Guest columnist Marietta Pritchard: Remembering Pepper and her special toy

Recently I read an article about the country’s most popular dog toy — Lamb Chop. According to the article in The New York Times, dog owners “throw Lamb Chop-themed parties and photo shoots.” They find Lamb Chop costumes for Halloween, along with other extravagances. This was news to me. Lamb Chop is the toy our rescue pup, Pepper, brought with her from the foster home where she’d been happily housed. That was almost five years ago. We never joined the cult, but the dog surely was attached to her toy. Unlike the corgis we’d had in the past, Pepper, our new little mixed breed dog did not destroy her plaything, but rather carried it gently around the house. I would find it in odd places — in the upstairs hallway, under the piano, near the front door, in the living room armchair where she sometimes slept. If I picked up Lamb Chop and tossed it, Pepper would always respond with a quick move, grabbing it and shaking it around, sometimes squeaking it for a bit. Then she would put it down and go about whatever was her next piece of business.

I bought a second Lamb Chop so that I could wash the first one, and now there were two of them placed in surprising places around the house. If I wanted to distract Pepper from something, a houseplant that seemed a little too interesting, for instance, I could toss the toy and she would come running. But in the past year, the two little fuzzy white toys have lain unused. If I tried tossing them, I would get a brief, somewhat puzzled response, but there was little enthusiasm.

Even more recently, there has been little enthusiasm for much of anything from our dog. There were, instead, health “issues.” First some kidney trouble, untreatable but manageable. All I needed to do was be sure she got to go out about every three hours so that she didn’t pee in the house. (She especially favored a nice rug in my study.) Eventually she began slowing down noticeably. Walks with her became painfully slow; she sometimes didn’t eat. So instead of offering the kibble she’d happily scarfed down, I began cooking chicken and rice, which she enjoyed intermittently for a while. I was carrying her up and down the stairs that she couldn’t manage on her own. We put a second bed near the kitchen so that she could have company.

Soon it became clear that the end was closer than we’d hoped. When she came to us via a rescue group bringing dogs from Puerto Rico, it was the beginning of the pandemic. We had lost our previous corgi to a brain tumor much too soon a few months earlier. Pepper was perhaps seven to nine years old, the vet guessed. But a few months ago, almost five years later, the guess was that she now was more likely close to 15. She was quite deaf and mostly disoriented, getting stuck under furniture and spending long minutes contemplating the corners of rooms, sometimes walking in circles for long stretches. She was often incontinent. We knew nothing about her earlier life, but we assumed it had not been easy. She, on the other hand, had been extremely easy — affectionate but not needy, responsive but not barky. When we lost her last week, she went gently. She trusted me and I trusted our longtime vet.

Happy trails, Pepper. Here’s hoping there are some Lamb Chops for you to play with in the hereafter.

Marietta Pritchard lives in Amherst. She can be reached at mppritchard@comcast.net