Ginny, a Dog Who Rescued Cats, Is Killed Off by Her Owner on Long Island

Ginny, a seventeen-year old schnauzer-husky mix from Long Beach, Long Island who was famous for rescuing cats, was killed off by her owner, Philip Gonzalez, on August 25th. At the time of her death she had stopped eating and was incontinent and arthritic.

Although an August 28th story in Newsday did not go into the gory details, the kindhearted dog was most likely dispatched with a jab of sodium pentobarbitol to either the heart or to a vein. A memorial service was held on August 27th at Regency Forest Pet Memorial Park in Middle Island.

The killing of either an elderly or a sickly pet is usually justified on the grounds of compassion but this is nonsense. Life is primarily suffering and this holds true for animals as well as for humans.

This life and this time are all there is; the Rainbow Bridge is most likely a fantasy. As Lucretius wrote in the De Rerum Natura, small pains are bearable while severe ones are brief and deadly.

Nature reclaims its own all in good time; man's intervention is neither needed nor warranted. Although pet owners claim that they have their pets' best interests at heart when they snuff out their short lives, an unwillingness to attend to -- and to pay for -- a sick pet is probably the real motivation behind their ungratefulness. In sum, Gonzalez was wrong to have killed Ginny.

Gonzalez estimates that Ginny saved approximately eight-hundred homeless and sick cats during her lifetime. She not only rescued them from the fields and streets where she lived, but also from hard-to-find places such as drain pipes, Dumpsters, and the glove compartments of cars.

Normally cats are fearful of dogs, but Gonzalez insists that cats came running up to Ginny (See photo above of her with a cat named Chairman of the Board.)

Although inter-species altruism is not unheard of, Ginny certainly carried hers to new heights. Since her previous owner had left her and her three puppies abandoned in a locked closet for a week, some observers feel that this is what motivated her altruism.

Others have interpreted her behavior as an example of the materal instinct gone haywire. Gonzalez labeled it simply as her "radar of the heart."

Gonzalez, a former steamfitter, adopted Ginny in 1990 in an effort to help alleviate his depression which was brought on by an accident at work. On their third day together Ginny discovered a stray cat in a vacant lot and that was the beginning of her exploits as a cat rescuer.

In 1995, Gonzalez published The Dog Who Rescues Cats: The True Story of Ginny and followed it up a year later with The Blessing of the Animals.

A cat-lover himself, Gonzalez rises every day at 2 a.m. and makes the rounds of nineteen feral cat colonies where he feeds approximately 320 cats. Although Ginny is gone, this will not change, but he will have to soldier on by his lonesome because none of his three remaining canines share Ginny's fondness for cats. At one time he kept as many as sixty-seven felines but now he is down to eighteen.

Photo: Newsday.