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the hefty responsibility of leadership

I remember this day and it still makes me mad. This was more than twenty years ago now. We leased an old barn on a rural road in southern Connecticut. There were three of us and that August day was so hot that we chose not to ride. The horses grazed in the big field under the shade of a few gentlemanly old oaks. We sat on our tack trunks in the barn aisle and talked horses.

The field bordered an access trail into the Naugatuck State Forest where we’d ride out. We shared the trail with mountain bikers and hikers so it wasn’t unusual to have them cross the field to the barn, looking for directions back to the main picnic area or to fill their water bottles.

So we weren’t all that surprised when we heard a mountain bike skid to a stop in the gravel outside the door that day, but we were shocked to see what he carried.

It was a dog, limp and lifeless in his arms. An Australian Shepherd- type with thick fur. The boy looked to be in his twenties. I always say if a boy can get out of his twenties relatively unscathed, he’s likely to be alright. This boy had taken his dog on a mountain bike excursion on one of the hottest, most humid days of the year. The heat index on that day was over 100°F. Dogs can’t sweat like humans, so the risk of overheating is even higher in a dog than a human.

I never did learn the name of the dog. The boy’s face was streaked with dirt and sweat and tears. He sobbed over the dog. One of the girls jumped up and shouted at him to get in her car while we tossed soaked towels over the dog. They raced away in a surge of dust and gravel to the veterinarian hospital just two miles down the road.

It was too late. They returned and the boy, unable to meet our gaze, got on his bicycle and rode away. I wanted to ask him what he was thinking when he took that dog on the trail that day. I imagined the dog following; what other choice could he make? When he started to feel sick, what could he do? Say something like, “no, no…you go on ahead. I’m just going to rest here awhile.”

What were you thinking? But, I know that he wasn’t thinking at all. It was meant to be fun. This wasn’t a boy who would deliberately hurt his dog. That much was clear. Maybe he hadn’t understood the assignment: the dog needs you to make the right decisions because he will follow you anywhere. He will follow you if you jump off a cliff, if you swim in a swift river, if you go mountain biking on the hottest day of the year.

Dogs don’t make good decisions. We know this and have to keep be good leaders, which means you get to make choices for them, but you also must own the outcome. We never saw the boy again. I imagine he never wanted to look in our eyes and see the questions we wanted to ask, but we knew the answers would be weightless now.