I live in a pretty small city on the West coast, essentially almost all desert. The summers are extremely hot and the winter nights are extremely cold.

It’s been happening for almost two months now, but one of my neighbors in my small complex has gotten a dog. 

The family is a bunch of hillbilly idiots, and the mom and dad are divorced with an only child. It seems to me that they got the dog just to get it and make the kid happy for a few fucking minutes while not actually giving two shits about it. Like a toy you just get bored of after a few days. They leave him outside practically all day. 

As I sleep next to my window I often spend sleepless nights staring at the ceiling hearing the dog howl a sad and depressing howl. The temperatures get well under 50 degrees at night. 

It has honestly been getting to me more than ever recently. It’s almost haunting. There are days where I even contemplate the craziest: like going in and rescuing it and taking it to a shelter in the middle of the night. Of course I’d never actually do it, but the fact it teases in my mind is weird. I try to reconcile with the fact that there are probably millions of other animals in worse or similar conditions, and that ultimately I can’t do anything against the reality and cruelty of life. 

I cannot even begin to imagine what it must be like to be trapped in a backyard, without any sense or conception of time, as the “hours” go by for what practically must seem like eternity. An eternity of just pure pain and struggle. The more I think about it the more maddening it becomes. I cannot understand how humans as a species can be so heartless, stupid and cruel. As I often drive down the roads of my city I see a lot of horses with their faces and eyes covered with a mask to block from the sun, as they’re standing there in their small fenced squares. Just standing there… forever. I can’t even spend 5 minutes when I step outside without getting cold to death. I can just go back inside to comfort of my heated house. To know they have absolutely no sense of any of that is almost maddening.

I guess I just wanted to get this off my chest. I don’t understand how I can ever really accept that I’m a decent human being while knowing or having known about this dog and hearing his howls just one day suddenly stop, not because they had a change of heart and finally gave it some sense of humanity.

Despite everything, every time I hear him cry it’s a reminder that he’s still struggling to live. And I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive myself for walking away from him.