Let’s Try a Direct Link
scrappybadger July 1st, 2008
flickr still hasn’t ironed out all the wrinkles when it comes to video. The embedded video doesn’t play back for everyone, so we’ll try something else.
Take 2:
Archive for the 'dog blogging' Category
Other Things That Make Me Happy
scrappybadger June 30th, 2008
Dogs, of course! This video is so cute — even if its a setup.
How Do I Get Back Here?
scrappybadger June 27th, 2008
It’s been almost 5 months since my last post. I’ve written upwards of two dozen blog entries since then, but they’ve all been in my head. And now I’m not sure how to get back. Maybe I should start with a picture.
Here’s Luna at the beach back in May. She actually fell asleep face down in the sand. Weirdo.
Reading About Dogs Makes It All Better
scrappybadger September 5th, 2007
I just finished Ken Foster’s The Dogs Who Found Me. Read my review if you’d like.
I don’t remember if I mentioned it in a previous post, but his interview with Terri Gross made me run out and buy the book the very same day which is pretty much unheard of for me.
What Is Better Than One Luna?
Luna’s Name in Lights
scrappybadger August 19th, 2007
Ok, not exactly lights, but cool nevertheless.
Check out Matron’s DOGBLOG.
Dog Days of Summer
scrappybadger August 7th, 2007
I had a fun weekend. On Saturday we made our (almost) weekly trip to the local farmer’s market. (For dinner I’ll be cooking the purple pole beans we got. I’ve never had this particular kind, but I’m a big green bean — or snaps as everyone called them where I grew up – gal, so I’m sure they will be delicious.)
While Piig paid for our stash, I coaxed Luna to pose for more cell phone pics. The darn sun was in the wrong spot though.
I wanted to try it from a different angle, but Luna was bored with me.
Afterwards we went to a doggie event sponsored by a local art center to raise money for area SPCAs. We missed the parade and the best tricks contest, but we got cake, and Luna got to mill around inside of an unfamiliar building which she loves but rarely gets to do. It was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, the day ended with Luna getting thrown in the slammer. At first she was a bit shaken.
But eventually she got used to it.
I ♥ ♥ ♥ my dog!
Goodbye to a Good Dog
scrappybadger July 27th, 2007
Several news sites carried the story of Jake, a Utah based search and rescue dog, this week after he died of cancer on Wednesday. He worked as a therapy dog visiting sick children and the elderly, trained other dogs, and performed search and rescue, most notably after Hurricane Katrina and September 11th.
I have mixed feelings about rescue dogs. On the one hand, they are often removed from abusive situations. Such was the case with Jake. According to one story, he was found with several injuries, beaten and abandoned before he was a year old. His caretaker for the next 11 years trained him for search and rescue. It seems positive. After all, dogs are like humans in that they usually want to do something meaningful; they like having a purpose. For some dogs that means strength exercises, agility, or caring for the humans who believe we’re taking care of the dog. For dogs like Jake that purpose is a more dangerous one. Search and rescue dogs risk injury and sometimes death fulfilling their life’s purpose. It is a purpose, however, that is foisted upon them.
It is the good-natured temperament that most dogs have that puts them in danger. Like so many other animals, they pay the price for human foibles. Our desire to live near fault lines, to build homes on potentially unstable mountaintops, to vacation on coastlines susceptible to hurricanes, our propensity for conflict that results in bombings, and, occasionally, our dumb luck creates situations where these dogs have to help us. We look to a creature that is held captive by our whims and schedules to do what we can’t. I’m not sure it is fair to ask so much when, comparatively speaking, we usually give so little back.
I hope that Jake’s cancer wasn’t related to any of the favors he performed for us. I’d rather think of it as a fluke, something no one could have foreseen and that we didn’t contribute to. I don’t really believe that, but I want to. Truth is, if it wasn’t his work that did it, it was likely something as ordinary as sniffing the neighbor’s lawn and, in the process, inhaling toxins from fertilizers and weed killers. I guess that in the end it doesn’t matter what caused Jake’s cancer, but I don’t want to think that we helped it at all.
To read more about Jake, and to see pictures visit:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12301482
The Princess Diaries
scrappybadger May 18th, 2007
I love dogs. I’ve tried to figure out what it is about them, and I can successfully list the things that I most like about them. Nearly all dogs are kind, forgiving, loyal, easy-going, and all but the very emotionally disturbed dogs enjoy the good times to be had in doing the simplest things. They are, in some ways, similar to humans in their desire for companionship and love of treats, but they are much different than us as well. Dogs so often seem to me to be better versions of ourselves as they are usually more flexible than humans and not only get along with, but also grow to love, even the most unlikable humans. I’m good with the lists, yet I still can’t quite put my finger on what draws me to dogs, to what makes me love canines so fast when I have the hardest time trusting and loving people.
Maybe dogs help me like myself better. They accept faults and imperfections easily and often without really seeming to notice. I’m not sure, but, whatever the reason, I love dogs, so it isn’t difficult for me to grow attached to ones that happen to come into my life. So it was with Princess. She was, as I hope to say about hundreds of other dogs later in my life, the easiest dog in the world to love. Our neighbor bought her as a Valentine’s Day gift for his wife in 2005. She was a tiny, white nugget of energy, and I went over to pet her every chance I got. I didn’t like the neighbors, but I faked it in order to coo over their oddly-named newest edition. As Princess grew up she visited us occasionally, running over to see Luna (who greeted her with not a little grumpiness) or jumping on Piig or on me. Like most dogs, she was happy. She was happy when it was sunny, when it was rainy, when she was being petted, and even when the neighbors chastised her for leaving her yard.
It was hard to pet Princess because she barely stood still long enough to get your hand on her in anything approximating a good head rub. She ran fast and trampled more than one of our flowers in the process, but we didn’t care. Her happiness was infectious, and Piig and I liked to see her. As much as we told them that we didn’t mind her coming over and that in fact we liked it, the neighbors grew increasingly stern with Princess. She’d been on the losing end of a skirmish with Luna once and they didn’t like it, but their admonishments primarily seemed to grow from a need to control every dog that lived with them. Princess was screamed at, threatened with raised fists, and chased into the house whenever they caught her sneaking into our yard. Unfortunately, the city we live in is like most others in that there is little to do when you see an animal being abused. I called the authorities to ask about reporting dog abuse, but the voices on the other end of the phone always sounded the same — either nonplussed or disinterested. Plus, we were afraid of making it worse for Princess and for bringing retribution on our own dog in the form of poisoning or something equally as horrible.
We stopped encouraging Princess to come see us in an effort to ease the abuse. I would tell her hello as she sat on her front porch alone, but I never gave her any of the subtle clues that would let her know that I wanted her to come jump on me and lick my face. I was sad; I wanted to rescue her from what I knew was a pretty horrible life, and I wanted, for my own sake, to see her again.
Last summer two of the 20-something men in the house would tie her to a bush in the front yard, leaving her there all day, bored and lonely. I routinely snuck over with dog bones, rawhides, and whispered apologies for being too scared to take her — for not being brave enough to save her. While their parents were at work, the two men started squirting Princess with a water hose. She used to chase their sprinkler and carry it around the yard in her mouth, so at first the water hose seemed to her like a game, but it quickly became something else. After a few minutes she grew frustrated with the steady stream of water in her nose and mouth, a stream of water that she couldn’t control by walking away from it. This otherwise very quiet, well-behaved dog barked. And she barked. It didn’t do any good; they continued squirting until she lunged for them, held back by a 4 or 5 foot chain that tethered her to the bush. I ran to the kitchen window day after day watching but not knowing what to do.
I thought they were training her to fight. Their brother’s pit bull had the tell-tale scars on her face, and I was sure that Princess was in for a similar fate. Thankfully, I was wrong; she was spared that cruelty when they decided to mate her with a new male pit they’d gotten from who knows where.
It was like she was made for watching over little puppies. She doted on and mothered them, and we saw less and less of her as she spent most of her time inside with her puppies. Though she seemed content to watch over them, the strain of a very large litter took its toll on her body. She developed a bad skin condition and never regained either her pre-pregnancy weight or the healthy look that she’d had just a few months before. Her happiness was less evident, too. She still wagged her tail in response to the slightest show of affection, but she seemed defeated. They’d beaten and yelled the spirit out of her until she didn’t really seem to know what to do with herself.
That was the hardest time for me to see Princess. I was worried when more than a few days went by without catching a glimpse of her, but when I did see her it made me sick. I was angry at what they were doing to her and angry at myself for not stopping it. Every single time I saw her I apologized to her. I mostly did it without saying anything, so I’m not sure if she got the message or not. Eventually I stopped seeing her altogether, and everytime I asked Piig she said it had been a little while since she had seen her too. One day a couple of months ago I saw the grandmother outside with their male pitbull, so I smiled a nice, fake smile, chatted for a minute, and then asked about Princess. I wanted to know how she was.
There have been many times in my life when I was angry with someone, when I wanted to yell or walk away and never talk to them again, but there have been very few times when I was nearly overwhelmed by the urge to go fucking crazy, to run up and pummel someone to the ground. That day was one of the latter, and as that woman told me that they’d “had to put her down” for being aggressive — lunging and barking like they’d trained her to on that bush — I wanted to lose control. I wanted to beat every single one of them to a bloody, useless pulp. I wanted to see and hear their pain.
When I think about it now, euthanizing Princess was the most humane thing to do. She was miserable, abused and unloved, and she didn’t deserve to live like that more than the two years that she had already endured, yet it all seemed so unfair. It wasn’t right that the short time she had was spent in such a hellish house, that once her hair started to fall out and she lost some of her cuteness that she was thrown away. Everything in the world felt wrong at that moment.
For several days I couldn’t stop thinking about what it had been like the day they killed her. That’s what it was — they started killing her almost from that first Valentine’s Day and it didn’t end until they had someone else push poisons into her veins. I wondered if anyone told her goodbye. I wondered if she was alone when it happened. (Since most people don’t want to be faced with the responsibility of killing an animal, the chances are good that only vet staff were with her.) I wondered if she was scared and if she liked or hated the vet. I wondered if she knew what was happening.
And I wondered if she knew I loved her.
