Personal essays can be effective arguments that lobby to persuade others to rethink behavior or at least understand a different point of view. As you read this week’s account of Kurt VanderSluis’ incident with a dog, note the way his narration of the incident as well as his narration of his inner response to it moves his essay forward. As in all argument essays, he nods to the opposition with an understanding (though in disbelief) of where the opposition’s actions may be coming from. His descriptions move the essay beyond the realm of having his readers identify and empathize with him and into the realm of what readers might learn to think about when it comes to differences in attitudes about the social aspects of dog ownership.

The job of the personal essay is not to show off the righteousness of its speaker, but the speaker’s vulnerability. We love personal essays not because they are written by perfect people about being perfect but because they are written by people whose failings we identify with; they are offered as a deep connection to others, as we all share the human condition.

After you read this essay, try your hand at a personal argument essay that persuades by narrating and describing an incident in your experience that changed your outlook.

Your Best Friend, Not Mine
by Kurt VanderSluis

I have a problem with dogs. Not all dogs, just big, barky dogs whose habit it is to greet all visitors to a display of athleticism and vigilance. Because of my work, I am frequently a visitor to people’s homes and many of these people are dog owners.

I did not begin my life with a dog problem. I loved dogs until I was 14, when I was mauled by a trained, German Shepherd attack dog while raking leaves for the elderly mother of the dog owner. This attack could have been easily prevented if the dog owner told me that the dog he saw me petting was actually a trained attack dog, or if he told me that he and his wife were leaving the premises, and that after he left, the dog’s behavior would abruptly change, or that the dog had been trained to protect, with great vigor, the area through which he had directed me to carry the leaves I was raking for his mother.

But none of those explanations happened and on my next trip past the dog I was driven to the ground and chewed on until I could roll out of the dog’s chain distance. Luckily, there was a hospital two blocks away and I walked over to get treatment for my wounds. I actually stayed fairly calm through most of the medical procedures, but at some point, I completely lost it and just started sobbing uncontrollably. I was equal parts embarrassed and terrified. That was about the time my parents arrived.

My anger came later, when I found out the details about the dog. The fellow owned a small group of delivery trucks and the dog’s job was to protect the trucks and their contents from theft. I also found I was the third victim of this dog and that none of us had actually been trying to steal anything from the trucks.

It was clear to me fairly quickly that my relationship to dogs had been permanently changed. I didn’t like how I felt about dogs, but my terror ran deep in me now, to a level that I couldn’t think my way through.

 Being 14, I couldn’t sue the dog owner on my own. I wanted to. It seemed to me at the time (and still to this day) that all the elements for a lawsuit were there. I had been traumatized and negatively altered by my trauma. The dog owner had knowledge and approval of my presence on his property. He had spoken with me and failed to warn me of how the dog would react after he left. My parents were not litigious people and further, this fellow was a member of the church we attended, so they wouldn’t even hear of suing this man. They wouldn’t even let me report the incident to Animal Control. I felt a moment of betrayal by my parents, but we all moved on. This dog attacked two more innocent victims before he was finally ordered to be put down.

To this day, I can still be reduced to that uncontrollable behavior that I first suffered at the hospital. All it takes is a large dog, barking and jumping, some element of surprise and I’m there. And if it’s a German Shepherd, it makes it even harder. There is this moment where my mind tries to prevent the slide into irrationality, but it doesn’t last long. I know that some big, barky, jumping dogs don’t mean me any harm and I have even learned to look for some of the signs to look for to determine the dog’s intent. I know for example, that a wagging tail is a stronger indicator of the dog’s intent than it’s bark, but I can’t always muster my wits quickly and powerfully enough to avoid responding to the barking and jumping and go hurtling down the staircase of consciousness to my own animal-level reaction to the situation. In the forty years since that first attack, this descent into irrationality has only happened a half-dozen times, but each time it leaves me shaking, nauseous, deeply angry and embarrassed.

I had an incident a few years ago that improved the situation a bit for me. A neighbor’s dog nipped me. It’s funny that this would help, but I realized that this dog, a big Irish Setter/Labrador Retriever mix, who I knew to be a badly trained, sporadically traumatized dog, was only firing a warning shot. He bit my wrist in one quick movement, but he had stopped just before he would have broken my skin. He had given me a finely calibrated bite.

Reflecting on this incident later, it made me realize something. In the absence of mental illness, dogs and humans alike have three sets of behavior. There’s the way we behave when we feel safe and secure, the way we behave when we feel scared and insecure, and the way we behave when we are freaked out. This dog, agitated as he was, was still operating in the scared region. I am actually only in real danger when an adult dog is either mentally ill or freaked out. And in that moment before I freak out, while I am still just afraid, if I can make this assessment of whether the dog is freaked out or merely afraid, it may be key to helping me maintain my own control. And as time goes on, I have definitely gotten better at thinking my way through these situations and doing the things that keep me from losing my rational mind.

Yesterday, though, it happened. I lost it. I was visiting a new customer at his home. He had told me to let myself in through the driveway gate. When I was about 10 feet away from his door, I saw it open a crack and immediately heard the sound of a big dog barking. The owner appeared and he must have seen me cringe because he asked me, while still blocking the doorway with his body, if I had a problem with dogs. I said that I did and before I could finish requesting that he secure the dog in another room during our visit, he opened the door and let the dog out. My moment of sanity didn’t hold. I think the only thing I could work out on my mental checklist of dog observations before I lost it was that the dog seemed young. I didn’t make it to the “Check to see if tail is wagging” step. With his barking and jumping and the fact that he was a German Shepherd, my rational mind lost control. This German Shepherd became my German Shepherd and the man became that man from our church who had stupidly let me be attacked. The fear, the anger, the pain, the humiliation were flooding my consciousness. While trying to protect myself from the dog and back up his driveway to the gate, I started cursing him and his dog, using words that I very rarely use. This man was supposed to be my customer, he lives in my community, other people are out in their yards and they will hear the profanity I am screaming at him — I know I should get myself under control, but I can’t actually do it.

Because I am screaming at the man, the dog is not calming down. Somewhere in my brain, I know there’s a link between these two things, but that’s not helping me now. The dog is frantically looking back and forth at the two of us, and I can see that, like me, he’s trying to puzzle out this unusual situation and that little sliver of rationality that’s still operating somewhere in a remote corner of my brain is hoping that he’s doing a better job of it than I am. He’s still jumping and barking and I’ve still got another 20 feet to get back to the driveway gate. My anger has leveled off, but my fear is still ramping up. I pick up a stick to protect myself, but it’s too small to be of use. The dog doesn’t react. Then I pick up a large stone to threaten the dog. It works. He backs off just a bit and when I draw back my arm as if to hurl the stone, he moves defensively to the other side of the yard. The stalemate broken, I hurry out the gate, shut it behind me and drive off.

Back at my office. I experience the familiar shakes and nausea. The shakes slowly dissipate during the next hour; the nausea takes about eight hours to fully leave me. The jangle of edginess that I feel is going to last longer than that. I cancel the rest of my appointments for the day. I’m not really in a condition to see or help people.

Some people who love dogs find it hard to imagine or take into consideration that there are people like me who don’t love dogs to the extent that they do. I remember this man, as he let the dog out, trying to tell me that his dog was a friendly dog. Obviously, that information didn’t help me. After I identified myself as someone who had a problem with dogs, why did he let the dog loose on me? Possibly because he thought I would quickly see that his dog was indeed a friendly dog, which he probably is. But because of my history, that information was quickly lost on me.

I have talked with others who have similar stories of attack, who know this sudden and unreasoning fear, have similar altered perceptions and reactions toward dogs and have experienced similarly triggered episodes of hysteria. We have shared our struggles to recover from this trauma and our efforts to re-acquire a more positive attitude toward dogs.

Over the years, I’ve gotten over my fear of small barking dogs whose tails are wagging, of non-barking large dogs who tails are wagging. Recently, I even helped out with the computers at a local dog kennel. I can’t say it was easy, but I got through it and did my job.  But it seems that I’m still not able to cope with a barking, jumping German Shepherd that suddenly springs out at me. I think that may be too much to hope for.