Since Sunday I have been deciding whether to kill my dog.

I was wiping his paws and he bit me in the face.

This is the first in the Old Truck Good Coffee Volley Series, in which Joel and Leo respond to each other’s essays with a piece of their own.

On Sunday evening it was raining, a cold fall rain. My dog and I came inside after rambling through BLM land. His feet were muddy.

I was wiping his paws and he bit me in the face. His teeth left four puncture wounds, the greatest is a half inch cut, an eighth inch deep, across my lip. I almost went to the hospital for stitches but luckily a butterfly closed it up fine by morning.

Please understand that he is not regularly menacing. Our daily life is peace and harmony. He is calm in the house. He responds well to commands. He is playful with other dogs. He asks visitors for pets by firmly perching his head on their thigh and staring up.

We go fishing together and Axle picks out the spot on the river he wants me to cast. When I catch a fish he follows the line in with his piercing stock dog eyes, then watches the water where I return the fish after netting it. On the drive back home he sits in the back and rests his head on my shoulder or annoyingly pokes his snout at my elbow for pets.

I can euthanize him or I can work with him to make him better.

"Unacceptable!" my step brother texted when I messaged him about the bite. He has lived out here just about all his life while I dallied in the city for decades. He would understand — both the pain and the reason — if I put this dog down. It is a hard truth for many people in rural places, sometimes a necessity, that inconvenient dogs don't get to live long.

Managing a problem dog is a risky endeavor and consumes wealth. It takes time from other tasks. Aggressive dogs don't last in most working environments, I am told. They are taken out of circulation pretty quickly.

"There are a lot of good dogs out there," said a woman who moved here from Montana. She keeps around a half a dozen dogs. They run beside her as she rides horses along our desert trails.

Another neighbor who keeps horses and dogs heard about my trouble through her husband and reached out. She had worked in veterinary offices and in shelters.

“How old was he when you adopted him?”

“Two and a half. He had one home that said he was ‘too energetic.’”

“Yeah, you know I have been bitten by a dog I was taking in to the shelter just as the folks surrendering it told me that it never bit anyone. People lie about that because they don’t want to be responsible for the dog’s death.”

I didn’t go to a no-kill shelter to adopt because I am suspicious of them. They don’t pencil out to me. There are more dogs than viable homes. The idea that we can just find a perfect person for them all puts difficult dogs with people who are not capable and don't have the time to train and heal a strong willed, traumatized genius. It seems to me that there is no world without euthanizing. It has always been a part of our relationship with our domestic animals. But all those bad dogs, those hard dogs, those traumatized dogs...I could easily love them in the sadness of their situation.

I recall when I was a kid around here I read an article in the regional paper about an adjacent town’s shelter. It was run by a man who used a carefully placed bullet to dispatched the dogs that could not find a home. The tool he devised was a rifle whose stock he replaced with a pistol grip. I do not recall the caliber. There was a picture of him displaying the piece in the yard with dogs running around him. It was not, as I recall, any kind of scandal that they used bullets to put dogs down.

I told a friend in Portland about Axle, but I was hesitant to. He had just put down his aged three legged pitbull. She was not mobile or comfortable. As dogs do, she made it clear to him that it was her time.

She was aggressive all her life and he went to great effort to protect the world from her. I have known him for over a decade and barely ever saw his dog.

I am afraid of slipping in to a life where I am in service to my dog.

My vet wants to put Axle on Prozac.

If Axle bites an unforgiving stranger, he might be taken from me. I would be liable for the damage, and he would be killed terrified in a strange, harsh place.

I want to have him, and I don't want him to be a risk to my community. It is the difficulty of the personal and the public. I am at a small collision of different customs, looking to find harmony between them.

In the pandemic, the question of public health became central. The majority of us are not experts in public health. Still, we all started using the language of experts, expanding our vocabulary and defining these new words as news anchors introduced them to us. Referencing infection rates and transmission, we touted statistics we did not understand.

We were asked (sometimes told) to do things that were uncomfortable and unfamiliar. Masks. Social distancing with strangers. Distance even from those we loved.

Some among us actively rebelled against those requests. They protested against masks, they defiantly kept their restaurants open and went to their churches. The emotions of feeling commanded, untrusted, and constrained were real.

"Liberty," the political speaker said. "Personal experience and responsibility," I heard.

It drove the nation further apart when folks who disagreed with that position mocked it.

"But my freedoms!" said comedians donning an exaggerated Southern accent for their urban clientele.

The personal risk of catching a disease was, in the view of those arguing against mask requirements, their own business. Those advocating for mask laws were saying that to the extent it created risk and damaged other’s lives, your liberty needed to be crimped.

Once I verbalize both points of view in a way that is understandable, it is hard to hold one completely, like this problematic dog of mine. I love this damn dog. If I keep it alive, am I privileging my own desires over the risk to my community?

We have created rules so people responsible for dogs ("owners" is the word, but it seems off to me) are liable for the outcome. Those rules do not take into account how unique and beautiful and loved *my* dog is. How could they? Isn't that the way of all agreements we make as a community? They are a broad stroke, and the details of any one's situation is the exceptional case. Ask anyone in jail.

One friend told me that there was a shift in America, around the 1950s, when dogs and cats became family not employees. Now, in the 21st century, I think some people have become their pets’ employees.

I took Axle fishing yesterday. He ran ahead and splashed in the water. When I didn't know where he was, I whistled and he bounded back to me on wet legs.

On the way up out of the canyon at dusk he found a giant stick and ran along with it in his mouth. We played tug with it for a while then he lay down and made it into a bunch of smaller sticks.

This dog and I have a good life together. These few days I have cried more than I can ever recall crying. He knows I am frustrated with him. I am frustrated with the two views I hold equally, that are of different topics, but that push so hard against each other that it seems that to exist one must destroy the other.