Bionic Dog

I am at The Verve on a cold maybe gonna rain Tuesday in Santa Cruz. The coffee is excellent (well when the café is also a great local roaster and the beans are roasted Next Door, that’s going to happen). I’m massively cyborged right now: phone is hopping with pictures, texts, email alerts; MacBook is working overtime on a wide variety of tabs and themes. Women’s World Cup (US women win 2-0 over North Korea). I read the comments on ESPN’s GameCast site, check the Giants game (holy crap! Up 11-3 over the Cubbies and it is only the 5^th inning!). Email: send messages to my son’s math tutor, check for “trouble” email from school/work/home, read some FPIF (Foreign Policy in Focus) on the amazing Chinese art at the Tate:

In the vast exhibition hall of London's Tate Modern, the installation looks from a distance like a huge patch of gravel. Perhaps it is the first stage of a construction site or the last stage of a demolition. Only when you come closer and crouch down can you identify the little objects. A discerning eye might determine that they are reproductions. The rest of us rely on an accompanying video about Ai Weiwei's project, which explains that the Chinese artist had commissioned a village of artists to produce the porcelain objects and paint them to resemble the real thing. What from far away looks like a gravel parking lot is actually one hundred million artfully produced sunflower seeds. http://www.fpif.org/articles/art_v_state

The brain is racing around a wild and bizarre racetrack, a steeplechase shaped like the inside of a computer merged with the global pings of a manic caffeine driven pingpong ball or pinball. I’m reading about the fickle nature of capital, the recent release of Ai Weiwei from Chinese prison, meanwhile mulling over the NPR show I heard on the way here (a frankly disappointing, much too limited discussion of “fracking” on Diane Ream show) and wondering how “clean” it would be to frack with natural gas to get natural gas, instead of using other dirtier methods…

And then I found a bionic dog in my Inbox.

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The email included a complete cut and paste of a SFGate article on Naki’o, “the first-ever “bionic man's best friend."” Below the print were two videos, one from ABC News, showing Naki’o running on four prosthetic legs, and generally acting like a happy energetic puppy. The story has big pathos:

Abandoned by a family fleeing their foreclosed home last year, Naki'o and his red heeler [Australian Cattle Dog] littermates barely survived the harsh Nebraskan winter. In his weakened state, Naki'o stepped into an icy puddle in the basement and got stuck in the freezing water. The 5-week-old puppies were eventually rescued and taken to an animal rescue center. But Naki'o lost his paws and the tip of his tail to frostbite. Under the shelter's care, his paws healed to rounded stumps, but he was left unable to walk.

As a dog owner and I suppose now a dog “person,” (a funny phrase and probably worth pursing – as opposed to a cat person, but also as opposed to a person person?), I had predictable reponses: restored function, happy dog, happy adoptive humans, great ending to a sad story. Then other questions came up: how much did this cost? Who did the work? And is this going to be an option for pet owners, and if so, is this gong to move us into the big-cost insurance world for pets that already exists for humans? (for the answer to this last question, I recommend the terrific series on animal insurance on This American Life at http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/392/someone-elses-money).

The story is that veterinary technician Christie Tomlinson found the dog (where?) both “charming” and “crawling on its belly to get around.” So she raised $1300 to have Naki’o’s two back legs fitted with prosthetics; when he did well the company Orthopets offered to fit the front legs for free. The total cost was $4500, thoug it isn’t clear if some of this was donated by Orthopets. It was this last fitting that made the dog into the first fully “bionic” dog.

The prosthetics look totally cool to me; they are meant to mimic dog limbs, and it does indeed look as if the dog can move freely and happily. So. Happy ending right?

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Increasingly I have been reading the comments at the end of articles like this. For many cyborg readers (that is, reading articles online and linked to sites that allow a wide audience to comment, flame, spam, etc) the end comments represent much of what is awful about the internet. My friend Crystal hates the mostly inane and often hateful posts; the author Jarod Lanier in his manifesto You Are Not A Gadget calls out the lurkers and trolls that destroy coherent conversations on the Net.

But for some reason I’m drawn to what people say about articles. Perhaps it is the writing teacher in me; I want to know what a wide range of people will say because that gives writers information. And it isn’t hard for me to move past the empty comments in order to find the spread of responses from a potentially huge audience.

In this case, the comments mirrored my own responses. First of course, admiration for the people who designed and perfected and fitted these prosthetics, and empathy for animals who have been abandoned or injured. Second, the feel-good part of the human story: people showing large amounts of empathy for suffering and dong something about that. Then…just as in the comments, I wonder about the people who abandoned these animals. Do I have the whole story? Are they cruel people? Bad people?

Here are a couple sets of comments:

Diana says: 
23 June 2011 at 10:33 am 
That story is so sweet it makes me want to cry.



Dogs Rule says: 
23 June 2011 at 10:55 am 
Freeze the limbs off the idiots that abandoned Naki’o and his siblings!

Empathy builds the animal-centric community, and that community can also express a wide range of emotions at those who are outside it. Anger against those who hurt or abuse pets serves to constitute a part of this community.

This it is only a matter of time before the accumulatin of pro-prosthetic and pro-animal sentiments produce a response by those outside:

K Fils says: 
24 June 2011 at 7:46 am 
Bravo Orthopets! How wonderful that there are still so many kind and giving pet doctors!
With all the poor animals that end up as amputees, I wish there was an Orthopets everywhere.
I hate that people lose their homes and simply abandon their pets. Pets are family and should be treated with the love and respect that family deserves. Karma will get these folks.



Kat says: 
24 June 2011 at 9:00 am 
So glad you could hit in the gut those poor people who cannot pay for medical coverage for their human problems. Paying $6000 to buy the new feet for that god, plus the surgery itself, really says how important humans are. Great the animals are being helped, but many humans need help, and the humans aren’t getting the help. In some countries, the humans would eat the dog, because the humans can’t afford the food.



I agree with Kat says: 
24 June 2011 at 4:46 pm 
Seems like a lot of resources wasted on an animal when people could use help. In a way the story is heart warming, but also indulgently disgusting. How strange…



And that was my own response, partly informed by how I often read: how will others read this? And how do I read through a wide range of eyes, including first second and third thoughts? People were quick to jump on Kat, for assuming that people who help pets don’t help humans in need…

But this is what writing is (often) supposed to do: generate not simply agreement, but a variety of responses, so that we see what was assumed, left out, needed to be developed.

The comments are prosthetic to the article. Poorly designed or not, they are crucial. Technology lets us see what otherwise would remain invisible: this range of responses, this range of emotions.

Both sides have some work to do, it seems. And the comments allow them to see that work, and to do it. To design better writing prosthetics for a wider reading community to use.