I was originally going to introduce you to my human family, but on second thought, I will introduce you to my dogs first. You see they are fabulous fodder for blog material. They are as peculiar as me, but cuter and infinitely more endearing.
I have two dogs, Sam and Kaos. They are both female and are aged, repectively, 10 and 9. I have learned so much about life through and from them that I am not sure I would be the well rounded person I am today (grehhhmmph,koff koff... jeez even I couldn't type that with a straight face, sorry to get so schmucky there.... I'm over it now).
Lets meet Sam first shall we? I can't really introduce you to the wonder that is Sam until I give you some back ground on our first meeting. So with no further ado.... Flashback time!
When I was in University, I had promised myself that I would not get a pet that was more time intensive than a goldfish. I knew that doing school full time and working three jobs would not leave enough time to properly care for a pet. After all, to any one with integrity or morals, the only thing worse than not having a pet, is having one and giving them sub-standard care.
But, I had never lived without the constant companionship of a dog before...EVER. So, after floppin around and trying to figure out what was missing in my life and fully revelling in all that self-indulgent, university-type, wanna-be-deep, artsy-fartsy, soul searching, I finally realized I was missing a safe friendship.
Any one who has ever befriended a dog knows exactly what I mean by "Safe Friendship". It is a friendship without emotional blackmail. A friendship where you aren't constantly trying to figure out deep motives, underlying psychoses or survive psychopathic dominance games (regardless of what putzs like Ceasar Milan would have us believe). In short a canine friendship. There is a remarkable purity and beauty to the love and devotion of a dog. They inspire me to be a better person because it is what they believe I am anyway.
So I went to volunteer at the Vet school on campus. The Vet college has a huge kennel of dogs that they use for laboratory work, surgery practice, behavioural and drug studies etc. They either breed the dogs themselves (when they need a controlled genetic study) or take the "unadoptable" dogs from the local Humane societies. Many of the Vet students adopt their "study" beagles rather than perform their final "Euthanasia" project. Likewise, some of the researchers, walkers and students are allowed to adopt the few dogs that are not in terminal studies and that haven't become aggressive or dangerously insane.
-------I will be posting a thread devoted to this issue very soon, for now we will just let the horror wash over our collective conscious, of all the irresponsible idiots that; buy a dog on a whim, get tired of it or decide to move...dump it at the shelter to "Find a NEW great home" only to have the dog NOT be adopted becuase it is too old... the fad breed of yesterday NOT today... or they didn't bother to train it and it is too much work for some one else to bother to train..
Either way darling Fluffy or Rover is left languishing in the cold, hard, cement floored and windowless kennels packed full of sad, desperate dogs barking for a sustained 23 hours a day. No doubt wondering when their Humans will be coming back to save them from another unnecessary surgery or painful drug study. Right, sorry bit of a tangent there. 'Nuff said for now.
SO...this huge kennel allows volunteers to come in and take the dogs for walks or playtime so that they get to see sunlight for 5 minutes once in awhile. Faced with the difficult choice of trying to walk far more dogs than I logically had time for, I studied the walking sheets. As it turns out, we Humans are not unilatterly generous. The walkers all had favourites that they would show up to walk, for 10 minutes at a time, several times a week. This meant that there were literally dozens of dogs that never got out of their small 3X4 kennels, except for procedures and tests.
To be fair, this was likely because so many of the dogs were largely untrained and somewhat difficult to walk on the paltry rope leashes the vet school provided. Most of the other walkers were either retired and/or elderly people. Who may not have been strong enough to handle the more rambunctious dogs. But my sense of fair play was incensed enough that I immediately began to walk all of the "unwalkable dogs" for 5 minutes each: trying to give them as much fun and exercise, while getting as many out as I could. I had arms like Popeye after a month of this. Some of those dogs were completely kennel mad and had developed OCD behaviours to pass the time. They were completely unaware of a person at the end of the lead...but at least they got to smell some fresh air.
There was a litter of pups that had been bred to have kidney disease, so that the researchers could watch how it was expressed genetically through the generations. The whole litter was nullified because none of them had inherited the condition. They were being used as blood and bone marrow donors for the dogs that the vets were performing surgery on. They were scheduled to be placed into terminal studies if they were not adopted out.
These puppies were 6 months and were a crazy mix of German Shepherd, Border Collie, Rottweiler and Hound. Some of the pups looked like huge Shepherd mixes. One looked like a big red Vizla. Another was the spitting image of a yellow Lab and several others were the spitting image of a huge blood hound. These were the "F" series of pups. Their names all began with the letter F; such as Faun, Fletch, Fudge, Frolic etc. They were clearly the darlings of the walkers as they usually all got out for walks. All except one. Her name was Frolic and she looked the most "mixed" of them all. She was small and scrawny and had a hound face with a whippet-like body. She was a combination of so many different parts that her body looked like it had been drawn by a four year old. Her back end was higher than her front, her tail was far too long to be aesthetically pleasing and it curled and twined like a serpent. She was housed in her little 3X4 kennel with her adorable sister Faun who looked like a yellow lab. Faun was walked several times a week, but Frolic must have been too ugly to tug on any one's heart strings.
I'm sure you will have guessed who Frolic is already. I will tell the rest of the story later on, for now you just need to know that Faun was adopted immediately. However, when I went in to walk Frolic, I found her cage door had been inverted and tied with metal twine. I couldn't budge it to get her out for a walk.
She howled pitieously and was thrashing around, desperately eyeing the door. She had never been without her sister for so long and was clearly frightened.
I left to walk the other dogs on my roster, resolving to bring her some treats to make up for being unable to walk her.
Its funny how, some times, we don't consciously recognize the, soon to be, most important person in our lives. But, deep in the recesses of my brain.... thoughts of her were humming along and kept cropping up at the most unusual times. I didn't know if yet, but we had clicked!
Thats all for now. Have a great day, even if you are JUSTAMOM.
Maggie
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