Zoey Tucker, 1996-2009

Zoey Tucker, a dark grey standard poodle, died today in Shanghai, China following a valiant fight with lung and liver cancer. She was nearly 14 years old.

Zoey was born in Lacey, Washington and traveled to her first home in Seattle’s Madison Park neighborhood in a cardboard box at the age of 13 weeks. It was in Madison Park that she developed her lifelong hobbies of retrieving tennis balls, chasing crows, hanging out at coffeeshops, and rolling in patches of mint and basil.

Over the years, Zoey lived in Seattle, New York, Massachusetts, Tokyo, Seattle again, and finally Shanghai.

Zoey worked at several jobs over her long lifetime – puppy class teaching assistant, cat tracker, and therapy dog. As a puppy class teaching assistant, Zoey was an ambassador for the art of clicker training. Zoey was walked off-leash for all but the first two and last one year of her life. She could sneeze on cue, do figure eights around her owner’s legs, and “take a bow,” this last performance being an especially big hit in Japan.

As a cat tracker she located not only the family’s cats when they strayed, but neighbors’ and friend’s cats and once, a total stranger’s who had heard about her from blocks away. Her greatest triumph was finding a shy black-and-white cat, Betty Hanna, following a trail 12 hours old, in a culvert in a ravine next to the Mass Pike tollbooth where Betty Hanna had jumped out of a car during a snowstorm.

Zoey loved cats and if she was on good terms with one, liked to pin it down with one paw and lick its head like an ice cream cone. In Shanghai she greatly admired the children’s hamster and wished to subject it to the same treatment but sadly, this ambition went unfulfilled.

As a therapy dog, Zoey was beloved of the residents at Apple Valley Nursing Home in Townsend Mass., who would save snacks for her and yield up their comfy armchairs. She also visited the University of Washington Medical Center’s spinal cord injury unit, where she assistant-taught an exercise group and put her grasp of the “paws up” command to good use visiting bedbound patients. Her work there indirectly led her owner to return to school to study occupational therapy.

Zoey adjusted smoothly to life with her owner’s husband and later, two children. She was a skilled detector of dirty diapers. She liked for everyone to stay together and would often herd the children with her nose if they were wandering on a family walk. Similarly, she enforced the “come” command with her longtime companion, Jack Tucker, by chasing after him and nipping his shoulder if he didn’t return immediately when called. (This type of behavior led the dog ladies in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Chuo Koen park to call Zoey “o-neh-san,” Big Sister.)

Zoey had a soft tissue sarcoma removed from a rear leg in spring of 2008, requiring an additional round of reconstructive surgery to accommodate her bouncy, jumpy, exuberant poodly gait. At the time of her death she had settled in nicely to Shanghai, enjoying short walks in the French Concession and croissants at the local Starbucks. Strangers in China, where only small poodles are known, often asked what she was fed to make her grow so large.

Jack, a cream-colored standard poodle, predeceased Zoey by a year and a half, also due to cancer. Zoey is survived by her human family and by friends of several species all around the world.