Are Golden Retrievers the last good thing on the internet?
On bringing sunshine into the online abyss.
On Thanksgiving Day 2018, at the end of a very tough year, I got an email from a local animal rescue organization bearing a wonderful surprise: I had been matched to adopt a Golden Retriever who was currently in their care.
My husband had grown up with a Golden, but I had never had a dog before. I wanted to rescue a dog, but I also wanted a Golden, which posed a challenge as there are not many dogs of that breed in American shelters. I had begun reading more about “Turkey Dogs”, strays that had long been part of the cultural fabric of Istanbul. Golden Retrievers had been an especially trendy breed for a time, but without much of a culture of dog adoption, many of these Goldens found themselves on the streets. Savvy animal welfare advocates, realizing that Americans are absolutely nuts about Goldens, began facilitating these international adoptions, correctly figuring that these dogs could be adopted by eager families stateside.
As I had been researching if and how I should adopt a dog, somewhere on the other side of the planet, a skinny, middle-aged, abandoned Golden Retriever with scars on his face was being loaded into the cargo hold of a plane, ready to cross an ocean and begin his new life.
The next day, Black Friday, we stopped at a pet store to get the supplies we suddenly needed. What kind of dog food will he eat? What kind of treats? We got a leash and a bowl and a dog bed and hoped this pup we had never met would like his new things—and his new home.
When we arrived to meet him, he immediately put his head on my lap, maybe sensing that I was still a little nervous around new dogs. He was pure love, made of flesh and floof. He was ours. We were now a family of three.
And what should we name him? That question was answered quickly: Wally. My husband and I are huge fans of the Pixar film Wall-E, a film about a robot who simply wants to eat trash and hold your hand. Shortly after meeting Wally, we could tell those were both among his favorite things.
We never did figure out much about Wally’s life before he came to us. The rescue estimated he was five years old, but the vet guessed he was seven. He already had a little bit of “sugar face”, the white fur that emerges on a Golden’s face as they age. Generally well-mannered but independent, he didn’t seem to care much for commands in English. (Attempts at using Google Translate to issue commands in Turkish didn’t work either.)
Wally made himself at home quickly. His first theft was the pack of leftover rolls from that Thanksgiving that had been placed on the kitchen island. We never saw him swipe it, we merely found the empty plastic bag in the family room and thought it seemed strange. How’d that get there? Where’d the rolls go? Ah, how naive we were. We would soon learn that any carb left unattended was fair game.
He was the perfect dog for our lifestyle. He loved to lay around while we played video games, or walk with us to the local coffee shop and bask in the sun on the patio. The rescue had wisely matched us with a bit of a couch potato, a dog who was already exactly who he was going to be and merely needed a loving place in which to relax and spend his “golden” years.
We were happy to oblige.
To borrow a phrase from Game of Thrones, the internet “is dark and full of terrors.” In 2020, 64% of Americans felt like social media was having a negative effect on the way things were going in the country according to the Pew Research Center; I can’t even imagine what the number would be if asked today.
I feel like I have to be Very Online for my job. I can’t say I enjoy it. Every so often, I’d delete the Twitter (or now, X) app from my phone, not out of ideological protest but because of an overwhelming feeling that this can’t be good for my soul. Like an addict, I’d always make my way back, reasoning it was important to stay informed, to be part of “the conversation”.
Just because the world online was often relentlessly combative and negative didn’t mean I needed to be that way. “Let your speech be always with grace,” was my goal, if not always an easy one to live up to. One day, shortly after Wally joined our family, I started trading the impulse to tweet A Hot Take with the impulse to tweet A Dog Picture. Thus was born: The Daily Wally.
Every day became a new day for a Wally photo. Wally at the park. Wally at the office. Wally enjoying a croissant. Wally getting his noggin scratched. Wally celebrates Christmas. Prayers up, Wally ate something he shouldn’t have. Wally is a goofball. By the time that first Ash Wednesday had rolled around, I had again declared I’d be giving up Twitter for Lent…except for the #dailywally. (As one friend put it, “God wouldn’t want us to miss out on Wally!”)
I also began dipping my toe into the world of r/goldenretrievers. I had not been much of a Reddit user, occasionally popping in for pepper gardening advice or Westworld fan theorizing. But on r/goldenretrievers, I was able to learn many things that I had never known, having never before owned a dog (and certainly not a Golden Retriever). It was informative and helpful, but also just an incredible internet palate cleanse. Look! A cute dog! More cute dogs! Oh boy, oh boy! More cute dogs!
Something else that struck me about r/goldenretrievers was that it was just about the nicest place on the entire internet. The dog photos and stories were great, but the norms of the community were very much in keeping with the Golden Retriever spirit: friendly, eager, helpful, kind. It was a place where Godwin’s Law - “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” - seemed not to apply.
In fact, the only thing that ever seemed like a downer were the occasional posts in which someone commemorated their Very Good Boy or Girl that had “crossed the rainbow bridge,” the friendly euphemism for a pet passing away. These online strangers would all band together and post kind poems and thoughtful notes comforting the dog’s owner in their grief. Golden Retrievers are notorious for a range of ailments, including cancer, and though they used to live well into their teens, they increasingly face a shorter lifespan.
Every time I would see a post of yet another Golden crossing that rainbow bridge, it was a reminder that one day my Wally would cross it too.
We Millennials are known for being very attached to our pets, with some even preferring pet ownership to parenthood. But for us, Wally wasn’t a substitute for kids. A year ago, I wrote all about the struggles we were facing starting our family, so I won’t rehash it all here, but suffice to say, I firmly believe Wally was an angel sent to comfort us during this tough season of life. His journey across the world meant he arrived exactly when he needed us, but also exactly when we needed him, and I hoped desperately that he’d see the day when there was a little human person in the house for him to protect.
We celebrated Wally’s birthday every year on Thanksgiving with some kind of dog-friendly treat and a candle shaped like a question mark, since we had no idea how old he actually was. We assumed he’d come to us at age seven, so that next year we celebrated him turning eight. Then nine. His face got whiter. Then, in 2021 when he turned “ten”, we were almost out of the woods: I was finally expecting our first daughter. My grandmother gave me a onesie that said “My Best Friend Has Paws,” in size 9M, and my immediate morbid thought was I sure hope Wally can hang in there until this baby is nine months old.
Wally did hang in there. We brought our daughter Eliana home from the hospital and I swear to you, he had a bigger smile on his face that day than I ever thought possible.
Some of the advice about helping your dog adjust to a new baby broke my heart. “Resist the temptation to lavish your dog with extra attention in the weeks before the baby’s due date…Instead, start scheduling short play and cuddle sessions with your dog, and gradually give her less and less attention at other times of day,” recommends the ASPCA. (Cue the Sarah McLachlan.)
I promised Wally he would be my best boy forever. I promised he wouldn’t become “just the dog”, as some had warned us. I swore I wouldn’t forget about him. And then the first morning after we were home from the hospital, we made it to 10 am before Chris and I looked at each other, bleary-eyed, and said…wait, have you fed Wally? I haven’t fed Wally yet. Has he had breakfast? Wally was patient and forgiving, but already on Day One the new baby had established a new hierarchy. (We felt such enormous guilt over that one delayed feeding that it never happened again.)
My newly divided attention also started to take its toll on my #dailywally posting. An effectively unbroken three-and-an-half-year string of daily posts about Wally’s adventures became…patchier. I’d miss a day or two here and there, because running a business and hosting a radio show and being on television and writing and taking care of a baby was a lot. Sometimes, if I’d miss a few days, someone would reply that they were worried about him. I’d show up to business meetings and the first thing people would ask is how’s Wally? Wally’s following was bigger than I’d imagined, and the daily posts over the years had meant more to people than I’d ever realized.
Wally made it to see that little girl turn nine months old. And then, he made it to see a second little girl join the family and turn nine months old, too, growing big enough to wear that now hand-me-down “My Best Friend Has Paws” onesie. But as we celebrated his “thirteenth” birthday over Thanksgiving this past November, it was clear that it might be a miracle if we got to fourteen. Walking had become much more challenging for him. He hadn’t gone up the stairs in our house on his own in recent memory. His kidneys were on the fritz, and the prescription kidney-friendly food wasn’t to his liking. Our always-hungry dog became pickier about his food, eventually leaving his breakfast untouched for hours in the morning.
I knew what all of this meant, where all of this was heading, because of those years of reading people’s heartbreaking stories over on Golden Retriever Reddit. I’d read too many posts from people who were absolutely shredded by the decision of what to do when their dog was clearly doing poorly, with no possibility of improvement. The consensus advice was always the same: be honest with yourself about whether your dog is enjoying life. They’ll try to hide their pain, but when it is time, you’ll know. You’ll know.
We took him to the vet three weeks ago and I didn’t know. We got him his annual vaccines like everything was fine. My husband had to essentially carry all eighty pounds of dog from the car into the vet’s office, but we thought, well, maybe it’s just his joints acting up. Maybe we just need new kidney-friendly food. Maybe it’s the icy ground. Maybe this, maybe that.
A week later, we were back at the vet and his condition had deteriorated; his inability to get up and walk over the last week had grown worse and spawned a host of other problems. More of this, more of that. Soon, he was back again in the emergency room. He wasn’t even drinking water anymore.
You’ll know.
If I hadn’t read about so many other people’s painful experiences saying goodbye to their Goldens, I’m not sure what I would have done. But hundreds of strangers on Reddit of all places, a platform that is supposedly notoriously toxic, had indirectly helped me face the horrible reality that I was losing my Wally with strength to do what was best for him.
The morning we said goodbye to him, Wally laid on that very same bed we’d bought for him on that Black Friday six years earlier. He was clearly tired and in pain, but perked his head up to nibble a little bit of the croissant that our now-toddler offered to him. We gently scratched his soft head, held his paw, and let him cross the rainbow bridge.
It’s been a week. I miss him more than I can ever convey here. It may seem a little silly if you don’t have a dog, but if you’ve had a dog, you know. The house is too quiet without him. The space under the baby’s high chair gets messy without him there to instantly snag the stray Cheerios. We still occasionally think, Oh, I have to go walk Wally, and then realize we don’t. We can’t. He’s gone. I vacuumed the house, sucking up the tumbleweeds of fluff that he was constantly shedding, and felt horrible about it because it felt like I was erasing him from our home.
But something wonderful has happened in this last week, too. When I shared the news of Wally’s passing and posted the final #dailywally, I never could have imagined the response. On X, a platform that doesn’t always feel like a bastion of sweetness and light these days, within a day over a thousand people had replied with condolences and comments about how much they’d enjoyed seeing posts about Wally over the years. People of every political persuasion you can imagine were there in the comments, and not a single mean post to be found. Just an appreciation for this dog they had never met, whose face brightened their day in a timeline otherwise filled with darkness.
“Daily Wally was the highlight of my day more days than I could count.”
“Wally was a real bright spot on the TL and we are all the better to have had his handsome mug on our screens. Please accept my heart felt condolences. Doggos are the best of us and we don’t deserve them.”
“I looked forward to the #DailyWally each day and it lit up this otherwise often gloomy app. Praying for you.”
I know that these days feel awfully divisive and somewhat dark, with a never-ending stream of bad news seems impossible to escape. Social media seems to obviously make all of this worse.
But then I think about the people who are organizing online to help save dogs like Wally who are now facing extermination at the hand of the Erdogan government over in Turkey. I think about the laughs I get from other Golden Retrievers online, like Tucker Budzyn or Chase and Chester, or the countless dogs that get shared in friendly corners of the internet.
I think about all the people who would never have met or even known about Wally otherwise, but who got a little bit of happiness in their day when they needed it, and who were able to give me a little bit of solace in return when I needed it.
We were there for Wally when he needed us, but even more, Wally was there for us when we needed him. Wally will always be a reminder to me that it is possible to find ways to create joy and light, even in the places and times that seem dark.
