Lessons from a Canine Landscape

Last week our dog Olive jumped out of the window of a moving car while on our way to obedience class, killed the pet hen on our friend’s hobby farm, jumped the 4-foot fence into our neighbor’s yard, ran head first into a freshly painted wall, and dragged a 8-foot section of newly-trimmed branch across the back yard. Olive has three legs.

Olive lost her right front leg when she was just six months old. I don’t know how she came to be so injured that amputation was the only solution. You see, Olive came to live with us just a little over two months ago. In her short life (she’s just 14 months old) she lost her leg and her first family. She was surrendered to a shelter in southern Minnesota just before the end of the year. Having recently lost their home to foreclosure her family could no longer afford to care for her. Olive was then passed from shelter to shelter until a rescue organization retrieved her.


What I do know is that with Olive there is always a story, a lesson, and laughter. Despite finding herself without a leg and without a family (and there is nothing more heartbreaking than a dog without a pack) all within her first year, there is no part of Olive that operates out of a broken place. She hops through her life with more enthusiasm, love and trust than any creature I’ve encountered. We adopted Olive shortly after our 14-year old Border Collie, Scully, died. We were looking for a smaller herding dog and wanted to adopt from a rescue organization. After looking at hundreds of dogs, I stumbled across a profile of Olive. She had a green heart symbol next to her picture. I’m not sure why I looked further. The green heart is the website’s signifier for a “special needs” dog and she was a sixty-pound black lab mix, not a small herding dog. Two days later, Olive came to our home for a visit and never left. After just an hour full of exploring her new home, meeting our other dog and three cats, Olive plopped down on our couch and slept the deep sleep of a dog finally home.

When I shared Olive’s adventures of this past week with my mother, she looked at me with a bit of concern and asked if I was worried we had a “problem” dog. I only laughed because I am filled with glee when I recount Olive’s adventures and innocent precociousness. They all are demonstrations of Olive's overflowing enthusiasm for living, loving and trusting with abandon. Well, that and an unwieldy combination of cleverness and clumsiness that Olive has perfected. Yes, I would have preferred not to have retrieved her from the middle of an intersection where she was lavishly greeting the nice man who was in the car behind me when she leapt from the car window. But then again, I had underestimated my three-legged canine companion once again. Of course, she could finagle herself out of the small back window of my car. There is simply nothing she cannot do. OK, she cannot shake without toppling over, but really that’s about it. This is quite a feat because dogs bear sixty-five percent of their weight on their front legs. More importantly, there is nothing that Olive will not try. Her enthusiasm and fearlessness is infectious and teaches me much about how to live abundantly when the “shoulds” and “can’ts” of life come knocking and attempt to shut down what I intuitively know to do.

I reach down and lay my hand across the curve on her body where her right leg used to be. It is exquisite. It is powerful. This shape, this beautiful, imperfectly perfect landscape reflects her very essence. It is in the way she flops (hopping, flopping, and slinking, are an essential part of this tripod’s repertoire) across my body to snuggle, the way she leans her body up against the couch where her leg once was to peer out the window, and in way she sprawls out on her back to nap in the sun the backyard. Olive reminds me that we can be enriched by our own and others’ imperfections and that beauty and truth can be found deep within brokenness. With and through Olive, I am reoriented. What was once broken is transformed into something exquisitely flawless.

-Jen Gehrig