The Great Ones-My Dog Sam

Sam was quite possibly the best dog on the face of this earth. I’m not just saying this, he was quite the pooch.

Sam was so great I just had to share him with everyone. He had a tougher life than most people of the human race have had and he just sucked it up and kept on waggin’ his crooked tail.

One day right before Christmas while I was living in Sherman, Texas, my two heelers Abbie and Mazie began to bark like Armageddon was arriving. I snuck a look out the window and there was Sam curled up in the flower beds by the front door with two dogs barking at him like he was trying to rob the place. The mercury was hovering in the low 30’s and Sam was shaking like a leaf and just about frozen solid. He had literally no hair and looked to be only a couple of months old.  I called the county to come get him, but they left it in my hands. 

I called the vet with the thinking that Sam wasn’t going to see the new year. 

We drove him to Sherman and the vet said it was the worst case of demodectic mange he had ever seen. We couldn’t even tell what breed he was but we thought he was a Shar Pei by all the wrinkles. The vet said he would put him down if we wanted, but Susie and I talked about it and asked the vet to help him if he could. He warned us that it wouldn’t be cheap, but we relented anyway. 

We started giving him about 2/10ths of a cc of oral ivermectin twice a day for a month and we expected the remedy to do more harm than good. The vet said this was last resort and we hoped for the best. We were sure his liver would be shot. Sam was also dipped in a mange dip every 10 days that just knocked his pecker into his watch pocket after each treatment. After a few weeks his hair started to grow back and he started looking much better. After 30 days we had named him Sam (after Sam the Butcher on “The Brady Bunch”), but also affectionately started calling him “The National Debt” because we sunk a good bit of change into his recovery.

As Sam started getting better and his brindle color started to come back and his big ole head started taking the shape of, you guessed it, a Pit Bull. 

I was a little nervous at first, but his two adopted sisters had taken to him, (somewhat) and he was showing us how smart he was. We figured someone had dumped him because of his mange, but he had had scar’s like he may have been a sparring dog for some dog fighting people.  See what I mean by a tough life…

Having a name like Sam gave us a multitude of other names to call him. Some of the many were:

Sammy

Sammy Davis

Shammy Davis

Sammy Sosa

Sam the Sham

Good Ole Sam

Sambo

Samuel Gompers

Samuel Clemens or Mark Twain

He didn’t care what you called him, he was just happy to be here.

Sam and the girls would rough house and play fight constantly and most of the time they ganged up on him. Abbie would grab his back leg and Mazie would grab him by the collar and they would both pull. Sam was having the time of his life. I bet he was thinking “This is great! Two girls!!”. They were all buddies until nighttime. I had to buy a second dog house because the heelers would make him sleep outside and wouldn’t let him in the dog house. We also had to feed them and let Sam eat first because the girls would not let him eat. I don’t think he ever forgave us for removing his male parts. Every now and then he would walk be me and I could see him looking back toward his rump and then giving me the stink eye.

We moved to California and the girls rode with Susie and I rode with Sam. He turned out to be a terrible traveling dog and puked before we got to Wichita Falls. No more breakfast for Sam when we traveled in the car. I soon realized what a problem he might be when the property management people in CA asked me what breed Sam was. I told them the girls were heelers and Sam was a Heinz 57. Not actually a lie, but not all the truth. 

People would look at us sideways when we took the dogs for a walk or a run down by the lake. We grew tired of telling people he was a mutt and finally just accepted him as a Bulldog.

He for sure changed our minds and opinions of Pit Bulls. Sam loved people but was protective (like most dogs) of us and our property. His bark could shatter windows and he owns the world record for slobber hanging from the chin. Both length and longevity. Look it up. He was wary of other dogs, but as he got older he became more assured. He mainly just needed more socialization; our fault all the way. This breed of dog is so misunderstood and mistreated. It is all about who is holding the reins. If you teach any dog to fight or be aggressive, by God that’s what they will become. Too many of the wrong people are destroying this breed. Just because you have a Pit Bull on a logging chain leash doesn’t make you a tough guy. The media doesn’t help either. Look at the bad press German Shepherds, Dobermans and Rottweiler’s have received over the years. If you teach a dog to sic em, they’re gonna get in your hip pocket. Pretty damn simple…

Sam moved back to Texas with us in 2008 and then back again to California with us in 2011. Not so much puking on the last trip. Sam had kicked death’s ass in his first year of existence and he survived a tummy full of fertilizer (don’t ask) in midlife. He refused to pass through the pearly gates and shake hands with Elvis and Rin Tin Tin. 

He finally ran out of gas a few years ago. Bleeding profusely through the nose, we knew something was amiss. The vet said that in his advanced age and with the symptoms he was showing, he had some sort of cancer. I was out of town when all this came down and never got to see Sam again. Susie had Sam put down on her own. I felt awful and cried when Susie told what had transpired. She said he was a happy dog all the way to the end.

I don’t think I will ever have a dog as good as Sam. He was taught me a lot, like 

“Don’t worry Tim. We got this.” He would look at me and Susie and you could see it in his eyes that he was smitten with us. 

We were sure smitten with him.