Driving Around Chicago with a Trunk Full of Dead Dogs

My strange and savage journey into almost becoming the next Dr. Doolittle

Growing up, I thought I might want to be a veterinarian someday. Not because I had any interest in veterinary medicine or zoology. I just liked Dr. Dolittle, the 1967 musical starring Rex Harrison. As far as I knew, all animal doctors wore top hats, sang their prescriptions, and had parrot assistants.

When I turned fifteen, I got a part-time job cleaning kennels at an animal hospital in the south suburbs of Chicago. I thought it’d offer me some insight into the real-world experience of a veterinarian, and maybe help me decide if this was what I wanted to do with my life.

But all I learned about was poop.

I don’t know what it is about dogs in captivity, but they defecate more than normal dogs. There was more coming out than going in. The cages looked like Jackson Pollock paintings. 

I eventually figured out that not everybody at the clinic was wrist-deep in dog poo. There was a small minority among the part-time help with special status. They were as young and inexperienced as I was, but for whatever reason, they’d been given special treatment by Dr. Carl.

Dr. Carl was our boss, the head veterinarian. He was huge and pasty white, like a snowman, and hands so thick they looked like mittens. The employees he picked as his favorites never got stuck with poop duty. Instead, they’d get to sit in on appointments, discuss rare canine diseases during smoke breaks, or if they were lucky, assist Dr. Carl with his animal surgeries.

I watched from afar, trying to figure out how they’d gotten so much undeserved power. From what I could tell, the only way to get noticed was by demonstrating your commitment to a career in the veterinary arts. Most of the kids who worked at the clinic made it abundantly clear that they’d only taken the job to earn extra money for whippets. If you wanted to stand out, you had to volunteer to do things that the punks and part-timers actively avoided.

Like the Death Shift.

Euthanasia wasn’t something that any of the doctors enjoyed—even Dr. Carl, with his soulless mannequin eyes. But with hundreds of strays being sent to the clinic every month, and precious few families lining up to adopt them, it was a sad and inevitable reality. I offered to assist with their grim task, thinking that my willingness to get my hands dirty in the veterinary trenches would eventually be rewarded.

Little did I realize just how bad it could be. The doctors had the easy part. They just stuck a needle into a dog’s neck, pumped some blue liquid into their veins, and waited for the induced cardiac arrest. My job required gently holding the animal, and after its heartbeat disappeared, carrying its lifeless body to a freezer in the back, where the dead were stored until they could be delivered to a local incinerator.

On the bad days, we’d euthanize dozens of dogs. I always hoped it would get easier. I wanted to have the same emotional indifference as Dr. Carl—to prove to him that I could be detached and impervious when faced with life-or-death decisions—but I didn’t have it in me. I cried myself to sleep on more than a few nights.

Months passed, and just as I felt I might be slipping into insanity, my efforts started to pay off. Dr. Carl called me by my real name and not his usual greeting, “Hey, Squirt.” He enjoyed condescending pet names for his adolescent staff, anything to remind us of our diminutive stature. Peanut, Scooter, Monkey, Freckles, Scrapper, and his personal favorite, Shortie. Shortie was shorthand for anybody he didn’t recognize or care about. If he called you Shortie, you weren’t going to last long at the clinic. But when he referred to you by your actual name, it meant you were moving up the food chain.

My mood improved exponentially. I carried dead dogs on my back like Santa Claus slinging a bag of presents. I was so confident that I didn't even dread the end-of-the-month corpse pickup. When the freezer was full, a dude in a van would drive over to pick up the bodies, and every kid unlucky enough to be on shift would have to load the frozen dogs into the back.

It was disgusting, but now that I knew I was on Dr. Carl’s radar, I was determined to act like a leader. And that meant making a less-than-enjoyable chore more pleasant for everybody.

Here’s a fun fact: When you drop a dead dog into a freezer, it assumes whatever shape it had when it landed. So when you pull it out, it’s frozen in what I like to call Action Poses. Sometimes it looked like it was delivering a deadly karate chop. Sometimes it had jazz hands. I suppose the more medically accurate term is “jazz paws.”

As I saw it, mortality is in the eye of the beholder. It’s either something to be feared and treated with somber melancholy, oooooor we could let these poor strays leave this mortal coil with just a little dignity and joie de vivre, by letting them perform a spontaneous song-and-dance number on their way to the Great Beyond.

The South Side teenagers I worked with weren’t amused by my musical satires. When I picked up a dog corpse and made him do a spot-on Ethel Merman impression, they just glared at me. Heaven forbid I choreograph an elaborate Fosse routine or even a Mad Magazine-style parody of “Funny Girl."

“Don’t tell me not to bark/ I’m dead already/ Don’t tell me not to claw/ My body's heavy!”

A year later, Dr. Carl took me aside and told me, without saying so explicitly, that I might be assisting him with a surgery very, very soon. I was beside myself with excitement. I’d heard about the surgeries from the guys who made it into his inner circle. If they were to be believed, it was like a John Woo movie. Blood spurting everywhere, lacerated veins flopping wildly like haywire lawn sprinklers. The tension could get so intense, they claimed, grown men fainted like teenage girls at a Bon Jovi concert.

In my bones, I knew that this was my destiny. When Dr. Carl recognized my innate talents, he’d grant me even more responsibility. And then one day, he’d come to work and say, “I have an important surgery this afternoon, but I just don’t have the energy anymore.” I’d flash him a reassuring smile and gently slide the forceps out of his beefy mitten hands. 

“Don’t worry, boo,” I’d tell him. “I got this.”

Fueled by my fantasies of becoming the youngest (and least educated) working veterinarian in Chicago, I became a model employee. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for the clinic. Dr. Carl seemed to sense this, and when he was faced with a situation that called for blind loyalty and at least a little stupidity, he knew that there was only one person to ask.

When I came into work one chilly winter morning, Dr. Carl summoned me into his office. “We have a problem,” he said, whispering like he was sharing a secret that only I could be trusted to keep.

“What can I do?” I asked. It didn’t matter what he said, I’d do anything to prove my devotion.

“The van is in the shop,” he said. “We... we’re going to need to borrow your car.”

I knew where this was going. The death freezer was dangerously close to capacity. The door couldn’t be closed without putting some elbow into it. The guy with the van who usually hauled away the dead dogs every month wouldn’t be coming this time. It was up to me.

“I understand,” I said, my voice unwavering. “It’s not a problem.”

As it turned out, it was a problem.

See, here’s the thing about frozen dead dogs. When you take them out of a freezer, they’re not exactly... what’s the word I’m looking for here?... malleable. That doesn’t so much matter when you’re loading them into a van, which has more than enough cargo room. But it does matter if you’ve got a ‘74 Honda Civic, which has a trunk roughly the size of a mini-fridge.

It could’ve been done. If we’d taken the time and been patient, we could’ve found a way to fit all thirty frozen corpses in the back of my car. You just had to think of it as a furry puzzle. “See, we just put that Doberman right there, and you’ve still got plenty of room below the passenger seat for a couple of Pugs. It’s all about using the negative space.”

My teenage co-workers didn’t have the patience for analytical thinking. They wanted to be finished with this minimum wage indignity. So they did what anybody would’ve done in a hurry. They shoved.

And pushed.

And forced the stiff, frozen bodies to fit into a space that basic geometry wouldn’t allow.

It didn’t take long before we heard the snapping of limbs and the crackly pop of frozen bones shattering. The corpses surrendered to our panicky assault. When I glanced into my back seat, I didn’t see a pile of dead dogs. I saw a congealed mass of... something. Flesh and bones pointing in improbable angles. It was like the dogs had been placed into a giant blender and then emptied into my car.

It looked like there had been an incident. Like something very, very, very bad had happened, and I was the one responsible.

As I drove through the south side of Chicago, I’ll admit it, I was a little paranoid. This is gonna end badly, I thought. A cop is gonna pull me over and I’m going to jail. I’d read about serial killers who would've gotten away with their crimes were it not for a busted taillight. I checked my rearview mirror obsessively. I was convinced I’d be stopped for something innocuous.

“Do you realize your license plates are expired?” The police officer would inform me, peering into my window. “I’ll need to see your license and... wait a minute, what the hell is that smell?”

“Before you jump to any conclusions, let me explain,” I’d say. “Have you ever seen the film Dr. Dolittle?”

It was Dr. Dolittle who’d gotten me into this mess. I thought about Rex Harrison and wondered what he’d do if he was in the same situation. He’d probably sing a jaunty song about “looking on the bright side,” and then he’d just flee to a tropical island and wait for the heat to blow over.

And that’s when I realized: Dr. Dolittle is an asshole.

I delivered the dead dogs, and then I drove back to the clinic, walked into Dr. Carl’s office, and told him I quit.

There were still days when I’d be tempted. I’d wonder if I’d overreacted, and maybe I could become the next James Herriot, only more urban and less annoyingly British. But it’d all disappear when a buddy or a girlfriend would get into my car and their nose would curl with disgust as they caught that first whiff of dead dog.

Dead dog smell doesn’t ever go away, no matter how much you scrub. That’s a lesson they’ll never teach you in veterinary college.