite a few different rescues that were coordinating to bring dogs up from North Carolina, so we all got notified to meet in a parking lot because the transport van was going to get everyone shipped up here at the same time. I watched these two probably 60-year-old women who had driven them through multiple states, going in and out of this van, repeatedly pulling out another 50, 60-pound adolescent, crazy dog at the end of the leash, just yanking around. They're wrestling all these dogs off this van, handing them off to their fosters.

And then they see me standing there, and they're just like, "Oh, you must be the one here for that Chihuahua." I said, "Yeah." I'm thinking they're just gonna go back and grab her and bring her out to me. And they're like, "Yeah, we're not gonna touch her. We haven't been able to get her out for any of the potty break stops on the way up here. So if you could just come on in the van and get her, that'd be great."

So I climb into the van. I believe I ended up having to throw a blanket over her to pick her up and not get bit, and get her out of the crate, and then into the crate in my car to take her home. Even at the time I thought, "Come on, guys, she's 10 pounds. She's got teeth, but she's not gonna do anything crazy. You just get her, and you put her in the car, and you go."

And then come to find out—I think they had every right to be absolutely terrified of her.

RACHEL: We had five other dogs of our own at the time. No cats at that point. We were taking just a lot of dogs. We would be fostering two or three at a time if they were all getting along. She was an easy fit, because she was already—I mean, I wouldn't say dog friendly, but she wasn't really people friendly. She wasn't anything friendly, so she was cool to coexist as long as no one was in her face. My dogs were fine with that. They were used to other animals coming and going. She just kind of fit right into a pack of dogs that were all used to coexisting without having to be up in each other's faces.

She was crate trained. She had no semblance of potty training. I don't think ever—that never got better. Which, again, I think is typical with the smaller dog, but we were already used to it with doing hospice fosters and other small dogs. We had all hard floors, washable everything, washable rugs. We really didn't have to change anything in our setup to accommodate Bonnie.

RACHEL: She was technically a foster for about four months. During that time, I was doing what I needed to do to get her adopted. I was not previously a Chihuahua person. It wasn't really ever the intent to keep her. So we made it a point to get to all of the adoption events, bring her out to Petco, put a little pink bandana on her. The pink bandana was probably a bad idea because it made people think that she wanted to really just be picked up and snuggled—and that was not the case. The entire time that we would be at a Petco at an adoption event, it was me trying to make her seem appealing, while she tried to eat passing children. So it was a dance that we were doing.

We had, I think, three visits with potential adopters that would fill out an application through Petfinder. I remember one time we met up at a Family Farm and Home with this nice lady who was clearly a small dog person. She was telling me how she had all these little coats and stuff that her previous dog would wear, and I'm thinking, "You're gonna lose at least half your fingers if you try to put a coat on this dog. It's not gonna happen."

She really wanted to have—and I think a lot of people do, and I don't fault them for it—but they want to have this immediate connection, or feel like, "Oh, this was meant to be." And that was not ever going to be a thing with Bonnie. She was not a dog that she would maybe let you in at some point, if she felt like there was something in it for her. I don't remember if she tried to bite the lady, or just didn't let her touch her, because I would pull her away if the lady was trying to reach down and pet her, and I could see it was gonna go sideways.

I think it was after that meeting that I felt almost a little bad for her, because I thought no one really is seeing that she could be a good dog. She liked us, and she was easy to have, but it was just not going to be something where she was going to make someone fall in love. It was going to have to be someone who was willing to put in the time, appreciate her for who she was, and then let it get to a point where maybe there was a relationship that would be established.

I think by that point, I was used to seeing a lot of people who thought they could force that—like, "If I pet her more, if I snuggle her more, if I give her more kisses, then they're going to reciprocate and want to be friendly with me." And the last thing I wanted was someone to try and force anything with Bonnie that she was going to be uncomfortable with, or try to train the attitude out of her.

When I started picturing her in other places and what that would look like, and how they would maybe handle who she was, I just thought, "We have it working, and we appreciate her for who she is. At this point, she's already eight years old. Yeah, she's probably got a lot of time yet, but also she is who she is." And I just felt bad making her start all over again somewhere else, knowing if it didn't work out, or someone didn't feel like they were making the progress with her that they wanted to, that she could potentially end up back again anyway.

So I don't even really remember the discussion that was had. It was just more of a, "This makes sense, right?" And he wasn't gonna put up a fight, because he was the only person that she really genuinely enjoyed.

RACHEL: She tolerated me. She was head over heels in love with my husband. We used to joke that he could swing her around by her back legs, and she would just be like, "Higher!" Meanwhile, anyone else that even attempts to pet her or talk nicely to her, she would show her teeth. So that was part of the reason too where it just felt like, "I don't know if she's gonna have that again."

When I think back to what I picture as her home before she ended up in the shelter, it had to be a single guy or something that just for whatever reason was familiar to her, that was what she was comfortable with. And I was just really cramping her relationship with my husband.

RACHEL: When she was still a foster, I was trying to get really cute pictures of her to make her look super adoptable. And then once we finally caved and kept her, I was posting pictures of her in her natural state, which was usually just snarling.

At first it was Hurricane Bonnie, after the hurricane, and then it somehow devolved into Hardcore Bonnie, because no matter what, she was going to stay hardcore and be snarling at whoever looked at her the wrong way.

RACHEL: We joked in the winters that it was just time to pee in the house. She was not gonna go outside. We tried putting tarp down and then pulling it back so that there was grass that she could go in. We tried putting up almost like a tent with tarp to keep the snow from falling on one area and kind of blocking the wind. We tried pee pads, but she didn't want to do that—and I'm not entirely sure why. If it was just because that would have been kinder to me, and she didn't want to do that.

So we had a rug by the front door that was washable, and basically from November to March, that was just one giant pee pad that got washed all the time. I didn't want her to be punished for who she was, because that's fair, right? She came from North Carolina. She's like, "Why is there two feet of snow outside that's taller than I am? I'm not going to go to the bathroom out there."

She was also obsessed with my husband's shoes. If she couldn't be cuddling Jeff, the next best thing was to grab one of his shoes from the back door. She would haul it up into the couch and actually snuggle with the shoe.

We had a pair of salad tongs that were strictly for getting his shoes away from her when it was time to go to bed, and she couldn't have the shoe anymore, because you would get bit if you tried to just reach and take his shoe away from her. So we'd have to get tongs to take the shoe away.

There was one time I was on a work trip in Vegas, and I got a picture from my husband, and it looks like the living room just rained shoes. There had to be 10 individual shoes of his that were all over the living room—on the couch, one on the recliner, a few on the rug. He had left for work that morning and apparently didn't fully close the service door from the house to the garage. So she spent the entire day carrying in his shoes one by one, until she had basically all of the shoes that she could find that she could get. And they're as big as her—she's not a big dog. He's got big shoes.

But she didn't take one of mine. There was not a single shoe of mine. She had gone around my shoes, my son's shoes, and only grabbed Jeff's—probably 10 of them—to bring them all into the living room. I wish we had video of what that looked like that day. She probably snuggled with one for a little bit, and then was like, "It's time for another one," and went back out and grabbed another one. I just would love to have been able to see her on her little mission, carrying shoes in and out all day.

She knew what she wanted. I think that's part of what I love too—she was just so independent. She just knew she had in her head what made sense to her and what she wanted to do. And if you're gonna get in the way of that, she had no problem letting you know she was going to do it anyway.

RACHEL: I don't think she could get more grumpy than she already was, so we didn't notice any behavior changes with old age. In fact, it was really even hard to imagine that she was aging or changing until she had an incident with a foster dog.

She was watching her boyfriend, my husband, mow the lawn from the front door, and one of the foster dogs came running to also go look out the window. All I heard was a snarl and a snap from Bonnie. And then I heard the foster dog kind of give her the same thing right back. It was not a fight. There was no punctures or anything, but she came yelping back to me. At the time I was like, "Good—you finally dished it out. You're finally getting a little bit of a taste of your own medicine."

But then I noticed she was not holding her jaw quite right.

So we go into the vet. I felt really bad when I realized, "Oh shit, this wasn't just a 'you got told off and you deserved it.'" The vet had said that there wasn't—it wasn't like the dog grabbed or anything. He said her jaw at that point was basically like glass. So it was not going to take much. Just being that old, and as small as she was, it was really brittle to begin with, so just even getting kind of knocked, it broke in a few places.

They told us we could try keeping a muzzle on for a while, because it just needed to be stabilized. And luckily, we already had a pretty purple muzzle, because that was the only way that I could do any kind of grooming on her, any nail trims or baths or anything. So we had her purple muzzle. We put it on. She had it taped shut for a little bit, but it was clear it wasn't getting better.

We went back in. They said, "We're going to need to repair it." It was hard, because with everything as small as it was, they didn't want to do any more damage. So they did internal wires in her jaw to kind of hold everything in place. And then on top of that, she had to have her mouth wired mostly shut through the healing process.

So Bonnie had her own blender so that I could make her gruel that she had to drink for six weeks—because I wasn't putting her dog food and water and whatever in our blender. So we had two blenders. She ate that way for six weeks. It got pretty gross, because you can imagine she was not cooperative with me trying to clean her up. And just with having to be really careful around her jaw because of the injury and the fact that she was prone to flying off the handle, just in general anyway, aside from having an injury—she was pretty gross for a while, until she was able to go back in, get sedated again, get all the wires removed.

And it wasn't until after it was all said and done that we kind of sat there going, "Did we just give her a bionic jaw? This dog that has tried to bite basically everything in the house, anything that she's ever come in contact with, and we just made her jaw indestructible? Maybe that wasn't the best use of however many thousands of dollars."

So yeah, she felt tons better. She was totally fine after that. It was like it never happened. And I was so sure we just gave her another decade, right? She really, other than having a slight heart murmur, which is super common for Chihuahuas, she didn't have anything else health-wise to speak of. So it just felt like we do this—we'll get, I mean, she's gonna run on spite alone for another decade.

RACHEL: I was working from home. I had an office set up in the basement, because at this point we were just post-COVID and my office was still allowing us to work from home a few days a week, so I had a nice little setup downstairs.

On my lunch break, I had gone upstairs to let the dogs out, make myself lunch. Bonnie liked to take extra time in the yard from the other dogs, especially if it was nice and sunny out. She really liked to—the typical Chihuahua—sunbathe.

The problem was, then when she was ready to come in, you needed to be right there to let her in. She didn't want to wait for you.

So I had let her stay out. I had finished my lunch. I had let the other dogs in. I went back downstairs. I was probably working for a half an hour, when I all of a sudden just had this jolt of adrenaline, because I had realized, "I think I might have left her in the yard."

Which was fenced, but we, in probably the two weeks prior to the incident, had realized that she was able to fit between the bars. It was a wrought iron fence. She, for years, had never done that. I think it probably just only took once for her to realize, "Oh, I can do this. Why am I hanging around this dump?"

And so she, a couple of weeks earlier, had done that. She had gotten through the bars, she had gotten down our relatively long driveway, and just essentially took herself on a walk. We were out in the country at the time, not a real busy road, but we have a gravel pit down the road from us. And so those trucks would be going by, and they would be going pretty fast.

The first time that it happened, I had obviously panicked. I had seen her just trotting down the road, going God knows where. I don't know what was in her head. I don't know what she was thinking. Probably something along the lines of, "This bitch did not let me in. I was done. I got the sun I needed, and I was asking to be let in, and she wasn't there." So she just trotting—straight line down the side of the road. Cars whizzing by. I was like, "You've got to be kidding me." So I scoop her up, bring her back. I'm like, "Dear God, we got to figure something out."

So I had gotten some mesh, like snow fencing, that I was going to zip tie to that part of the fence to keep her in. And I just kind of wasn't getting around to it. I would just go out there with them and make sure to stay out there with them until they were ready to come in again.

We were set back pretty far from the road. So I think in my head, I just thought, "If she tries to pull that stunt again, I'm going to be checking frequently enough that I can get down there and stop her. She won't make it all the way down to the road again."

So I think when I realized that I had left her out, I think my brain was already calculating that it had been long enough that, if she had wanted to go somewhere, it had already happened.

So I sprinted upstairs, checked the yard. She was not in it. From the yard, because it was out the front door, I could see the driveway. She wasn't on the driveway. So then I really started to panic, because at that point it was like, "Okay, she made it. She made it to the road."

Ran down to the road, and I remember looking left first, because that was the direction that she had gone the last time, and not seeing her, and then looking right, expecting to see a dog trotting down the road like she had last time. Didn't see anything.

Ran back up to the house. At that point, I just called my boss on Teams and said, "Hey, I just—I don't know where she went. I got to figure this out." Ran back up quick, double checked the house, because being a small dog, she might have been behind the couch. Who knows where she could have been stashed away. And I think that's the worst feeling—just at that point, it felt like, because I don't feel like I can trust my memory: Did she come in with the other dogs? And I just didn't notice. We had five of them at that point. It was very possible. Or is she actually—where do I need to focus my energy searching?

I remember at that point feeling really, really panicked. I went back outside, because at that point I felt pretty confident she wasn't in the house. I checked the backyard quick, even though she never really went back there. But there's a pond back there. So then I had that—it felt like there was danger in every direction, right? Especially for a small dog. We had woods on the sides of us. We had the pond out back, and then we had the road out front. And so it just felt like no matter what direction she went, it was not good.

I ran to the road because I felt like that was the direction she took last time. I get to the end of the driveway, I look left—nothing. I look right, and I see her in the road.

And I think I didn't see it the first time I went out, because I wasn't looking for roadkill. I was looking for her walking down the road. Because I think even at that point, my brain just didn't consider that a possibility. Even though I was obviously panicked—heart pounding—it just felt like, "I'm gonna be so relieved when I finally get her and get her back in the house."

RACHEL: I think what was so hard was it was gruesome. Being as small as she was, and it was more than likely one of those gravel trucks that hit her.

I remember reaching out to touch her fur on her forehead and kind of her ear, just to—I think I just didn't know what to do. And it didn't feel like real. And it was almost like I was trying to ground myself a little bit. Like, "This is real life. This is actually her."

I've never screamed like that, ever. Not up to that point, not since. Where you're almost—I don't even know what I was saying. I think I was just screaming. I don't even know if it was just screaming or if it was words.

I think anyone who fosters animals or is in rescue—if you see an animal that was hit by the side of the road, you stop. And I've done that before. I've seen a dog by the side of the road, and you go and you check if there's tags, because someone's looking. I would want to know if that was my dog.

And someone found it. My brain, I think, did such a good job of trying to protect me that I couldn't even tell you what I saw. I remember being horrified. I remember a lot of blood. I remember seeing bone. I remember not knowing what to even do, because it didn't feel like I could pick her up.

I ran back to the house to get my phone. I called my husband. I'm pretty sure I just screamed, "Bonnie's been hit. It's my fault. It's my fault. It's my fault."

I called my friend, Stephanie, who was at work. I'm pretty sure I said the same thing again: "Bonnie was hit by a car. She's gone. It was my fault. I didn't let her in. It was my fault." She left work—as I'm pretty sure as I was still talking, I think she was shutting everything off and getting in her car.

I didn't know what to do while I waited for someone. I normally feel like I'm a person that locks in when something happens, or someone needs to know what to do and do the things right. And usually I feel like I can do that. And this was just one of the few times that it was like I didn't even know. I couldn't do anything. I didn't know what to do, and I couldn't do anything. It was like I couldn't act.

And so I guess the only thing that I could think to do was go back out to the road to stop any more vehicles from hitting her even more. I remember standing essentially over her body while another car came. Those poor people, because God knows what they saw—it was just this wrestled woman in the middle of the road, just hovered over something, just screaming at them. They went around, and I just—I don't really remember anything else up until Stephanie got there.

At that point, I started to panic that I had called Jeff, and he was on his way home too, and I just thought, "He can't see this. I don't want him to see what I saw. I don't want him to have to deal with that." And I think that's when I kind of snapped into, "We just have to handle it." I think it wasn't until I thought about him potentially having to deal with that aftermath that it was just like, "Okay, what do we do?" It had to be me thinking about someone other than me. Because if I was just thinking about me in that moment, I was just going to sit there and not move or do anything.

So then all of a sudden, it felt like kind of a race against the clock.

RACHEL: Stephanie got there. I don't remember this. It wasn't actually until I was chatting with her about doing this podcast that she told me she didn't see Bonnie's body, because I suppose I had picked up what I could and put it in a box at that point and just didn't want anyone to see it. Apparently, I had already had what I could pick up of her in a cardboard box that I wouldn't let her open, and then I just kept saying, "How do we get the blood off the road? How do we get the blood and what's left out there?"

She took buckets of water and a big utility broom from our garage and literally scrubbed the pavement for me. Because I think that was something that—not only for my husband, but for myself—just knowing you got to drive home from the store and from work and whatever, and I'm going to see that spot. How long is that going to take to go away?

I dug a hole by the side of the driveway to put the box in. And I think what was hard for me, specifically, too, was having done hospice fostering and having our own personal dogs that had gotten to the end of their life and been euthanized—it's all very organized. Whether it's the vet handling it, or you do the in-home euthanasia, and then they have a place that they coordinate with that takes the body. It's that kind of aftermath that, when you don't have someone saying, "Okay, now we do this, and we take this and we handle this part. And how do you want this done?"

It was like, "What do I do with her?" And I know people bury pets on their property all the time. I know there are people that do that. I tried it once, and I had to fight the urge to go dig that dog up for a month after. I just—so it was not anything that I ever intended on doing again. That was a learning experience, and that's not something that I'm equipped for. But at that point, it was like, "What? Where? What else do we do?"

For having been pretty experienced in the sense of euthanasia and saying goodbye to pets, I was so completely out of my depth and clueless for the way that that all happened. And just what haunts me still—we go out of our way to make saying goodbye the least stressful, most peaceful thing that it can be. So if that means in-home euthanasia, so that they don't have to get in the car, or they don't have to go to the vet—just to be someone who's been so intentional up to this point about making that the most peaceful thing that it can be, to have lost her to something so incredibly violent.

I think the only last thing that I remember from that day specifically was after Jeff got home and we had buried Bonnie's remains and cleaned as much as we could. Stephanie, who is not overly affectionate or huggy or touchy feely, literally reaching out to grab my arm and look me in the eye and say, "I think that you should talk to someone about this." Because I think she knew even then this was something that was going to continue to eat away at me. Because I think all that I could keep saying was just, "I did it. It was my fault. I left her out."

I know accidents happen. My brain—I know those things. I know anything can happen. You can't control everything. But had I not given her that extra time in the yard, if I had brought her in, if I hadn't gone downstairs first and forgotten—that would not have happened.

I'm still having a hard time with it, because I still—I want to—I say that, but then in my head, I still come back to, "But it was my fault."

RACHEL: I remember the week after it had all happened, starting to second guess if that was really her that I saw on the road because of how mangled it was, and not being able to—having had my brain so quickly just wiped those images, which is probably for the best, but at the time, I had to really convince myself that was her.

It was just unexpected, and it was a bizarre feeling to all of a sudden sit there and go, "I mean, she could be out in the woods right now, and I'm not looking for her, because I mistook this squirrel or whatever." Even though I know that's not what it was. But it was just like because my brain so quickly just wiped all of that, I was second-guessing all of it.

She was mostly deaf by this point, and her vision wasn't super great either. And I feel like what was likely was she never saw it coming and it was just gone. Because I don't know that for certain, because I didn't see anything. It's really easy for my brain to be really unkind and just think about the other horrible things, the other ways that that could have gone. It's all the what-ifs. What if she got clipped by another car first, and then was there, and I wasn't there, and another car came? As much as I'm glad I didn't see it happen, part of me wonders—at least then I would know if it was just she was just gone.

And then, on top of how traumatic it was, I felt like all I did was shit-talk this Chihuahua. Just talk about how nasty she was, how difficult she was to live with in the winter, specifically. I never got to have that moment of saying goodbye and—I know she knows that I loved her—but just being able to have that moment of telling her that she was a good dog. Everything else aside that I wouldn't have changed who she was, her antics, the things that she did, the stealing the shoes, being the one that kept all the foster dogs in line—I wouldn't have changed her. And those are all the things that I would have told her if we had been able to say goodbye on our terms.

I guess that's if there was one thing that I could tell her, it was just that she was a good dog. She was just—she was good. She was who she was supposed to be, and she belonged with us.

HOST: Tell me what it was like in the household after Bonnie died.

RACHEL: Because we had five other dogs, the daily routine didn't change. It wasn't like we had dishes that we had to pick up and put away, or a bed that wasn't getting used anymore. It would have been easy to feel like nothing had changed, with the exception of the empty spot to the right of my husband on the couch.

But what I noticed with me was just feeling incredibly paranoid. I mean, even still—if I wake up in the middle of the night I can all of a sudden panic: Is everyone here? Is everyone where they're supposed to be? And I'll actually turn my flashlight on my phone and do a head count, because I feel like I can't trust that I put everyone where they were supposed to be.

It probably—and this is another thing that I think I felt a little guilty about—is honestly the house was probably more peaceful. The other dogs didn't feel like they had to tiptoe around her. I think all the humans felt it much differently than probably the other dogs.

HOST: Tell me about where Bonnie lives around you guys now. How do you guys memorialize Bonnie?

RACHEL: We have—I keep the dog tags of all of our previous pets and any hospice fosters that we've had that we've said goodbye with. I always make sure that I make them a dog tag, and we keep all their tags in a jar.

When we moved recently, I had some pretty big feelings about leaving Bonnie behind at the old house. Strongly debated digging her up and bringing her with. It felt like one more thing of—we made fun of her while she was with us. She died this horrible death, and now we're leaving, and we're leaving her at this old house. It just felt like one more thing that we were doing to her. Luckily we did not dig her up, because I don't think that that would have gone well.

But when we got to the new house, I realized one of my dogs that we have now, named Lola, I couldn't find her tag anywhere. And just being in a new neighborhood without a fenced-in yard, I wanted to make sure she had identification on her, and I couldn't find a tag. So I was like, "Well, I know where I have dog tags with our phone number on them. It might not be her name, but the phone number is the important part."

And so I grabbed out a tag, and it was Bonnie's. So Lola is wearing Bonnie's tag, and at this point, there have been quite a few times I've debated, "I just got to make her a new one." But I also kind of love that she has Bonnie's on and that she's kind of with us here with that tag on.

LESSONS LEARNED

HOST: What did she teach you?

RACHEL: She taught everybody in our house and probably everyone that came over—just because there's a dog there doesn't mean you have to touch it. It doesn't mean that you have to interact with it or try to pick it up or do anything. It's unfair for us to put those expectations on dogs. When we didn't put that pressure on her, that was when she really started to kind of blossom and feel confident and have fewer outbursts.

And then the other big thing: to say the things that you would say if you were saying goodbye. Don't wait to say them.

HOST: No, exactly. Yep.

RACHEL: And it's such a shitty way to learn that—having those regrets of what I would have said to her that she didn't ever get to hear. Not that she would have understood it anyway. I recognized that that was more for me than her.

IF THERE'S AN AFTERLIFE

HOST: So if there is an afterlife where we do get to see our pets, and they're waiting for us, what would you say when you get to see Bonnie?

RACHEL: I would tell her that I would have done a lot of things differently. I didn't mean half of what I said about her. It was all met with love. It was teasing. And that she really was a really, really good dog.

HOST: Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe and share with your friends. If you have a dead pet that you'd like to share, please send an email to deadpetsofficial@gmail.com.

Dead Pets is a Wild Media Industry's production. It is written and hosted by me, Elyse Wilde.

"Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened." — Anatole France