Makin' tracks for home

Blackie is the senior Outdoor Dog now. While she's grateful to live here in the lap of canine luxury, she's still very much a neighborhood dog, long used to roaming wide while socializing, sniffing, accompanying our neighbor to church 3 times a week, and begging for treats wherever she goes. How anyone could look at her chunky body and believe she's starving is beyond me.

When Mr. P. mowed the front yard (calling it a lawn would be torturing the truth) last week for the first time this season, he discovered that Blackie's habitual path to and from the house had worn a track across the yard.

Stylin'

When we took the Dunderheads to the vet for their annual exam and shots last week, one of the assistants gave us 2 kerchiefs imprinted with the name of a flea & tick medication. I wanted to put them on Meg and Berry, but they weren't interested. Teddy and Jinx quite liked them, though.

Guardian of the Garage

Ginger is our new Guardian of the Garage. It's her main hang-out. She likes to play in our next door neighbor's pasture, but basically she's a homebody. When Mr. P. is at home, Ginger is like a tick stuck to his butt when he's puttering around in the garage or working in the yard.

Speaking of ticks, they adore Ginger. Unfortunately the medicine we give her to deal with her heartworms can't be used along with the most effective tick medicine.

Ginger's Puppies

When Ginger first arrived here with distended teats, we assumed that she had been nursing puppies. Mr. P. took her to the local animal hospital for a check-up and shots, and scheduled her to be spayed 2 weeks later.

Yesterday she was spayed. When the procedure was done, someone at the hospital called to let us know she was OK, and to tell us that Ginger had been pregnant still and that her puppies were aborted.

I can't imagine how Dr. D. failed to notice her pregnancy during her first exam. Her teats were still distended. When Patch was pregnant enough for her teats to distend, the vet was able to palpate her puppies. So I have to ask if Dr. D. didn't bother doing that because he was lazy or uninterested or what on earth. I don't like him anyway so it's hard for me to be objective about this.

A different vet (Dr. M.) did the surgery yesterday, and I can't really blame him for the abortion. Dr. D. would've put nothing about a pregnancy he didn't notice in Ginger's file, so I suppose when Dr. M. opened her up and saw the puppies, he assumed we had decided to abort them rather than calling us to ask what we wanted to do.

We certainly don't need another litter of puppies to care for and adopt out, but if we had known that Ginger was still pregnant, we wouldn't have decided to terminate the pregnancy.

Cheez Ballz!

Santy Paws brought Polly a huge jar of cheese balls for Christmas. When he presented it to her, her curly tail wagged so fast that we thought she might take off like a helicopter.

As you can see in this photo, Polly is already on the verge of obesity (she takes after her mother). Our vet says this is a common tendency in pugs. I have a hard time understanding how a little dog with such a big personality, who is so very, very busy in her roles as Ear Hygienist, Beard Inspector, Hall Monitor, Dining Supervisor and Traffic Management Director, would not be burning at least as many calories as she takes in. I worried a bit that the cheese balls would add to her girth.

As it turns out, Polly has little opportunity to overindulge in cheese balls because the instant my hand moves towards the jar, all the dogs come running. Cheese balls rain down from heaven and are gobbled up the instant they hit the floor. Then everybody licks the floor for 3-4 minutes. With all that competition, Polly's lucky to get a single cheese ball to savor.

The new living room

Our living room used to look like the rec room at an insane asylum. An ancient television set, a hodge podge of 2nd or 3rd-hand chairs, and a hodge podge of "residents".

Now it looks more like a bedroom at a frat house the morning after a beer bash.

Welcome, Ginger!

     We seem to have acquired a new stray dog, a pit bull with enlarged teats who must’ve been nursing a litter fairly recently. Don’t know where the puppies are, which is just as well. I hate to think of what may have befallen them. Ginger is hungrier for affection than for food, but she definitely needs to eat on a regular basis instead of scrounging, poor girl.

 

 

     She wears a collar and can't understand why we won't let her inside, so she must have been someone’s pet at some point, and an indoor dog at least part of the time.

     She’s a very “bully” pit bull and far too big to qualify as a 9 Dogs Howling Indoor Dog (though Polly could probably give her a run for her money), but she’s determined to come inside nonetheless. She lies on the welcome mat on the porch or stands with her paws on the windowsill looking inside. The day she arrived here, the rest of the dogs spent 4 hours barking and screaming and running back and forth because of Ginger. I finally shut the blinds in the living room so they can’t see if Ginger’s on the porch. Which gives the living room all the warmth and charm of a funeral parlor. 

     Mr. P. had a wonderful, sweet pit bull, Peach Pit, when we were first married, so we’re OK with pit bulls. But…in this part of the world, they tend to be bred as fighters rather than pets, so we have to be careful with Ginger. Pits are often well-behaved with their humans but badly-behaved with other dogs. Ginger gets along with the cats OK, which is in her favor, but I haven’t seen her interact with Blackie yet. Poor Blackie was attacked by a neighbor’s German shepherd last weekend and has a wound on a front leg from that. And it’s time for Babe’s annual check-up and shots. And we need to get Ginger spayed. Ugh. Dog rescue is a mighty expensive proposition.