{"id":2251,"date":"2008-05-03T07:12:10","date_gmt":"2008-05-03T12:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/?p=2251"},"modified":"2008-05-03T07:13:44","modified_gmt":"2008-05-03T12:13:44","slug":"for-gary-and-emerson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/?p=2251","title":{"rendered":"For Gary and Emerson"},"content":{"rendered":"

two of my oldest and dearest friends<\/em><\/p>\n

A long tiome ago, there was a dog. A beloved and treasured family pet. The dog had puppies. Because she had heartworms, though her owner didn’t know it, the pups were born with heartworms. They were born dying. <\/p>\n

The owner crawled into the dog’s kennel to try to see if any of the remaining pups could be saved. There had been five, and by now only two struggled weakly along. The dog had eaten one of the dead ones and was trying to eat another. <\/p>\n

The man reached in for one of the remaining live pups and the dog turned on him, suddenly and unexpectedly pinning him to the ground. She was going to kill him, and there wasn’t much time. <\/p>\n

The man’s son ran to the garage and grabbed the shotgun that hung there. He ran out to the kennel and aimed at the dog. In a split second he had to make a decision: Kill his own, beloved dog, who he’d watched and cared for from a puppy, who he’d cared for all during her pregnancy, or watch that dog rip his father’s throat out. <\/p>\n

Hands trembling, tears streaming down his face, he pulled the trigger. How he managed to take out the dog and not his father too is still a source of some amazement. The last two pups succumbed in hours to the heartworms. The months-long joy of anticipation of a kennel full of pups was dashed in less than a day, and turned to heartwrenching sorrow. <\/p>\n

The man is long gone, now. The boy is a man with a child of his own, and he learned a terrible lesson that day: Sometimes life hands you choices, and all of them are bad ones. You must still choose. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

two of my oldest and dearest friends A long tiome ago, there was a dog. A beloved and treasured family pet. The dog had puppies. Because she had heartworms, though her owner didn’t know it, the pups were born with heartworms. They were born dying. The owner crawled into the dog’s kennel to try to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2251"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2251\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}