The Animal Girl by John Fulton

their animal world, a stinky dark void without language, without sensations beyond fear and hunger. But the dogs invaded the human realm, leapt over and into Leah’s world readily and with the assumption that they belonged there, that their home was with Leah. They trusted her. And what bothered Leah more than the dogs’ eventual fate was how terribly misplaced this trust was. “Stupid, stupid dogs,”she told them several times a day, and they didn’t hear. They continued to depend on her for everything and to seem more than happy to do so.
    Unlike the sheep, they didn’t resist the short trip from the cages to the operating room. They always competed to be the first out, lunging toward freedom and toward Leah, who delivered a dog to the operating room at least every other day. Leah never chose the animal. There were three to a cage. If she had more than three dogs, she always chose the cage closest to the front of the room, where the most senior dogs, those who had been at the lab longest, stayed. The first out of the cage was the dog she would deliver. In this way, they seemed to choose themselves. To make things worse, they enjoyed the brief trip down the hallway, licking Leah’s ankles, diving for her shoelaces, rearing up with excitement. A rubber ball in hand, Max usually made this trip with Leah. At the first sign of apprehension in the animal, he’d let the ball go and the dog would dive for it, focus entirely on the toy and forget everything else.
    Leah didn’t stay for the operations. Max had already told her more than she’d wanted to know. They were needed to test the utility of a new laser scalpel that might eventually be used on humans for common gallbladder operations. Their gallbladders were cut open, sewn up, and then the whole dog was disposed of. The scalpel cauterized vessels, staunching bleeding, as soon as it cut into the flesh. For certain tissues, such as the gallbladder, this sort of surgical instrument, if it worked, could be very useful. “And how do you know if it works?” Leah asked one afternoon when Max had stopped by her animal basement.
    As usual, Max looked sleepy, as if he’d just woken from a nap, his hair tousled, in need of a comb, and his large, drowsy body filling Leah with the urge to grab hold and hug him. “You make sure it cuts effectively. You make sure it causes minimal tissue damage. You make sure it staunches bleeding. In short, you use it.”
    â€œWhy on dogs?” Leah asked.
    â€œThey’re similar enough to us, and they’re affordable.”
    â€œSo you cut a few dogs up and see if it works or not. Then you’re done.”
    â€œI’m afraid we need more than a few dogs. We need a few hundred if we want a statistically significant sample.”
    â€œOkay,” Leah said. “So why not let them recover?” Leah was sitting at her big, perplexing clerk’s desk and listening to the light-rock station turned down low. She’d tried to listen to the jazz station, but the sounds of horns—saxophones, trumpets, trombones—made her dogs (she had five of them now) howl in a forlorn, heartaching way. But harmless old rock songs like “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree” and “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” didn’t seem to bother the dogs.
    â€œThat would be too expensive,” Max said. “Too expensive and too painful for them.”
    â€œDon’t you think they’d rather live than be spared pain?”
    â€œI’m not sure what they’d prefer,” Max said. “I’m not sure they have preferences. They’re dogs. We’re humans.”
    â€œI know that,” Leah said, irritated by his insistence on playing the role of the teacher. All the same, Leah knew exactly what the dogs “preferred.” She saw it in their every gesture, every bark, howl, and scream. They preferred to live. “We’re killing