Dog Stories

When Dogs Attempt Suicide

2011-11-30T10:00:00.000-08:00

The day before Thanksgiving, Jake had his distemper shot and for the rest of the day he didn't eat. That didn't come as a surprise; I know that dogs often don't feel well the day they get shots and just decided to keep an eye on him the next day. What I didn't take into account was that while it might be normal for a dog not to eat for a day after getting his shots, a dog who tips the scales at 5 pounds even can't handle it.

By the time he hadn't eaten much for a couple of days--which I've seen dogs only slightly larger do several times over the years--he was lethargic, hard to wake up from sleep and kept going and hiding behind the couch. He'd rouse himself to go outside and come when he was called and such, but didn't seem very interested and, if nothing else was being asked of him, he slept.

I thought he was sick from his shots and took him back to the vet, only to discover that he was actually suffering from low blood sugar and essentially starving himself to death.

Apparently, after just over a day of not eating, he was feeling sick enough that he didn't want to or didn't think he could eat. He'd lost 6/10 of a pound, which doesn't sound like much but was more than 10% of his body weight. Even the vet freaked out a little when he saw the change in his weight over just a few days.

After loading him up with Nutrical and high-calorie prescription soft food and pretty much anything he showed the slightest interest in for a few days, he's back to his normal (read: highly energetic) self, but it could easily have gone the other way. It turned out that while I thought he was just sleeping off his shots, he was actually too weak to eat. And it happened in just over 24 hours.

Obviously, the dog wasn't really trying to commit suicide, but he was just lying around waiting to die, and if my daughter and I weren't both a shade on the overprotective side, we could easily have waited too long to seek help.

Apparently, if your dog weighs five pounds, it needs to eat every day whether it wants to or not.

What I Forgot (1)

2010-04-29T15:03:00.000-07:00

In three years of doglessness, I entirely forgot the feeling of having a dog run at full speed across the yard to greet you or fling himself against the door when he sees you coming, as if your arrival is the most important thing that's ever happened to him in his life.

Lost Whippet in Boston - please help!

2010-03-28T15:33:00.000-07:00

Re-posting this call for help from a friend; if you're in the Boston area please keep an eye out for this dog and leave a comment here if you find her. I don't have a phone number to share at the moment, but will get in touch with her immediately if anyone has information to share.

Friends in and near Boston I need your help!!! Please put the word out - the dog I was walking tonight slipped out of her collar and took off, I cannot find her! She is a small female whippet, white and grey and answers to the name Gracie. She is very fast and very skittish. She was last seen on Beacon and Joy - if you see her PLEASE contact me IMMEDIATLY.

Jake Makes a New Friend...

2010-03-17T15:59:00.000-07:00

but I don't think he's at all certain about her.

Everyone Loves a Puppy

2010-03-13T12:36:00.000-08:00

You all know by now that I got a puppy about a month ago (and promptly dropped out of sight because I'm...well...busy with my puppy). He's pretty cute, in case you haven't noticed.

My daughter, much to her own surprise, is crazy about him.

She argued strenuously for a cat. She knew we couldn't really get one (I'm allergic), but she made it clear that the whole dog thing didn't interest her and she was just going along because she knew how much I wanted one.

The biggest surprise, though, has been the interest of other people. When my friends first started making posts on my Facebook wall asking me to post more pictures of Jake, I thought they were humoring me. Don't get me wrong--I appreciated it, and I definitely took the opportunity to go ahead and post more pictures (and video) of Jake, but I really thought they were just trying to give me an opportunity to show him off, like a new mother.

It seems like not. Video of Jake seems to be in hot demand, as he does fascinating things like walk across the couch, run down a hill, and sit in my yard.

Big news like the fact that Jake had his first bath is received with excitement.

I'm surprised, but it's all good. Keep those requests coming, even if you are humoring me. I'm always happy to look at Jake and talk about how cute he is.

Good News

2010-02-21T20:52:00.001-08:00

Desperately Seeking Yorkie

2010-02-14T11:03:00.000-08:00

It's been nearly a year since I made this optimistic (okay, insanely excited) post about how I was finally ready to get a new dog and had gotten my landlord to agree. I even posted a picture of the kind of dog I wanted...but since then, it's been nothing but disappointment. Now, I'm not going to claim that I've been looking tirelessly for this puppy for the past ten months, but every time I get close I end up disappointed.

For instance, I thought I'd found a reputable place to get a puppy in Yorks, Morks and Malts. I even corresponded with the breeders a bit. They and their website claimed that they were a retired couple who kept their dogs in the house and raised them with love, and I was very optimistic...until I suggested that rather than meeting them at some halfway point in the middle of nowhere, I'd come and pick up the dog. If fact, I said, I'd like to come and PICK OUT the dog. You know when you meet the right puppy.

That was the end of our correspondence. No demurrer, even, just pure radio silence after that. I guess I should have known based on the fact that they were offering three different types of dogs, and multiple litters at a time, but hope is blind.

I've had a couple of other similar experiences; what I haven't found is a reliable source for a well-cared-for, non-puppy-mill Yorkie pup. If anyone can help, I would be most appreciative. I really need that dog.

you have to see this

2009-05-08T16:09:00.000-07:00

http://letsbefriends.blogspot.com/

A Strange Happy Ending

2009-04-28T16:24:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday Tinkerbell, a 6-pound chihuahua, went missing in a rather unusual way...she blew away. It took two days and the help of a "dog psychic", but her worried owners reunited with her on Monday nearly a mile from the original site.

Blown-Away Dog Reunited With Owners

Turns Out I Know a Happy Dance...

2009-04-06T18:38:00.000-07:00

So, listen: I'm getting a dog.

I know, I know...when the best dog in the world died two and a half years ago, I was sure that I'd never want another dog. It took a long time, but about six months ago I started to think about puppies. Only in the most abstract of ways, though, because I live in a rented townhouse and they don't allow dogs. My lease is up soon, and I started thinking about moving to a place where I could have a dog...and then a miracle happened: my landlord came by this morning to ask whether I was going to renew my lease and I told him I really wanted to get a little dog and he kind of shrugged and said, "you can do that".

So that was it--after 28 dogless months, I don't even have to move--all I have to do is get organized, buy some supplies, and pick a dog.

I'm hoping for someone sort of like this:

Meanwhile, although I feel a little silly admitting it, I can hardly think about anything else.

Should We Keep Pets?

2008-09-04T20:03:00.000-07:00

Of all of my blogs, this is the one I never expected to generate controversy. My Catholic blog, obviously, doesn't sit well with some people. What's Wrong Around Us? is full of socio-political viewpoints that might draw disagreement. And my webzine, Rational Outrage, often inspires...well...outrage. But this blog? Well, dogs are dogs. You like them, you love them, or you aren't here reading, right? While some people (yes, I know it's hard to imagine, but it happens) don't care much for dogs--or even outright dislike them--they aren't the sort of dislike that inspires people to go out searching for opposing viewpoints to shoot down. I've never had a comment on this blog that said, "Dogs are NOT great! They're the spawn of the devil!" or "EWWWW....you think those mice of your daughter's are CUTE???"

However, last week I got an email about an interesting website I hadn't seen before: http://opposingviews.com

And, although the site covers a variety of topics related to my more political and legal blogs, the email was in response to THIS (warm, cuddly, non-controversial) blog, and directed me to this question: Should We Keep Pets?

I suspect that most readers of this blog are in favor of pets on a personal level, but once the question is raised, it does bring to light some uncomfortable issues. And this site does an excellent job (on this topic and others) of covering both "sides" of the issue with analyses by intelligent, credentialed writers. I still come down in favor of dogs...but that might be pure selfishness on my part. The discussion has already generated well over 100 comments, and appears to be going strong.

This one, though, is just getting rolling: Should Animals be Kept in Zoos?

So much for this being a quiet, non-controversial subject...

Aren't Dogs Great?

2008-08-30T09:21:00.000-07:00

That's a phrase that comes up a lot in my family. Someone tells a story about a dog--which happens fairly often since I'm surrounded by dog lovers--and someone else says "Aren't dogs great?" They do just keep doing things that impress us and touch us--things that would be rare human behavior seem to come quite naturally to dogs.

That's why I wanted to share this story, about a dog so great he's been honored with a statue...after standing guard over his dead master in snow and rain for eleven weeks. That's right--eleven weeks. When help finally arrived, the 14-year-old border collie was so weak that he had to be carried off the mountain.

Teacup Poodle Murdered by Police

2008-08-16T10:38:00.000-07:00

It's not often that this blog intersects with my social commentary blog or my webzine, Rational Outragee, but here's a story that fits all three: In short, a Texas police officer pulled over a couple for speeding. They WERE driving much too fast and he was right to pull them over. But when he learned that the couple was racing a teacup poodle to the vet in response to a life-threatening emergency, he told the woman to "chill out". It was only a dog, he told her, and she could buy another one. And then he detained the couple by the side of the road until the dog died.

Read the full story here: San Marcos Officer Paul Stephens Watches a Teacup Poodle Die in Owner’s Arm And please pass it on.

Okay, I Know This Isn't a Dog...

2008-08-15T18:24:00.005-07:00

The Greatest American Dog Deserves Better Than...the Greatest American Dog

2008-07-14T20:15:00.000-07:00

I have to admit that I came in to the Greatest American Dog a little disappointed. When I caught the first glimpse of an advertisement, I pictured something else entirely...a tour across the country to meet various dogs of note, for instance. Reality TV is, in my book, just exactly what the world doesn't need any more of, ever, and so when I figured out the concept I wasn't thrilled.

Still, some of those dogs were very cute. There were all different dogs--little tiny ones groomed to ludicrousness and big, athletic ones. White ones, red ones, black ones. The dogs looked good.

My mom and my daughter and I were planning to go to the library that evening, but my mom called me and reminded me that the Greatest American Dog was coming on and we agreed that we'd both turn it on and see what we thought. If we liked it, we'd go to the library when it was over; if not...well, we actually failed to make that plan. The implication was that we'd turn it off and go earlier, but we didn't make any kind of plan about calling one another or anything like that. Maybe on some level we expected to like it.

We didn't.

The dogs were cute. I know I mentioned that already, but it bears repeating. There was this one reddish and white dog who looked, in my mom's words, like the quintessential dog. If you drew a dog for a children's story book or got a visual of a boy fishing with his dog, it would have been this dog. But there were other good ones, too.

The problem is, the show wasn't about dogs. It was about their owners, and most of the screen time went to the owners. There were sets, competitions, dumb costumes, and props. There was very little that's natural or comfortable to a dog. It was no more than Survivor or one of its clones with a bunch of dogs in tow--and some of the dogs weren't even treated very well.

It was bad. I won't watch it again. If these are, in fact, the Greatest American Dogs, then they deserve a better forum. Maybe even one that's about dogs.

more thoughts on dog love

2008-03-18T12:22:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been really hung up on something I ended up calling, by need of a blanket name to cover all its possible manifestations and ramifications, "dog love." It started in an email to my professor friend, who is caught in a tangled father-figure relationship with one of his students. The student bites him, and he took this as a betrayal of his loyalty. Somehow, as all questions centering on love and loyalty do, my answer spiraled its way back to my friend Rachel. My mom said the other day that sometimes I seem more concerned with her than with my own family, and I told her the truth: I don't differentiate between Rachel and family. My professor friend wrote me of an inner circle that he lets very few people enter, and Rach and I opened those lines more than half our lives ago. My own sister, on the other hand, is almost eight years older than me. She has Always Been There, and I blithely and unfairly take for granted that that cannot change. But I remember life before my best friend, and taking her out of the equation is an unfathomable horror--I imagine it would be something like the way it felt the day I found my bedroom at my parents' house emptied, the floor covered in butcher paper, walls already half-painted the decades of scribbled phone numbers and chalk drawings away. I had a first love once who died; it was terrible and I was twenty and lapsed appropriately into madness for months. I backed myself into a corner, snarling. My family sniffed, stung at the rejection, I'd imagine, then stood back and kept watch from a safe distance. Rachel was, for some reason, not a threat to me, and thus she spent months at my side, baring her teeth as needed, following on my dangerous, thoughtless jaunts into the street only to watch for oncoming traffic. In short, it was some pretty heavy shit for a nineteen year old girl to commit herself to, but she did so unflinchingly. Once, in trying to describe her philosophy on people, which may have seemed cold to a stranger, she said something like, "I know who I love, and I love who I love." She punctuated the statement with a shrug that seemed to say and everyone else be damned, for all I care.
She and my sister don't much like each other, I don't think. They're as different as a Kandinsky and a mathematical algorythm, and I am their only common ground. That's okay. Now that we're supposed grown-ups, each chooses words carefully regarding the other, and the low growl waiting in my throat never comes to fruition. My mother, being Alpha in most things, speaks her mind freely on all matters, and is continually shocked when her daughters snarl. That's okay, too, though I wish she wouldn't take these things personally. I'm not very good at staying with a pack, probably haven't been since I was very young, evicted from many in classrooms and schoolyards. So in a world that seems to respect things I don't really understand, like professionalism and degrees, I look for the smart people who understand loyalty at its most fundamental level.
When I first met my boyfriend's dad, I thought him unbearably cold and reserved, and resented the uneasy old-school male inability of he and his son to speak their love for one another. Then he needed surgeries, and I saw my boyfriend's snarling cease and turn to dutiful daily hospital visits, where they had next to nothing to talk about unless I came along armed with what sadly remains (for the large part) the feminine gift of chatting. I saw then that this man I'd written off as hard and cold was sitting impatiently in a hospital robe that didn't conceal the rarely-seen tattoos from his other life as a Marine at Khe-Sanh, waiting for nothing more than to get home to Flane, the old devoted collie mutt he'd rescued years before (and kept his odd moniker to avoid confusion).
This past Christmas, my pack howled when I insisted I was spending Christmas morning with this pack and not my own. As the only woman in the household on a holiday, the men stepped back and let me arrange the scene to my specifications. There was a bit of grumbling when at the last minute I realized we didn't have a camera, and insisted that Ryan and I go to the gas station and buy a disposable one. Ryan's dad, by this time, had come back healthier than he'd been in years, but none of us knew that it would be Flane's last Christmas, that in fact, he wouldn't see the new year. It was a good day for both of the old boys, and Flane and his dad figured prominently, their unflappable love caught in action, my favorite a shot of Flane leaping almost to his dad's full height to reach the amazing candy-cane shaped rawhide in his hand. The cat even got involved that day, delighting in attacking the packages I'd spent hours wrapping and decorating.
Flane went fast after that, and I suppose had any of us known, our neighbor Harley, the sweet neglected Shepherd, would have found a new home here instead of in the garden of St. Francis (call it the Rainbow Bridge, if you prefer), and I would have continued in my role as Wendy in a house of Lost Boys. But Flane's death was terrible, and though he was old, shockingly painful. Ryan spent a night sleeping on the living room floor with him, and on his last night, though Flane and I never shared the deep love he had with Ryan or his dad, I stayed up all night watching him, trying to coax and coo him into calm, the way my mother taught me when, in fourth grade, my pet pigeon went into a terrible panic over a thunderstorm and I watched as "that bird" was brought into the house and my mother put aside her allergies and distaste until her cooing was in sync with the bird's. My family, aside from my sister, is not a deeply religious one, but I think that we must fall under the protection of my beloved St. Francis, for if my parents have little else in common, they share and have passed on to their children a responsibility to any animal in need. Strange dogs, when lost, come to their door--one is particularly remembered for climbing into the dog recliner and crying when my mom opened the door to see what he'd come for. My dad had a squirrel, much to the outrage of the great Mopsy and Hank, the two dogs who left permanent holes in my heart when they died. The squirrel sat on his knee and ate from his hand. She sat on the railing by the door and leapt when someone came out. In her finest hour of insane dog love for my dad, she hooked all her claws into the screen door and waited for him, looking like a Christian desperate to be martyred.
Dog love can be learned, I realized this morning when Maggie, Ryan's new 11-month old rescued sister climbed onto my lap, oblivious to the fact that she's fast approaching my size. In this neighborhood and in my parents', both mine in a sense, I suppose, the biggest problem is not the occaisional broken car window. Doors can stay unlocked all day without much concern. The problem is a faction of humans who lack dog love. I have no use for these people, and I wonder if the day will come when their own children feel the same way about them, about everyone. Harley died because of a lack of it, and I suspect that monsters rather than stewards of the earth, as St. Ben called it, are being created in the house where he lived.
Today is a vacation day for me, and as much as I'd like to see my mom or my sister, or even my pre-teen niece, they've made it clear I'm unwelcome to come into their lairs and pick up strep germs. So that leaves me and Maggie. She's sulking because Ryan and her dad are at work; I'm sulking because I can't see any of my family, and Rachel had a baby yesterday and she's a thousand miles away.
There is a woman in this neighborhood Ryan's dad bristles at, because by all appearances, she returns and exchanges dogs like they were an impulse buy from Nordstrom's. Maggie was a Serious Decision: Jud Parker, for all his quirks, understands dog love as well as anyone I've ever met, and he looked for her for weeks, visiting shelter after shelter, before he finally met the girl they were calling "Beulah" at the Anti-Cruelty Society one Saturday in February. She didn't come home that day--in fact, that Sunday I saw Father Ted (appropriately and "coincidentally" a professor of life science) outside my building at work and chased him down to ask that he say a prayer to St. Francis for the two of them to find each other. Maggie came home that night.
So she woke me today with the same delight and wonder as she always does, though I am, at best, her tertiary person. And I was filled with wonder at another day, though last night it didn't seem like much to me. Then, for the first time, I thought about Maggie, as Maggie might think. She was adopted out and returned twice before the steadfast man came to bring her Home, permanently. Ryan was getting ready for work as I held her on my lap working at managing the excitement-biting, and it came to me suddenly that she might be wondering how long she'd get to stay here before she went back to the shelter. "Do you think she ever thinks..." I asked Ryan.
He isn't prone to dramatic exclamations, but I heard something like horror in his voice when he said, "Dear God, I hope not."
Rachel adopted Ava, a young boxer not long ago--her first rescued dog, and commented to me how appreciated she made her feel, in a way that other dogs brought home as wide-eyed puppies hadn't. Ava, I'm sure, is confused by the one-day old human who came home with Rachel today, but I feel certain that she'll come to understand: I love who I love, and he is one of ours.
Ryan wrote me a song when we'd known each other only a few months, a sort of traditional Irish bar piece called "The Girl Who Brings Home Stray Dogs." I laughed at it, not because it wasn't good, but maybe because its truth was too raw to face. Ryan and I are not having fun right now; we're both preoccupied and tired of everything: we're both waiting for spring in both the literal and figurative senses. That's okay. No one is leaving. Maybe my dog love over time has called up in him that part of his father that he was so wary of giving to me. Just as Maggie will learn a little more each day with the consistent love of her dad, that she is home for good. That not all people believe in returns and exchanges, even when things get rough.

Global Warming Outside my Window

2008-02-13T08:08:00.000-08:00

In reality, I have no idea whether or not this has anything to do with global warming—but it’s downright odd.

My townhouse is split-level, which means that nothing is at ground level except the landing. When you come in, you go up or you go down. The kitchen is down…halfway below ground. That means that my front yard is just a little below eye-level when you’re standing in my kitchen.

Directly at eye level is a bush. It’s one of those bushes that looks vaguely like a pine tree and is gorgeous when covered in snow…but I digress.

Last fall (2006), a whole herd of caterpillars hopped up there and started building cocoons. Well, okay, they didn’t exactly HOP, and I’m not sure that caterpillars travel in herds, but dozens of caterpillars converged on my bush and built cocoons.

And then nothing happened.

We waited a while, and then it dawned on us that it was getting cold. As in, turning to winter. And they hadn’t come out. And then a neighbor pointed out what we’d actually known all along, but hadn’t given any thought to because we’d figured the caterpillars knew what they were doing—caterpillars make cocoons in the SPRING.

“I don’t think they’re coming back out,” our neighbor predicted, and of course she was right. Sixteen months later that bush is still covered in cocoons and not a single creature has sprung forth (or painstakingly dragged itself forth, as the case may be). That’s not much of a surprise, now that we’ve given it some thought. But what were those caterpillars DOING? Why did dozens and dozens of them gather at my bush and build cocoons, all in a single day, at the wrong time of year.

And I just can't think if a scenario in which it's a good thing.

Don't Mind Your Own Business

2008-02-05T11:41:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking and thinking about Harley, and if I can come out of this experience with anything to say besides, "this sucks!" and "I'd like to kill that guy!" and "that poor baby" and the like, it's this: Don't stay out of it.

I know it's kind of hard to see what difference it makes. My parents didn't stay out if it, and neither did their neighbors, and Harley still died of something that sounds pretty darned unpleasant, alone in a garage. But it could have gone another way. Animal control could have kept him. Someone could have made an impression on his owner. It could have.

And even though that didn't happen, for the last several months of his life Harley had affection, occasional freedom to run, and table scraps for probably the first time in his life. Maybe someone could have done more, although I'm honestly not sure what it would have been (short of kidnapping him). But at least he had a reason to prick up his ears and wag his tail in the last months of his life, and that wouldn't have happened if everyone had minded his own business.

RIP Harley

2008-02-01T20:35:00.000-08:00

Months ago, I made a series of posts about the German Shephard next door to my parents. He was a very nice dog who spent all of his time in the back yard, tied to a tree with only a few feet to roam, with no shelter except a dog house that was several sizes too small for him, and often without water in the hot summer.

Many of the neighbors fed him and gave him water. My father, who is a retired carpenter, offered to supply the wood and help his owner to build a larger house for him, but he declined. My mother gave him little bits of food and gradually he began to wag his tail and come to her to be petted; all indications were that he didn't know what petting was all about before then. In all the months that he lived next door to my parents, none of us ever saw his owners touch him or even speak to him.

Several of the neighbors called animal control, and they came out multiple times. Once, when they found him tied in the yard without food or water in mid-summer and no one was home, they took him away, but he was back the next day.

Today, Harley died, alone in the neighbor's garage. Apparently this morning he was, in the quaint words of his former owner, "shitting blood". After noting that, he shut the dog in the garage, gathered up his kids and went to the water park. Unsurprisingly, when he came home, the dog was dead.

My parents, who would gladly have taken the dog to the vet at their own expense, think his owner was stupid. My mother is sick thinking about the dog lying alone on the cold floor of the garage dying, and she keeps repeating the things that you repeat when there is no longer anything to be done..."we would have taken him to the vet", "oh, that poor dog", and every once in a while, "that man is so stupid".

I wish I believed it, but I don't think he's stupid at all. He didn't feed the dog or give it water in the heat of the summer, he didn't give it a house big enough to fit its whole body inside, he didn't pet it, he didn't talk to it, and he didn't take it to the vet when it was dying. No one is that stupid. He just didn't care. Which brings me back to the question we've all been asking all along: why did he get a dog?

Animal Stories

2007-11-22T08:59:00.000-08:00

I ran across a blog today that's all about animals...not dogs, for the most part, but exotic animals--some I'd never heard of. Most of them seem to reside in Africa, which might explain my lack of exposure. If non-domesticated animals had their own newspaper, this would be it, and if you're an animal lover you can't help but be charmed or entertained or concerned by some of the stories you'll find here: Minz animal blog

I Just Miss My Dog

2007-10-13T09:44:00.001-07:00

It's been ten months since Cocoa died, just a few months after his 17th birthday. Some days when I walk into the kitchen (where he primarily stayed during the last year of his life, and where his ashes are guarded by a small sculpture of an angel holding a little brown dog), I just want to pick him up so badly that I can feel his negligible weight in my arms and his tangle of curly hair against my skin.

Not a dog post --but funny anyway

2007-09-09T08:52:00.000-07:00

I'm sort of taking the "dog" part of the title of this blog a bit loosely. Here is a website devoted to cats in sinks. I don't know why I thought it was so funny that someone would actually spend a lot of time setting this thing up and getting ad revenue for it and all, but I just do. And it's oddly addictive. I clicked through the entire set of pictures. Clearly, I need more coffee.

Cats in Sinks

Remember How Foxy Used To...

2007-08-18T20:36:00.000-07:00

Well, no. Of course you don't. You didn't know Foxy, did you? Foxy was the beautiful Sheltie I got for (but not on) my twelfth birthday. She died the summer after my first year of law school--May of 1989. But the other night my daughter and I happened to have dinner with my parents and my sister, and she came up.

It wasn't a planned family dinner in a restaurant or with turkey and all the trimmings--my parents were babysitting my daughter and my sister came home early from work because she wasn't feeling well and said she was going to make chicken soup. Homemade chicken soup may be the only "family recipe" we have, and we're serious about it. So she made a big pot of chicken soup and when I got home from work there was soup and chicken sandwiches, and as we all sat around the table, one dog led to another.

It started, I think, with something Daisy did. That, whatever it was, naturally led to a "she always does that" and then a "but remember when she was a puppy and...", and before long we were transitioning through an endless string of dogs and their personal quirks and distinctive personality traits and tricks and even bad habits.

When it comes to talking about my recently deceased dog, I like talking to my family better than to anyone else (except, perhaps, my ex-fiance, who knew him when he was young) because they remember things like how he used to turn my car radio off is a song at a certain pitch came on, or use the remote control to turn the television back on after I'd gone to bed at night. Sometimes people who didn't know him are skeptical.

The whole conversation really got me thinking, though, about how integral to family life our dogs are. Of course, a lot of people never have dogs, and other have them and don't interact with them in the same way. But if you have a dog who is part of your family, maybe you know what I'm talking about. Those old "remember when" stories aren't really any different from the stories we might re-tell about my grandparents, or even about each other in days gone by.

Hank Peed on My Back

2007-08-14T20:48:00.000-07:00

And I never got over it. For years, whenever someone mentioned my sister's dog's name, I'd say, "Hank peed on my back." Of course, everyone already knew that, but it was a summary of my views on Hank. Once in a great while, someone might be around who didn't know the story, and then the statement drew a reaction, but that wasn't my intention. It was just what I had to say about Hank.

Hank was allegedly a miniature poodle, but he was longer and lower to the ground than any poodle I ever knew. I suspect that his bloodlines weren't pure, and that somewhere up the line there was an errant dachsund. He was quite possibly the friendliest dog who ever lived, and no matter WHAT was going on, he'd greet you excitedly, wagging his tail, rubbing all over you, delighted to share the moment with you.

The night he peed on my back, my daughter was just a few weeks old. I was severely sleep deprived, of course. I was changing the baby on my bed when Hank suddenly hopped up onto the bed, walked around behind me, hiked his leg and peed on my back.

He wasn't a puppy.

It wasn't an accident.

He jumped up on the bed, peed on my back, and jumped down again.

My nightgown clung unpleasantly to my back and there was nothing I could do about it, since I had to stay where I was and finish changing my daughter and get her safely back into her crib or carrier before I could get up and change--let alone shower. And showering was heavy on my mind at that moment.

My relationship with Hank was largely defined in that moment, but he was so damned friendly and optimistic that he never really seemed to notice, and he was so damned friendly and optimistic that I didn't really WANT him to notice. When he came running to greet me, I usually said, "Hi, Hank. Go away." But I said it PLEASANTLY and he wagged his tail and wiggled all over my legs. I sighed sometimes, but I never told him to go away in a voice he might understand.

A dog love story

2007-08-02T09:41:00.001-07:00

It's Love Thursday and I've posted a little Valentine to my dog Sydney on my other blog.

http://sothethingisblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/love-or-something-thursday.html

The Mouse Who is No Longer Welcome in My House (and Other Stories)

2007-07-27T14:43:00.000-07:00

I've posted before about the mouse in my house--not the ones my daughter chose and keeps in a cage in her room, but the one that moved in on his own and then I didn't have the heart to kill.

My sympathy is waning.

A couple of days ago, my daughter discovered some little bites on her mice's tails, and thought they'd been fighting. The very next day she woke up to see the "wild" mouse squeezing back out through the bars of the cage. Apparently the food source was too good to pass up.

Fortunately, we'd just seen a no-kill mousetrap you could make at home on sk-rt, so we moved the mice and set the trap.

It didn't work. In the morning, the cardboard tube was in the garbage can as promised, but no mouse. It seemed unlikely that he'd fallen into the garbage can and escaped, so I figured that he'd knocked the tube off before getting inside it.

My daughter, though, had a different explanation. "Mice aren't dumb animals," she began. I agreed. They certainly ingrain learned behaviours quickly. "Well," she went on, "you left the paper explaining the trap laying right there."

Moment of silence. "You don't think they can read, though?" I said carefully.

"No," she agreed, "but there's a big picture of how it works."

So I tipped off the mouse. Oops. And even assuming that he didn't read the diagram and sort it all out before he approached the trap, mice DO learn, and he hasn't come near the trap since--so we're back to the drawing board, with a new sense of urgency and a greatly reduced sense of "but he's so CUTE..."

Gratuitous Butterfly Photo

2007-07-24T17:06:00.000-07:00

I know, I know. It's not a dog. Technically speaking, it's not a butterfly, either, I don't think. The rumor I've always heard is that monarchs are moths. But I've always liked this picture, and having all these blogs means that I can randomly inflict my photographs on the public after years of just piling them up in little plastic filing boxes.

Meet Mopsy

2007-07-15T08:06:00.001-07:00

Since my family always had dogs, many dogs are mentioned in passing on this blog. For instance, I know that I mentioned Mopsy (though perhaps not by name) in my post about pet burials--I said, "there's a black schnoodle in my mother's kitchen cabinet".

Mopsy wasn't really my dog, in the sense that I returned to law school just a few weeks after she came to live with my family and never came home permanantly, but she was part of the family. (Pay no attention to my hair--this was 1990!)

I had a party at my parents' house the summer they got her, and she entertained my friends so thoroughly that my father decided she was going to get sick from all the activity out in the sun and took her in to her cage to rest. She howled. She wanted to go back to the party. She also surrepticiously stole a hamburger bun, poking her nose onto the foil-covered platter from behind and slowly sliding the bun off the edge of the table.

This is Mopsy with her water bowl. Her formerly full water bowl. She picked it up to play with several times a day, always by the far edge, dumping it across the kitchen floor as she trotted around with it.

It took a surprisingly long time for this to get annoying. It was so funny the first dozen or so times she did it that we didn't get sick of cleaning up the water for at least a few days.

Eventually, she'd get heavier bowls that were a little harder to pick up. Then, she had to move on to more creative endeavors.

Mopsy was a unique dog in a lot of ways. One of them was that she was hyper-intelligent. We've had a lot of smart dogs, especially my recently-deceased Cocoa, who used the remote control to turn the television on and off and change the channel, but Mopsy went beyond dogdom.

For instance, my parents subscribe to two separate newspapers, and each reads one. Mopsy not only retrieved the newspapers from the yard in the morning, but knew which paper belonged to which parent. If my mother let her out to get the paper, she brought my mother's paper. If my father let her out, she brought his. Once, the positions of the papers in the yard were reversed (not a test, I swear--it just happened that way one morning) and she went to the place my mother's paper usually was, looked over the paper, somehow determined that it was the wrong one and went and got the other.

But--maybe because of that intelligence--she was oddly standoffish for a dog. Dogs generally, at least in my experience, like you automatically. You bring them home as puppies and you hold them and pet them and feed them and care for them, and they like you. Not so with Mopsy--you had to earn her respect, and you could lose it again just as quickly. For years she got a certain kind of treat for bringing in the newspaper every morning, but then the vet said that she couldn't have them anymore. My mother bought Milk Bonz. Mopsy brought the paper in, carried it over and dropped it at my mother's feet, and waited for her treat as usual. My mother gave her a Milk Bone. She set it down and looked it over. She smelled it. And then she picked up the newspaper and took it back away.

Mopsy was serious about tug of war. Eventually, we'd always give in because we feared for her teeth--she'd hang from the rope like a fish indefinitely, but she wouldn't let go.

She wasn't much into playing ball or any of the normal dog-person games, though. On a day when she was feeling generous she might bring the ball back to you once or twice, but there was no racing down the yard or sitting on the floor for half an hour playing with Mopsy; somehow she always gave the impression that that sort of thing was beneath her, and that she'd just retrieve the ball a few times to humor you.

She did know how to have a good time, though. One of her greatest joys was riding in my father's Jeep. It was an older Jeep--the kind without doors. Or a roof.

In retrospect, this looks kind of scary (and I'm sure that my father must have secured her somehow), but she stayed in her seat.

She had a problem with her tear ducts and it turned out that riding in the Jeep with the wind in her eyes was giving her eye infections, so she got these goggles to protect her eyes on the ride. She didn't mind them a bit.

Be on the lookout for corrective comments from my family, who will undoubtedly be in touch almost immediately to say, "But didn't you say..."

Still Not Dogs

2007-06-22T15:53:00.000-07:00

For me, getting another dog six months after my poodle of 17 years died would have been a little like bringing a date to my husband's funeral. Even if I'd wanted to get another dog, I wouldn't have been able to--our townhouse is rented, and they don't take dogs. We had a special provision written into the lease for Cocoa because he was so old and sick when we moved in that everyone knew he wasn't going to be with us much longer. After I introduced him to my landlord-to-be, he agreed to make an exception, but made it clear that it was for This Dog Only.

My daughter, though, has been starved for pet attention since he died. When we found those little lost dogs a few weeks ago, she wanted desperately to keep them.

Last night, she brought these guys home.

They're not dogs, for sure, but when her best friend's mouse had babies, she immediately fell for Monkey, the white mouse who is named (lucky me) for his tendency to climb anything and everything he comes in contact with--including humans. I'd just resigned myself to getting one mouse when my ever-helpful little sister told my daughter that mice were much HAPPIER in pairs. At the same time, her friend discovered that Candy Corn (presumably so named for his coloring) was a boy, and so she couldn't keep him. Ah, synchronicity. So we got two mice and roughly $60 worth of associated equipment, and I got a very itchy nose.

But she seems happy to have them:

Lost and Found for your Dog

2007-06-18T18:31:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, before there were blogs (or at least, before I knew about them), I had the idea to set up a website where people could report on missing pets and pets they'd found. The idea was to craeat a 24/7 solution to a 24/7 problem that, at that time, had only a 40 hour/week solution. I couldn't figure out how to automate the posting so that it happened in real time, and by the time that technology was readily available we were living in a 24/7 world and I assumed it was no longer a problem.

Just a few weeks ago, though, a couple of unexpected dogs dropped by my house. I called animal control and got their answering service, who asked if I wanted them to pick the dogs up. Having nowhere to keep them and no means of finding their owner, I said yes. The woman at the service told me that someone would either call me or come out. And someone did call me--two days later.

In the interim, I called the closest vet. It wasn't really that I thought they could do anything to help, but when I lived in a small town the local vet would take in found animals on the weekend. It seemed like someone frantically searching for an adorable pair of little lost dogs might call the vet just to see whether they'd been brought there. The vet's office told me they hadn't had any calls, but if I wanted to bring the dogs in they could scan them to see whether they had chips. This was the first I'd heard of that technology, and while I'm an anti-big-brother kind of girl all the way, I thought it was a great idea.

I was surprised, though, to find that animal control didn't respond on the weekend. I was surprised that things hadn't changed all that much since I'd been looking for a 24/7 solution. Surely (I hoped), at least someone else had shared my thought by now. I was delighted to discover that, at least here in Illinois, we have Dog Detective--a website that allows lost and found postings and more. Here's what they have to say for themselves:

We provide FREE registration to anyone who has lost a dog.

Joining Dog Detective is a way to make your dog's information available to someone who may find him or her. Click on Register and fill out the form to add your dog. Your dog's profile will instantly be added to the search feature for lost dogs and a free web page will be generated for your dog.

The site also includes a nice section of reunion stories, a lost poster creator, and more. But the real gold here is the ability to get your dog's description, photograph, and last seen location online immediately, in a place that the person who finds him can search for you.

Police Dogs Fail Performance Review

2007-06-12T21:51:00.000-07:00

I won't tell you the whole story, because we're pro-dog over here, but I never heard of a dog losing his job before.

Read the whole story here: Bad Mannered Police Dogs Fired

And we know the story is Absolutely True, because I read it at www.absolutelytrue.com!

These are Also Not Dogs

2007-06-09T15:47:00.000-07:00

Thus far, the invasion of the cicadas has been disappointing. Frankly, I've seen just as many cicadas in off years as I have so far this year, and while I understand that they're meant to be pests and all that, I kind of thought a plague of cicadas would be interesting. I must have missed the one 17 years ago somehow, because I've never seen more than one cicada in a given location. In fact, most of the ones I have seen were temporary "pets" my sister picked up somewhere and perched on her shoulder for a while.

Well, until these:

These, you will note, are in a plastic cookie tin (shut up-you know what I mean) and not in the wilds. That's because my father had to bring them home from a jobsite many miles away so that my daughter could actually see some.

We returned them to the wild, of course.

Still, the absence of a constant buzzing sound underlying all activity and swarms of brightly-colored cicadas covering the trunks of trees has been disappointing.

This Dog is Going to be Murdered on Thursday

2007-06-05T13:07:00.000-07:00

Please take a moment to visit For the Love of the Dog and read They're Going to Kill Me On Thursday!

This dog is eight months old, a service dog in training for a woman with fibromyalgia and anxiety disorder, and has NEVER BITTEN ANYONE OR SHOWN ANY AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR. Her crime is being an unspayed pit bull, and the law doesn't allow her family to simply get her spayed...it says she must be destroyed. If you have any interest in animals at all (or laws that make sense), you must read this story.

The Best Dog in the World?

2007-06-05T09:45:00.000-07:00

Years ago I heard a comedian (I can't remember which one) talking about dogs. He said that poodles were the smartest dog (something I firmly believe after living for years with a poodle who turned the radio and television on and off to suit himself and was known to take himself for a sedate walk around the block and return home without incident). Since they were so smart, the comedian said, they would soon be able to talk...and when they could, they would say, "Please don't cut my hair that way!"

I'm almost certain that the "Best in Show" from the World Dog Show is thinking exactly that: World Dog Show Winner

Animal Love, or How You Know When He's the Right Guy

2007-06-04T00:34:00.000-07:00

We were raised to stop the car for lost dogs, people with broken-down cars, and the random, fiery small-plane crash. Okay, so the last was a one-time occurrence, and the second, I suppose, goes on a case-by-case system, but as Disney would tell the world much later in my life, all dogs go to heaven. The Rainbow Bridge is hard science, not a pretty little myth to soothe grieving animal lovers.
In my parents' house, there is a chair referred to as the Dog Recliner. Not only because a succession of three of our own dogs have claimed it as dog turf, but because all dogs seem to know our house is Dog-Centered. One day, my mom opened the front door to find a strange dog (not odd, we just hadn't met him before) standing on the porch. When she opened the screen door, he came in and jumped onto the aforementioned chair and got comfortable. Of course, he was sent or taken home, but being lost, he knew right where to go. Another secret of the universe Disney let out was The Twilight Bark, the news feed among dogs since...well, since there were only 101 Dalmatians. I'm a firm believer.
A friend and I caught and brought home a chihuahua who bit. A vicious little grandma-dog with a plaid collar but no tags--what else was I to do? After he caught on to the two-person trick of one providing distraction while the other waited for just the right moment drop the towel over his head so we could take him outside, my dad switched to thick leather gloves and the towel. Of course, he couldn't be taken by Animal Control on the weekend.
Wasn't it only a year before that my friend Matt and I had met a cop at Animal Control with a big, gray blue-eyed girl we called Wolfy, only to have The Man put her in a holding cell and switch the lights back off, saying someone would be there in the morning? What a terrible betrayal to poor Wolfy; she'd trusted us and we turned her in like Good Nazis.
So my parents and I stuck it out with that little fucker of a chihuahua until Monday. When my mom talked to AC, she made it clear that if the little fucker wasn't claimed, we'd take him. Biting dogs can't be adopted out according to Them. According to my family, you can always wear full-body chain-male suits (you have to adapt your lifestyle a little when you have dogs in the family, right?), but you can't let a biting dog be put to sleep. As evidence of a benevolent God, the little fucker was claimed before two days went by. We all exhaled.
Then we went back to being bitten and snubbed by Mopsy, the family dog who was smarter than us, and to cleaning the carpet twice daily when Hank, my bad-ass, territory-marking, ten-pound poodle left yet another yellow splotch. (I'll never forget the first thing my mom said when I walked up to her with my gentle-souled but somewhat literal piss-ant puppy in my arms and said we were moving in. Her face went ashy and fell, her eyes went flat and hopeless, and she said, "But I just got three thousand dollar carpeting."
It was solid blue for a few weeks, but of course, it soon took on a sort of marled blue and yellow-green look. Hank also had the distinction of being the entire neighborhood's opportunity to please St. Francis: he went out for an unscheduled dash about twice a week. Both dogs got red collars in their Christmas stockings--with their names and phone numbers embroidered on them. Being the most mild-mannered dog in the world, and happily approaching all strangers and pit bulls with jaws afroth, it was no surprise that once my parents heard him barking from the backyard of a couple who had just told them they hadn't seen him. My cousin Mark actually asked one holiday if he could take him home. I think he was as serious as his bank accounts, but Hank and I didn't do well when we were separated for long. I dated a guy who didn't want "the dog" to come with when we went camping. Neither could he get his mind around our hard and fast agreement between a dog and his girl that I would never be gone for over two weeks.
It should have been apparent right then that I'd end up burning black candles and his picture under a waning moon, putting down the hoodoo on him in the end. Come to think of it, that was the same guy who didn't want to stop and help the lost rot puppy who clearly didn't know the street yet.
In retrospect, of course, I shake my head and wonder that I could have been so blind, and if he has gone completely insane yet from having that same dream every night. Mostly, though, I think about Hank. Fondly, now, after a very open-minded woman named Julee has grief-counseled me to this point. My dad clear-coated the last of the acrylic-paint footprints he'd left on my bedroom floor when he blithely walked across my friend Carol's painting-in- progress.
The current neighborhood issue is our new next-door neighbor, the shepherd next door. He's an outside dog. Apparently, this is still legal. My father went to the dog's man and explained that in this neighborhood, dogs live inside. One neighbor fed him; one watered him; AC has been called in, but no one has gotten anywhere with them. My mom, who is home all day, has become obsessed with the dog next door. She has trouble sleeping if the weather isn't cool enough or warm enough, and of course, about his lack of a comfy bed. It's like Tillie Olsen, Jack London, and Charlotte Gilman got together and wrote her into a corner, the poor woman.
Real Men stop traffic for families of baby ducks; they return baby birds to their nests; they dive under their decks and retrieve ground squirrels from the mouth of the damned cat. Even my sister knows this, and we all think there's something missing in the poor girl that she doesn't enjoy doing normal things like, say, watch a couple of squirrels play silly buggers (that's what my boyfriend calls their dating games) for half an hour.
I'm moving out of my parents' house (time #127.3B) pretty soon, with my boyfriend and the head-eater, as we fondly refer to the damned cat since the bunny incident last year. Apparently there was an ear left, but much like one of the fantastic horror movies we so love, no brain. I couldn't look, but then, I'm not even really Catholic and I wholeheartedly genuflect when I see carnage like I did today in the middle of the street--both ears were still standing straight up. How do I know this man is a keeper? To me there's no question about it: a half-grown river cat showed up on his doorstep, so he took him in, rocked him like a baby, named him after the most dismal town he's ever traveled through, petted him while he ate, and settled in to a life of being scratched and bitten, keeping constant vigil against fauna and property destruction, and swearing a lot.
I can't wait 'til we get the puppy; I'm sure that with enough swearing, the damn cat will learn to love the puppy. (Wait--that's a problem; he'll have to be taken aside for that. You can't swear in front of a puppy. Or smoke.) Of course, I'm saving up as many personal and vacation days as possible, because my job's p/maternity leave doesn't cover dogs. It's the one really backward thing about the place, aside from not having the bring-your-dog-to-work policy yet. My supervisor brings her preteen daughter in to work sometimes; Dorothy Parker took her dog everywhere. I can't get my mind around this archaic thinking, so I'll just let it rest.
I think we should adopt a girl. Then she can be the flower girl, and the head-eater can run off with the ring until my love inevitably chases him down before he swallows it.

Unexpected Guests

2007-06-03T13:17:00.000-07:00

Just after we got home from church this afternoon, a pair of little dogs ran down the sidewalk in front of our house and stopped to sniff around us and wiggle. We were happy to see them, but not so happy to see them go bounding energetically and unhesitatingly into the middle of a busy street when they were done with us, so we followed them a bit.

They showed a definite proclivity for the middle of the street and no apparent knowledge of their wherabouts. They were happy to let us catch up to them and pet them and check their tags...except they didn't have any. They were nice dogs, friendly, wearing collars, recently groomed, but they had no identification.

Someone was almost certainly looking for them, but that someone hadn't called animal control or the nearest vet. We didn't want to turn them over to animal control too quickly, since it seemed likely that someone was canvassing the neighborhood for them even as we spoke, so we tied them to the fense with my daughter's jumpropes.

We live at a very busy intersection, so it seemed likely that if someone was driving around looking for a lost dog, they'd spot them there. We gave them some water and my daughter changed out of her church clothes and rolled around in the grass playing with them for a while, and then a young woman driving slowly along the street next to our house looked over, closed her eyes, put her hand to her heart, and slumped in obvious relief before pulling into our driveway calling out thanks.

The dogs were delighted to see her (though in fairness, these dogs seemed delighted by everything) and each settled immediately into what was clearly a well-settled spot in the car. A happy ending, but one that could definitely been expedited if those dogs had been wearing their phone numbers.

I think all too often people don't feel like their dogs need identification because they "don't let them out alone". The irony is that dogs that DO run loose typically know how to find their way home--and know to avoid cars. It's the ones no one expected to be out alone that are most in need of human intervention when they find themselves in the middle of a busy intersection.

A World of "Experts"

2007-06-02T07:16:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of upsides to the Internet, but one of the biggest downsides I've seen is the fact that it's very easy for anyone with a pretty template or an authoritative writing style to hold him or herself out as an "expert" and be believed by countless strangers, who then pass on the misinformation to countless others, and so on.

I see this in many contexts--when I was researching my first book, I ran across the same mistaken details in dozens of sources, carried innocently (if a bit carelessly) from one to another. I see the teachings of the Catholic church authoritatively misstated in blog posts and on discussion groups every day. And the margin for dangerous wrongness grows when someone tries to assess a situation based on the contents of a single post.

In my work, I maintain several legal blogs, and we frequently receive short emails providing three or four sentences worth of information and asking for advice. We can't provide legal advice in that forum, and there's a good reason for it--we don't have enough information to make good judgments. But when that same person posts in a public forum, she's usually presented with a number of "absolute" answers from people who want to use "common sense" to divine that her situation is comparable to the one their sister's neighbor went through a few years ago in a different state...

Why, you ask, are we talking about this on the dog blog?

Because this morning I received a fairly lengthy comment in another forum pointing out to me that there was nothing wrong with dogs lying in the mud in the rain, many of them like it, and people too often project human emotions onto dogs.

I was a little taken aback to discover that the desire to EAT is an exclusively human emotion, or that only humans would object to being tied to a tree in the sun all day with no water, but it wasn't the substance of the issue that really interested me. What really interested me was the authoritative one-paragraph judgment passed by a stranger.

Several of that German Shepherd's neighbors have taken an interest in the dog, all pet owners themselves, all people who have interacted with the dog, seen how greedily it attack the (dry, not especially exciting) food provided by one neighbor, how it emptied a bowl of water that had been filled from a full kettle. (Guess it projected the human emotion of thirst on itself...the neighbors probably confused it) Several professionals have objected to the lack of care the animal is receiving--animal control took it once, and then visited again to require changes to its living environment. Foster care has been offered by a rescue organization I won't mention by name.

And yet, some poster somewhere truly believes that she is a better judge of this dog's situation than the people who see and interact with it every day or the people in charge of enforcing state and local standards for humane care of animals. It's a special kind of arrogance, and one I think the web breeds. I don't mean to single out this particular person--this comment is simply a symptom of something unfortunate that seems endemic to web communication.

Forums like yahoo answers have sprung up, and they're a great example of people reaching out to help people, but they're also something much more dangerous. Read the forum in your true area of expertise, and you'll see pages and pages of authoritatively presented misinformation; since my area of expertise is law, the misinformation I see could easily cost people their freedom, custody of their childre or--at the very least--a lot of money. I haven't dared to look at any medical threads.

Suddenly, grocery store clerks can give legal advice, those separated from the church can misrepresent her teachings in a cogent, logical way and have readers believe that's what the church said, and a stranger can determine whether or not a dog is happy without looking into its eyes, seeing the places its fur has been rubbed off by trying to jam itself into a house half its size to get shelter, watching it struggle to stand straight after a night in that house, or...well...knowing anything except a few paragraphs presented by one person on a little blog somewhere in the midwest.

Just in case you were wondering....

2007-05-30T21:28:00.001-07:00

there's still a mouse in my house.

Update, Thanks & a Challenge

2007-05-28T13:58:00.000-07:00

The Blog Catalog fundraising event for Donors Choose is in full swing and hundreds of bloggers have posted appeals for donations to this organization, which allows you to choose specific projects and requests to fund.

Here are just a few of the posts I've found around the web so far:

Blog Catalog Raises Money for Kids. You Can Help!

Blog Catalog Community Fundraising Event Challenge for Public School Teachers and Students

Bloggers Uniting for Good Fundraising Challenge

Blog Catalog Blogging for a Purpose May 28 - Come With Us!

DonorsChoose.org - Blog Catalog Raises the Bar with "Bloggers Making History"

Unfortunately, we're thus far doing a much better job of getting the word out than we are of bringing the money in! Please support this worthwhile cause--if everyone reading one of these posts donated just a few dollars, it could make an incredible difference to children across the U.S.

Children Need Love (and Books) Too

2007-05-28T09:04:00.000-07:00

Maybe this isn't directly on topic, but as dog lovers you all have soft spots in your hearts, right?

Donors Choose offers a quick and easy way to make donations that really count--and lets you see exactly where your donation is going and whom it benefits.

Today, bloggers across the country are coming together to raise funds to allow teachers and administrators at public schools across the country to provide programming and equipment that they couldn't otherwise afford. Best of all, you can browse the proposed projects and donate to those YOU think are most worthwhile!

Please join us in supporting this great effort by making a donation here: Donors Choose Blog Catalog donation. And if you have your own blog, please help us spread the word. Using this link will help us track the success of the effort: http://www.donorschoose.org/donors/viewChallenge.html?id=16793

The German Shepherd Next Door, Part III

2007-05-26T23:22:00.000-07:00

It rained all day today and the German Shepherd next door lay in the mud for most of the day. It wasn't terribly cold, but it was a cold rain and not something you'd want to lie on the ground through. I supposed, if the neighbor's representation that he's had the dog for 7 years is true, then the poor thing is used to it.

My father, who is a carpenter, offered to supply materials and help the neighbor build the dog a bigger house, but he said he had too much work to do in the house and didn't have time for that.

Meanwhile, his young son is making quite a habit of running up to the fence and kicking my parents' dog.

You can't offer someone else's dog for adoption, right? Because I know this nice German Shepherd who could really use a good home.

All About Urine

2007-05-26T11:37:00.000-07:00

I've written about Scout before, albeit on a blog that has almost nothing to do with dogs, except as far as they add humor and frustration to my life. (So, the thing is blog)

It's just that I've had four dogs in my entire life and Scout is the first one that has ever made me think of getting rid of an animal. I'm from the "Adopt a Dog = Adopt a Family Member for Life" school of thought. I knew a woman once who got rid of her cats when she moved because they didn't go with her new apartment and she didn't want any messes. It ruined our friendship. I couldn't get past it --I mean how shallow do you have to be to do something like that? Who gets rid of a pet because it's not the proper accessory??

And honestly, there is nothing so dreadfully wrong with Scout. He's annoying as hell in his damn enthusiasm for the almighty tennis ball. (He took off down the greenbelt in back of our house earlier today, chasing after some deer. When he came back, he still had the ball in his mouth. Imagine the moral dilemma if he'd gotten close to one --put the ball down and catch the deer or keep the ball in his mouth? It boggles the mind.) He's no rocket scientist but honestly, I think Scout really just needs someone to work with him more and I'd be glad to do that.

Except for the peeing thing.

Scout does that thing the dog trainers call "Submissive Urination." You cannot speak sternly or kindly to him without him peeing everywhere. The only way around this is to ignore him or to speak sternly or kindly to him outside. Well, if he's done something heinous INSIDE, like barking at the cats at 3:00 in the morning, there is no way to get him OUTSIDE before he pees everywhere so you can scold him. As soon as you grab his collar to take him out: pee-city.

The good news is that we only have carpet in one small room downstairs and Scout hasn't really figured out that he can go UPSTAIRS yet. (See note above about not being a rocket scientist.)But it's just such a problem, even with the ease of clean-up. I mean, I just don't want to clean up urine five times a day.

And he's a really cute dog, too, so everyone who walks through our front door wants to pet him. So, then he pees everywhere. He's nervous around kids so he just pees on principle when he sees them. And god, don't SCARE him or there's an entirely new development in the area of voiding--don't make me say any more than that. (Okay, let's just say that it turns out to be actually possible to scare the shit out of someone/something.)

The other thing is the pitch of Scout's bark, which is on some sort of frequency that sits right in your spine and makes you react in uncharacteristic ways. My husband, the only person who actually LIKES Scout, once threw a cooler at him for barking right in my husband's ear, trying to get him to stop working and start throwing the ball.

So, I don't know. He's almost three. That's about another ten years and just thinking about how much urine I'll clean up in that time makes me a little woozy.

There's a Mouse in my House

2007-05-25T15:48:00.001-07:00

I know...I know...two posts in a row that aren't about dogs...

But listen: this mouse is the closest thing to a pet we've got right now.

Of course, he's not a pet--he's a mouse who is running around my house, eating my bread, and leaving unappealing little mouse droppings in places I don't like to find them. He's the reason I have to re-wash my already-washed dishes before we use them.

But he's cute. I'm not even entirely convinced that he's a wild mouse. He's very small, and a very dark gray (almost black). I don't actually know whether it's a boy or a girl, but we've been using "he" kind of generically.

Yeah, we talk about the mouse a lot. How cute he is. How much we like him. What would be the best way to kill him. My daughter calls him "our little friend".

I don't have a lot of experience with mice in the house, but it was always my assumption that they tried to stay away from the people. Not so with "our little friend". It's not unusual for him to walk across the middle of the living room floor while we're watching television, or to poke his head out from under the refrigerator while I'm cooking. Once, he ran along the back of the sink while I was washing dishes. "We're going to have to kill him," I said sadly to my daughter, and she agreed. We went to the store and looked at all of the traps and agreed that they looked awfully harsh and wondered why they didn't make a trap that would just TRAP him and not kill him.

Then we went home.

Several days later, after we found a small hole in the bread bag and approximately 2/3 of the bread gone, I went back and bought the electro-shock trap that "meets international human kill standards". We kept it on the kitchen table in the box for a few days, and then one day while my daughter wasn't home I opened it up and put the batteries in it and...it didn't work. I was kind of pissy, because it cost thirteen bucks, but I haven't exchanged it. Someone asked about it and I said that I hadn't had time, but I think maybe the real reason I haven't exchanged it is that if I get one that works, it will kill the mouse.

We Interrupt this Dog Discussion to Talk About Geese

2007-05-24T20:26:00.000-07:00

This evening on my way home from work, I saw a pair of geese walking through the parking lot at the train station with 17--yes, seventeen--goslings in tow. (My daughter's first reaction was, "You took time to COUNT them?" Well, yeah. I counted them. I've never seen so many goslings with one pair of geese before.)

What was even more interesting--and it's tough to get more interesting than those awkward little bodies covered with down that looks more like the fur on a messy puppy than future feathers--was that they appeared to be from two different litters (or whatever they're called). Approximately half of them (I didn't count them separately) were very small and young, and the others were about half grown. They didn't segregate--the older ones were mixed in with the younger, all trailing the apprent parents, with one of the littlest stumbling along far enough behind that I felt compelled to stop and make sure that he made it out of the parking lot with them.

If I had a camera phone, you'd be looking at 19 geese right now.

Let's All Take a Moment to Look at Heather Armstrong's Dog

2007-05-23T11:57:00.000-07:00

Seriously.

I know this might seem like a shameless and relatively ineffective way to ride the coattails of arguably the most successful blogger in history, but I'm in marketing, so I'm not quite that dumb. If I wanted to do all that, I'd wait until I had some significant content on this blog, and until I had it listed in the Blog Catalog and--at the very least--until there were enough posts and enough pictures here to make any incidental visitors I might drum up want to come back.

So it's not that.

I just happened to see "I take pictures of my dog every day, too" on the front page of Heather's blog, and I liked it. I liked that she's a photographer, because I have an interest in photography, and I liked that she broke out photographing her dog as a separate activity. And then I looked, and I liked the dog.

So here he is: Heather Armstrong's Dog

A Proper Burial. Err...sort of.

2007-05-20T14:18:00.000-07:00

When my dog was near death, we talked about having him cremated. I didn't really want to, but our options were limited. A pet cemetary wasn't in my budget, and since we rent I couldn't exactly bury him in the backyard (which is probably illegal, anyway). The idea of just handing him off to the vet to be "disposed of" made me queasy. In the end, cremation seemed like the only real option.

My sister, hoping to prepare my daughter, wanted to show her what we'd get back after the process. Early one morning she opened a cabinet in my mother's kitchen, stopped cold and said (In exactly these words, I swear), "Where are the dogs?"

There's a black schnoodle in my mother's kitchen cabinet, and a beautiful shetland sheepdog. That little apricot poodle from the first post is somewhere else. And my own poodle sits on a shelf in my kitchen, with a carved angel holding a dog watching over him. But the thing is...if you're a dog person, you usually have a lot of dogs in your lifetime. What's the right answer? A gallery of dead dogs seems a bit macacabre--having them incinerated en masse at the local animal shelter is unthinkable. The really appealing possiblity of burying them under their favorite trees is largely a thing of the past. Some people laugh at pet cemetaries and some pay thousands of dollars to make use of them, but they're definitely out there to fill a need. I'm just not sure it's the right one.

What if there were a pet cemetary without markers, without plots, without outrageous fees? What if it had streams and trees and gardens, and we could bury our animals the way we once did in our own yards, without caskets, alongside the beloved pets of strangers, and let them return to nature as nature intended?

Cheating on Your Dog

2007-05-18T20:04:00.000-07:00

Here's the German Shepherd I wrote about a few days ago, with the nice big rawhide bone that my mother bought for him today.

I definitely got the impression that he'd never been given such a thing before. His first reaction, after sniffing it a little, was to pick it up and go put it on the other side of the tree, clearly out of our reach. Every time he picked it up to chew on, he looked around tentatively.

Later in the evening, we saw the children out in the yard. They don't seem to acknowledge the dog, although the youngest one did empty his water bowl and put some black object in it. I haven't seen the adults acknowledge him, either. They have been going out and feeding and watering him, but they don't pet him when they do; they don't even seem to greet him.

This is Daisy.

Daisy had to stay in the house while we sneaked the rawhide bone out to the other dog in case she might not understand why my mother was giving such a thing to another dog. I suggested that it was a good idea to teach her sharing, and she looked at me like I was crazy and said, "Dogs aren't like that." It may be true--my perspective may be skewed by this whole raising a child thing.

It made me think about dogs sharing, though. I'm just sure that they do. I can think of examples of dogs offering things to their human companions, but on some level where I currently can't come up with any evidence, I'm just sure that they share with other animals too. Any stories to share out there?

The German Shepherd Next Door

2007-05-16T10:29:00.000-07:00

Well, not next door to me. Next door to my parents.

I stopped by my mom's this morning, and while I was there I asked her if she wanted to join my dog blog. She's a Dog Person who, by her own admission, slows down the car to check out dogs like men do to check out women. She covets the neighbors' dogs, and the dogs she sees passing by on the street, and the dogs on television commercials.

She couldn't talk to me about blogging dogs, though, because she was busy standing at the patio door conversing with the German Shepherd next door. Someone had to.

The German Shepherd next door moved in last week, and instantly caused a lot of controversy in the neighborhood over things like the proper care and feeding of dogs, whose business other people's animals were and were not, and how to pronounce "Assisi".

The new family next door apparently moved in, staked the dog out in the yard with a little plastic house approximately half his size and no food or water, and went back to their old house overnight. The neighbors fed him and talked softly to him and gave him water for two days, and then someone called animal control. They took the dog and left a note, and a couple of hours later the dog was back, tied up in the yard again (but further from the fence) and looking no happier.

He's a beautiful dog, and he wags his tail tentatively and looks hopeful when you speak nicely to him, but he's not quite brave enough to actually approach. 2/3 of all conversations on the block now begin, "I don't know what we're going to do about that dog." I wish I had a happy ending to report (and I'm still hopeful), but for now...I don't know what we're going to do about that dog.

Dogs Die

2007-05-16T06:52:00.000-07:00

My sister said that, resentfully, not long after her miniature poodle Hank was hit by a car. She seemed to mean that dogs should be avoided, that they couldn't be trusted to live. I can't blame her for feeling that way, since Hank was only 7 when he was hit by a car, and it came out of nowhere--one moment she was at work matting something under archival glass and the next she was on her way to identify her dog.

It didn't come as a surprise, in a sense. Hank was a runaway. He got under the fence until my father wired up the bottom and then he slipped through the gate, and if you opened the door in his presence you'd better be prepared for a quest.

He was as friendly a little dog as ever lived, and the people who found him always took him into the house and fed him before calling. They often bathed him, if he'd been mucking around in the fields. Chasing Hank was a regular part of life, and he could never grasp that it was wrong to run away--he'd greet you wiggling and wagging when you went to pick him up, proud to introduce his new friends. But we thought we'd sealed all the holes. Someone opened the back gate and he escaped, unbeknownst to anyone. We didn't even know he was gone until the call came that he was dead.

My sister was angry, and I couldn't blame, her, not even for resenting my old dog. Cocoa was the first apricot poodle in the family; I bought him at the mall in Champaign just before Christmas in 1989. I was in law school, and lived in an apartment that didn't take dogs. I had a part time job that paid $6/hour and he cost $365. None of it mattered: they put him in my arms and I knew I wasn't leaving without him.

We drove to Augusta, Georgia together in a 1979 Mustang with no air conditioning; he was so hot that when I poured him a bowl of water he lay his head down in it. I carried him in my book bag in law school, fifteen years before Elle Woods would have the same idea, shamelessly walking in and out of public buildings with his just his head poking out. He could walk or dance seemingly indefinitely on his hind legs.

In the years we traveled together, I got engaged and then broke that off, started my own business and lost it, lived in three states, got married, had a baby, wrote a book, separated from my husband, and through it all this tiny dog was constant.

I'd started to doubt that dogs died, honestly. At 12 he was diagnosed with testicular cancer and seemed to be on his last legs; dental work rejuvenated him. And each year as his birthday approached I wondered whether he'd live to see that next landmark, but by the time he was 17, I'd begun to think that somehow we'd be together forever.