Binky and Tabby (left to right).
Origin
In 1989, my brother wanted a dog. He was twelve. I was six. We lived in suburban Central Florida. We found Binky in a newspaper listing.
At Binky’s house, I pet Binky’s mom and she ignored me, walking away with straight posture. Binky’s parents competed in dog shows. We chose Binky over his brother because his brother seemed out of control, sprinting through the house, pulling down a lamp. I don’t remember what Binky was like that day.
Four years later, I wanted another dog so that Binky would have a companion. When we went to meet Tabby one afternoon, she and her family of six or seven poodles were all lying flat on sofas and the floor, sleeping.
Appearance
Tabby weighed almost twice as much as Binky, who averaged five pounds. They both looked white to us, but veterinarians labeled Tabby “apricot,” which we found amusing. Binky was elegantly proportioned, like his parents. Tabby was awkward, doe-like, with long legs, a rectangular body, and a small-looking head.
Personality
Binky was tense, loyal, protective, and easily agitated. He had a loud, piercing bark that made it hard to talk on the phone or hear the TV. At night, he would hear noises and bark continuously for up to an hour or more. My mom described him as “very serious, like a policeman.” When my parents and my brother and I argued, Binky would bark at the person who was being loud. If we pretended to hit one another, Binky would bark in a rapid, urgent-seeming manner and then attack the attacker with his teeth.
Tabby didn’t care, or even seem to notice, what we did to one another. Cheerful, unconcerned, and easily satisfied, she rarely barked and seemed to care only about food. She was carefree to the point of seeming Zen/enlightened. If Binky was a grumpy, peace-wanting cop, Tabby was a contented stoner. While resting, she would look at us by moving only her eyeballs. She allowed us to drag her around the house by holding her two hind legs (one in each hand) and pulling her like a sled.
Binky would never have let us drag him like a sled. To him, it would have seemed absurdly inconsiderate. He would have bitten us before we’d gotten hold of his legs. He often attacked us, causing bleeding wounds, but only when provoked. If we touched him wrong, or if we got too close to him while he was eating, or if he was curled on my bed and felt my legs shifting beneath a blanket, he would growl and then, if we kept troubling him, lunge at us, biting. I respected that Binky asserted himself.
We each had our own semiprivate strategies for interacting with him without upsetting him, but I felt that I knew him best. I was the most proficient, for example, at picking him up from the ground—gently yet quickly, sliding my hands firmly down to his belly from both sides of him while he was standing and aware of my presence.
Freedom
Tabby ran away at any opportunity. She’d run past our legs when we opened the front door. We lived at the back of an approximately sixty-house subdivision called Willow Run that was enclosed by a wall except at the front, where cars entered and left.
Once, after sprinting out of the house, Tabby seemed to disappear. The next day, a family that had recently moved into our subdivision brought her home; she’d stayed the night at their house after jumping into their minivan when its sliding door opened to let in a human. Another time, Tabby ran away on a cold night in December. My mom, who was living alone with the dogs at the time, told me in an email:
I was worried, going out to look for her, but could not see her so I came back, closed the door, looking out from the door window for a long time, finally I saw her outside of our home, walking so slowly and leisurely, felt like she was enjoying the cold air and the quietness of the night. I called her name, upon hearing my voice, she ran away again, she did not want to come home.
After being gone for hours, she would stand at the front door until someone noticed her, waiting there silently, patiently, unlike Binky, who would repeatedly scratch the door and then, if we didn’t notice him, go to the door in the garage or the screen doors in the back of the house.
Binky never ran away. We would let him out and he would return within ten minutes. On walks, we often didn’t leash Binky. Tabby always required a leash. Despite being heavy and seeming low energy (she was usually recumbent), she was so quick and agile that it was almost impossible to catch her once she escaped.
Love
In middle school, when no one was home, I would lay facing Binky as he lay flat on his side on the carpet. “I love you,” I would say, looking into his black eyes while carefully petting him in a limited, measured way. I never said this to anyone else during my childhood. It felt difficult and strange to say, even to Binky.
When I played piano, Binky would lay Sphinx-style on the carpet behind me, listening. When I visited home during college, Binky would walk upstairs to the second floor—my room, at that time, post–Willow Run, was above the garage—and “knock” on my door by scratching it.
My brother says he was closer to Binky than Tabby because we got Binky first, “but in my memory he spent much more time with Tabby. My parents say they preferred Tabby because she didn’t bite. In a 2008 email, after both dogs had died, my mom called Tabby “the best, nicest and funniest dog we have ever had.”
I was much closer to Binky than to Tabby. Binky’s unpopularity made me like him more. I related to his grumpiness and alienation. I was defensive of him against Tabby, who in moments of uncharacteristic hyperactivity would sprint at Binky, bumping into him or biting his ear and then running away, angering him.
In 2004, when I was twenty-one, Binky was fifteen, and Tabby was eleven, I got a Gmail account and named it binky.tabby. While researching for this essay, I realized I couldn’t search “Binky” or “Tabby” in my account because it returned every email, so I searched “Binky was” (seventy-six results) and “Tabby was” (fifty-eight results). Other research I did for this essay: asked my parents/brother for their “most memorable memories” of the poodles; viewed photos and videos; searched “toy poodle” in my Gmail (331 results).
Fetch
Binky loved playing fetch, which we called diū diū (“throw throw” in Mandarin). He played it fervently, never getting tired or losing interest. Fetch allowed him to meditatively focus all of himself on one simple yet ever-changing task. I believe the activity served as much-needed stress relief for him, a reprieve from police work.
We played fetch with him while we watched TV. We’d throw a rubber ball or a stuffed animal toward the front door. He’d bring it back within ten seconds and begin barking within another five seconds; if we didn’t throw the object, he’d scratch us and/or move the object closer to us while continuing to bark.
I don’t remember Tabby ever bringing me anything to throw. She played fetch half-heartedly, often giving up after an instinctual burst of motion. Her disinterest in fetch, peacemaking, barking at perceived threats, and other activities that occupied Binky supported our suspicion/joke that she cared only about food.
Tabby.
Intelligence
We fondly thought of Tabby as “stupid.” We viewed Binky as remarkably intelligent. He sometimes watched TV. In a 2004 email, my mom said, “When Dad called this evening, Binky was watching Fox News for about two minutes standing very close to the TV.”
According to my mom, Binky was “interested in politics, he always watched presidential debates, he was against Ross Perot, every time when it was Perot’s turn to speak, Binky would run to the TV and kept barking at him.”
When Binky and I chased each other around the loop that went through the kitchen, living room, and piano room, back to the kitchen, he would turn around and run in the opposite direction or stand motionless, waiting for me.
When Tabby was carrying a grape or some other piece of food in her mouth, I’d chase her for fun and she’d run away and put her head beneath my parents’ bed; with her entire body exposed, she’d stop moving, apparently thinking she was hidden. If she couldn’t see us, we couldn’t see her, seemed to be her reasoning.
But maybe she was being playful or was somehow testing me. Throughout my life, gradually sloughing off culture’s hubristic bias against nature, I’ve increasingly realized that I’ve underestimated the complexity of animals. If I met Tabby now, I think I would discern many signs of intelligence that I hadn’t noticed as a child.
Christmas
Before Christmas, Binky would home in on his and Tabby’s presents under the Christmas tree and open them, clawing and biting through the wrapping. We’d repackage them and hide them better, among the other presents. Tabby didn’t open presents. Binky would open hers for her. He seemed to enjoy opening the presents more than the presents themselves—dog snacks, rubber toys.
One Christmas morning, my dad entered the room with a large cardboard box. He said it was for me. This was unexpected because he never gave anyone presents for Christmas, not out of stinginess or animus but seemingly just because it wasn’t something that he felt a responsibility to do. I opened the box and saw Binky and Tabby. My dad laughed harder than I’d ever seen him laugh, falling down, gasping.
When I asked my dad if he remembered this, he said, in an email, “Not really.” I told him, “This happened one Christmas and you laughed harder than I’ve ever heard you laugh.” He responded, “animals specially poodles n cats. gave our family so much happiness so long. we are lucky.” My dad had a cat as a child and another one as an adult, before I was born, and I currently have two cats.
Cats
Unlike Binky and Tabby, my cats were born and weaned in the wild, have a natural diet (raw meat), are free to go anywhere whenever (indoors or outdoors), don’t wear toxic and limiting accoutrements like flea collars and leashes, and never get scolded. When the poodles stole our food or peed or pooped in the wrong place, and when Binky attacked us, we’d say, “No!” and sometimes add, “Jìnqù!” (“go in”) and they’d walk slowly to their room and we’d close the door. My cats are purer expressions of the natural world than Binky and Tabby, who were somewhat heavily contaminated by human culture in ways that impaired their mental and physical health.
Baths
Tabby didn’t seem to like baths, but she was easy to bathe since she didn’t get angry. Binky hated baths. When he heard the sink filling with water, he would hide or curl into a tight, tense form, growling when we approached. After we put him in the water and squirted shampoo on him, he would let us scrub only his back and the top parts of his sides. Sometimes he became so distraught and defensive that we left him in the sink to air-dry after his bath, afraid to try to move him. Other times, we used bath towels to protect ourselves as we lifted him onto the adjacent laundry machine to be blow-dried.
Change
Binky wasn’t always violent and high-strung. He was docile and peaceful until he was one or two, when he stayed at a kennel for two or three months while we were in Taiwan. My parents and brother and I don’t clearly remember “pre-biting Binky,” as my brother called early Binky, but we know he existed.
Diet
They ate highly processed, corn-based, dry dog food, which probably gave them nutritional deficiencies and swings in blood sugar that made them insatiably hungry all of the time, especially Tabby, who seemed unable to stop eating until no food remained. The only time when Tabby would growl was when she was eating and Binky approached. This was effective in keeping Binky away.
When we ate, they constantly tried to steal our food. Sometimes, Tabby brought home vehicle-flattened, sun-dried frogs and toads; we’d pull the dead animals out of her mouth; she likely would have benefited from eating the natural, nutritious food, but back then we all seemed to view the behavior as indicative of her low intelligence.
They ate their own vomit, as my mom described in a 2005 email: “This morning when I was typing, I heard Binky growl (the way he is guarding his food), I thought why he growls, there is no food around, and I turned around and saw he was guarding his vomit afraid Tabby might steal it. Then he ate it back, I was trying to pick it up, but Binky wouldn’t let me. When I turned around again, it was Tabby who was eating it.”
Binky regularly tried to eat his own poop. He did it somewhat reluctantly. We would stop him, and he would seem to lose interest. We viewed the behavior as pathological, but he was probably instinctually trying to improve his microbiome.
Blockage
When Binky had diarrhea and long fur, poop would stick to his butthole, rendering him unable to poop. He would continue trying to push out poop, standing with his front and back legs together, and a mass of poop and fur would build up. These despair-filled events took hours to resolve. I would use scissors to cut off the matted fur, making one cut at a time by sneaking up behind him, quickly making the cut, and retreating as he turned to bite me. We would put him in the sink to let his butt soak.
Elmo
Once, we adopted a male gray nonpoodle who was Tabby’s size and had a large, wide head. I don’t remember where he came from. He may have just wandered into our yard one day. We named him Elmo. He became friends with Tabby but not Binky. Tabby seemed to like Elmo more than she liked Binky. I sympathized with Binky. I didn’t like Elmo. We had him for maybe a week. We gave him to one of my dad’s employees.
Hurricane
My mom spent four years living alone with “Bin-Ta,” as we called the dogs when calling them both at once. My dad was in prison for a white-collar crime, my brother was living in New York City, and I was at college. One year, my mom and the poodles endured three hurricanes. The first was Hurricane Charley. My mom wrote:
Power was off and the wind was so strong, our doors suddenly flung open, I had to use all my strength trying to close the double doors against the strong wind, then the windows in your room sounded like they were going to break so I had to rush upstairs to your room to hold the windows in case they broke, running up and down in the dark (Binky and Tabby just followed me all the time).
Hurricanes Jeanne and Frances were less powerful but also caused power outages, lasting up to two weeks. At night, my mom lit candles and was scared sometimes but, as she also recalled, she “felt comfort with Binky and Tabby being always beside” her, keeping her company.
Death
My mom gave Tabby twice-daily insulin injections during the last few months of Tabby’s life, testing her urine each morning to determine the dose. “When she ate, I injected the insulin, she just kept on eating without even noticing she was being injected,” wrote my mom. One day in December 2005, seven months after I graduated from college, Tabby’s pee was green. She died that day. She was twelve.
For around a month, my mom cried whenever she thought of Tabby’s absence. Then she had a dream where “Tabby was so happy running around in a green field full of beautiful flowers.” She viewed the dream as a message from Tabby that she, my mom, “did not have to be so sad.”
Binky lived for seventeen more months. He became blind and then also deaf during this time. He would walk along the walls to reach his room to pee and poop on newspapers. Once, while I was visiting home, he accidentally walked into the swimming pool, making a surprisingly loud splash. He seemed happier being deaf-blind. Unaware of the world’s frustrating tumult, he became placid and untroubled again.
In May 2007 we decided to euthanize Binky, who was seventeen. I said bye to him at night, massaging him in my room. In the morning, my dad and brother brought him to the vet. After his death injection, Binky bit the vet and died.
Tao and Binky.
Tao Lin is the author of ten books. He is active on his blog/newsletter.
