The last gift
Published 1:30 am Wednesday, April 8, 2026
As any islander who knows us is aware, my wife Yulia and I are Dog People (yes, that’s capitalized). We’ve always had at least one dog, and a few years ago we began fostering others for adoption.
This was meant to be a one-time deal with a small pitbull whose internet photo had stolen our hearts, but somehow we got fished into taking on others. Most we find homes for, but inevitably — it’s an occupational hazard — we occasionally fall in love with one and keep him or her. That’s how we somehow ended up with three dogs; two are foster fails.
That is, three until yesterday. Alice was the first dog my wife and I adopted together, back in 2014. She came from Homeward Pet, a no-kill shelter in Woodinville where she’d been sitting unclaimed for three months. On March 9th, Alice died at the age of 13, felled by what was probably a massive stroke on her way back from a walk.
She was a remarkable creature, this Staffie: friendly to people and other dogs, but the bane of rodents and raccoons everywhere. It quickly became apparent that her entire life was all about the hunting of small mammals: raccoons (32 that we know of), squirrels (quite a few), as well as rats, mice and voles (an endless number thereof). We had to explain to her early on that cats were not on the menu, a restriction she obeyed but which we always felt she resented. She had boundless energy and drive: in her youth she’d happily zoom up and over chain-link fences or climb up trees in her eagerness to get that dratted squirrel.
With human help, Alice began coming up with really stupid scientific paper titles in response to endless spam invitations from money-making Chinese conferences (every scientist is inundated with these, the topics of which invariably have nothing to do with one’s area of expertise).
Examples included proposing to use gigantic cloned hamsters in industrial-sized exercise wheels to generate green energy, the employment of swimming border collies to guard aquaculture facilities, and the use of trained ducks to replace disposable oceanographic sampling methods. Despite the stupidity of these ideas, her submissions were always accepted (followed immediately by requests to pay the hefty “conference registration fee”).
After New Scientist magazine’s humor section started featuring Alice’s work, we decided she should test whether a predatory journal — fake journals that operate on a pay-to-publish basis — would actually accept a full paper, no matter how ridiculous.
She submitted an article entitled “Solicitation of patient consent for bilateral orchiectomy in male canids: rethinking the obligatory paradigm” to a journal with the grammatically challenged title of “Examines in Marine Biology” (essentially the paper said that if you’re going to neuter a dog, you need to get its consent first). After so-called “rigorous peer review,” the paper — co-authored, by the way, with another dog and a chicken for good measure — was accepted without changes the next day. The journal asked for $500 to publish it; she offered $25, and published it was. Alice and her paper were duly featured in a TED talk a few years later.
Beyond her scientific fame, Alice was just a dog who lived life large, and with boundless joy. She roamed woods and beaches freely, chased deer and coyotes from our garden, and was a remarkably strong swimmer who thought nothing of spending an hour in the water (unsuccessfully) hunting turtles. No dog ever lived a more fulfilling life. And of course she was always the Queen of the Pack, a fact that she made very clear to our many foster dogs.
Alice’s death wasn’t the first. A few years back, we fostered an ancient American Bully named Petey who’d had a horrible life: deaf and with a badly healed broken hip, he’d been chained up in a yard, then thrown out into the street. Despite that, he was such a sweet boy.
Realizing that no one would be able to give him the life we could, we kept him. He lived a very happy last year with us; but then his kidneys failed, and despite valiant efforts by Fair Isle vets it was clear his quality of life was zero. So we made the wrenching decision to say goodbye.
Ditto with a sweet old dog named Mabel whose owner had died, following which the owner’s horrible children had tried to have her put down. The day before we were due to deliver her to an adopter, we discovered Mabel had a tumor on her spleen; so we kept her. She outlasted all the vet’s predictions and lived 8 months, and very happily so until the last few days, when we realized she needed our help to cross the Rainbow Bridge.
Alice was lucky: she died quickly, with no lingering disease or pain. But when needed, that choice to say goodbye, to end the life of a suffering dog or cat, is the last gift you give them. Your brain knows it’s the right decision… But that knowledge never makes it any easier.
I’ve cried more over losing these sweet, innocent creatures than I ever have over a human death. It helps to know that we gave them their absolute best life, and I’m comforted by that. But the loss always cuts deep.
Louis MacNeice wrote a beautiful poem about a pet entitled Thank You, and I think of it now as we grieve the loss of our golden girl, who left us with so many wonderful memories. I urge you to read the whole poem; but it ends with, “Thank you for the abandon of your giving/For seeing in the dark, for making this life worth living.”
Phil Clapham is a retired whale biologist who lives on Maury Island. He can be contacted at desertislandbookworm@gmail.com.
