Posts Tagged ‘pets’
Animal Care
Caring for our animals is a lot like caring for children, except they will never grow to become self-sufficient and eventually move out and have a life of their own. Do I sound tired?
You know that part of my life where I go off on bike rides because I find time to embark on such a frivolous pursuit? It happens a lot less often after we decided to have pets that require so much care. Luckily, humans tend to fall in love with animals almost as much as they do with their own children, so it ends up being a labor of love.
Of course, when you love people and pets, it is tough to watch them suffer illness. Even though it took almost three days for her to reveal symptoms, Cyndie thinks that Delilah’s current problems have a high likelihood of being the result of her activity while roaming loose on the neighboring properties last Saturday.
Tuesday afternoon, when I got home from work, Cyndie reported two interesting morsels of news: 1) She found the fully intact and well-preserved remains of the infamous goldfish when cleaning debris from our landscape pond. Surreptitiously deposited back in May of 2016, it was only spotted two times over the course of it’s time here. 2) Delilah was suffering from severe diarrhea.
Seconds after they followed me into the house, Delilah vomited on the old Hays family farm rug in the porch. When Cyndie went down to the barn to tend to the horses, she left Delilah in the house to rest. A few minutes later, Delilah came to the chair I was sitting in and looked at me.
I hustled to get her leash and get out the door. She practically pulled me across the driveway and down the slope into the trees and leaves where she experienced the worst canine diarrhea I had ever witnessed. Our doggie was seriously ill with some gastrointestinal disruption.
Tuesday night was one of constant sleep interruptions, and Cyndie described yesterday as producing gradually reducing symptoms. Delilah ate some rice with chicken broth. I took her for a walk after work and saw what we hope was one of the last gasps of an attempt to release the pressure of mostly virtual diarrhea.
I marveled at Delilah’s ability to proceed with the remainder of the walk in her usual mode of inspired curiosity at the world of scents. It was as if the disaster that I just watched playing out in her digestive system had never occurred.
It made the role of loving witness to her suffering that much easier to bear.
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Delilah’s Dilemma
Delilah must have rolled into some sap. Cyndie thinks it might have been bugging Delilah for a few days. Our poor dog was biting at it, pulling her hair out, and licking obsessively, which eventually created a sore spot of raw skin.
When I got home from the day-job, Cyndie was working her way through an escalating series of interventions to dissuade Delilah from messing with the sore. She had yet to find a method that achieved her goal.
Poor Delilah didn’t realize her lack of cooperation was the cause for the increasingly intrusive control methods being hoisted upon her.
Finally, out came the pad and cling wrap. Cyndie started applying it while Delilah was lying down on her side, and I was getting ready for the chaos that was about to happen when Cyndie tried getting the cling around Delilah’s body. Then she told Delilah to stand up, and the dog responded perfectly, allowing Cyndie to complete the wrap.
It wasn’t very tight, so after a couple of hours it had slid down off the sore spot, but it did help Delilah stop fixating on the wound for a little while.
Before the end of the night, Cyndie had reached the point where she was willing to try the “cone of shame” around Delilah’s head. It wasn’t a full effort, stopping short of threading her collar through loops on the cone as directed, so it didn’t last long. It didn’t really matter. Delilah’s obvious misery was so extreme, to the point of not wanting to move a step while tucking her tail and ignoring any offering of treats, it led to the swift removal of the psychological torture.
It was such a sorry sight, I didn’t have the heart to violate her indignity with a photo recording the moment.
We prefer to remember her in her better days, like the time this weekend when Cyndie grabbed a pillow off the couch and set it on the floor in front of the fireplace to lay on. In a flash of milliseconds after the pillow landed, Delilah dove in for a pin-point landing before Cyndie could lean back.
The dog had arrived with her fangs wrapped around a precious morsel of bone and went about her business with a feigned obliviousness to the intrusion she had brilliantly executed. When Cyndie turned to question the violation of space, she got the well-known universal dog expression. The look that says, “What’d I do?”
Puppy eyes. Twist of the head.
“Whaa~aaat?”
She knew exactly what she’d done. I don’t buy that act for a minute.
Yesterday, shortly after my photos of disappearing snow posted, we got a fresh new (temporary) inch of white stuff covering everything. Cyndie cleaned off the upper parking pad of the driveway.
Delilah was granted some leash-free time to watch. I think the snow probably felt good on her sore spot. She makes for such a noble looking sentry, doesn’t she?
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Remembering Clarity
I’m trying to remember what clarity is like. It seems like it was a long time ago that I last experienced a moment of clarity. Lately, everything is a combination of spider webs and fog interspersed with moments of wind whipped precipitation and hours of lost sleep.
Not lost as in, I don’t know where I put it, but the kind of lost which I can never get back. It’s gone. No longer exists.
But I can make more. There is more where that came from.
Don’t worry. Even Delilah is confused by all this.
She can’t figure out why I’m not getting over that moment of her violating the sanctity of my dinner plate. If I thought she could understand, I’d explain that it’s because I don’t want to get over it.
Our dog is now facing a new regimen of training in which I re-establish my dominance over her.
I’m not confident that she is putting 2 and 2 together, but I do know that she understands what I’m after when I demand she lay down and let me straddle her and stand very purposefully. She does not want to give up her power without a fair amount of resistance. Outlasting her is one thing that I may not have enough patience for.
I tend to think of myself as a patient man, but I’m finding out there are some situations to which that doesn’t apply.
Or maybe it’s just hampered by a lack of clarity.
I’m hoping that a few nights of decent sleep might produce a new dose of that forgotten clarity. Now, if I could just remember how it was that I got a decent night’s sleep.
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Pet Scapades
Sure it’s cold. So what does that have to do with Pequenita, our indoor cat? She has been a lot more playful the last few days. Cyndie let ‘Nita have her way with some tissue paper yesterday and the cat went to town on it. It was fun to watch, because it was a bit out of character for her.
Other than that brief excitement indoors, the rest of my day involved shoveling, tending to the horses, walking Delilah, fixing the winch cable on the Grizzly, and plowing the rest of the driveway in the evening darkness. I was cold and hungry when I finally headed inside, and happily discovered the scent of dinner preparations upon my arrival.
Cyndie has made so much progress this weekend, she was able to move around without the walker and could stand long enough in the kitchen to prepare food. Since it’s still difficult to carry things, I brought her dinner plate to the bedroom for her, where she was putting her leg up to rest.
When I returned to the kitchen to get my plate from the counter, I saw nothing but salad left on my plate. Delilah was chomping my entrée on the floor. More indoor excitement. At least it wasn’t the cat.
What a way to wreck a meal. Cyndie split her serving in half and shared it with me, but I had a hard time enjoying it after seeing my original portion spread on the kitchen floor. What bothered me the most was the feeling of betrayal and disrespect of our food on the counter by Delilah.
Someone really needs to teach that dog some manners. Is there an app for that?
For the time being, I am going to practice not letting my plates of food out of my sight when she is around.
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Scratch Fest
When I walk in the door at home after work, Pequenita kicks it in to high gear, meowing and rubbing herself against my legs in a plea for attention. The second I settle somewhere to take a load off my feet, she climbs aboard.
I am at her service, giving her whatever she seems to want the most, in terms of massage and scratching. Her head shifts up and down, to and fro, moving to direct my fingers to the next sweet spot.
I suppose we both gain something out of the exercise, but I get the impression that she tends to enjoy it just a little bit more than I.
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Nail Appointment
The horses had their hooves trimmed yesterday. We are nearing the end of the season of rapid hoof growth, as the days grow shorter and the horses’ bodies shift their energy to growing a winter coat of hair. The hoof growth is still going summer-strong and combined with the wet weather we’ve experienced all summer, our horses’ feet have looked pretty rough around the edges.
Cayenne has received some special attention since her days of lameness when she developed an abscess on one foot. George has been slowly reshaping the hoof over a period of multiple trims to correct the way it will support her weight. She has one hoof that tends to develop a crack in it.
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The horses weren’t the only animals having an adventure here yesterday. Delilah was exposed to a wonderfully submissive female bob-tailed Australian Shepherd. We are always grateful for a chance to work on Delilah’s socialization, and this episode verified we are a long way from having control over her aggression.
Delilah is good at blocking out our attempts to command her to stand down, soldier. I’m afraid she requires reprimands that equal her outbursts, and I’m not sure our level tends to match hers.
I don’t know how to balance an intense level of reproach between that which would be effective and one inducing unintended trauma to her canine psyche. We got her when she was already almost 10-months old, not knowing the full extent of her early history, and it seems to us that she shows occasional signs of possible past trauma.
Cyndie is considering shopping around for a training school course this fall. She has my full support.
Our feline had a different sort of adventure last night. Pequenita was conspicuously absent overnight and this morning, such that it was the very first thing Cyndie and I spoke of this morning. Where was the cat?
She has a history of wanting to get outside. Last night we had company over and ate dinner on the deck, so were in and out of enough doors that ‘Nita had plenty of opportunities to sneak out. Our first thoughts were to look outside, but logic told me that there are plenty of indoor places where she might have gotten trapped behind a closed door.
With that in mind, it didn’t take long to hear her distant call from the storage room downstairs. She was thirsty and starved for affection, but otherwise unharmed by her overnight confinement away from her peeps.
We dive into another day of relative animal normalcy with our crew…
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Cat Love
For the last ten minutes, when I could have been typing with two hands, I have instead been thoroughly preoccupied by a certain cat who plopped down on the corner of my laptop, strategically beneath my right hand. In our house, I appear to be the cat magnet.
Our little tortoiseshell, Pequenita, always comes to the door to greet me when I get home from work. If Delilah happens to be in the house, ‘Nita waits for a turn, but she makes a point to visit. She has this wonderful/terrible habit of reaching up my leg for a stretch, and flexing her cute little front paws so that her sharp claws pass right through anything but my heaviest Carhartt jeans to make startling contact with my delicate flesh.
I know she means well, but the reaction it involuntarily evokes involves spontaneous reflex flinching, some yelling, occasionally cursing, a bit of anger, a dash of sadness and hurt feelings, and perplexity over her lack of sensitivity to my plight. That all leads to my questioning why we have a cat.
Then I remember, we have a cat so we will have something to clean off the coils under the refrigerator whenever we get around to checking it. I assume, as ironic as it would be, the mice around here are thrilled over the vast resource of nest material that piles up in every out-of-sight nook and cranny in our house.
After the ten-minutes of head scratching and full-body massaging that she gets from me when I crawl in bed and she arrives for her session, there is a small blizzard of cat hair sticking to me, my keyboard, the comforter, her back, and floating in the air currents of the heat vents.
What can I do? She loves me.
I’m her pin cushion and her masseuse.
I must admit, it is kinda nice to have one pet in the house who doesn’t go into barking fits over sights and sounds outside these walls. Maybe I should work on getting the cat to try out the stretchy clawing maneuver on the dog every time there is an eruption from Ms. Barksalot.
The old stimulus / response model thing.
Delilah’s smart. She’d probably figure out she shouldn’t go all panicky barking at squirrels after a few sessions from Pequenita, don’t ya think?
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Not Food
Time appears to be assuaging the angst, and moods are lifting for all the inhabitants of our household. Yesterday, for the first time since we brought her home, we let Delilah spend some time in the yard with us, off leash. She did wonderful. Since she was focused on the play, it’s not entirely clear that she even noticed that she was free of the leash.
Before untethering her, Cyndie was tossing the squeaking tennis ball for Delilah to help her practice catching it in mid-air
We continue to work on training her to respond to our commands, and she is showing continuous improvement, thus far.
There was also significant advancement in the process of acclimatizing the dog and cats to sharing house space. The cats are both showing clear behaviors of decreasing the distance they have been maintaining from Delilah, and the dog has actually had moments of calm, or at least, semi-calm, in their presence.
Last night Cyndie was coaxing the cats closer with some treats, and then decided to share the treats with Delilah, too, for behaving civil with the cats in plain sight, and within close proximity. It seemed like a moment of family bliss, and a hint of possibilities for the future.
A bit later, when Lilah was straining on her leash to get after Mozyr, she didn’t even realize that Pequenita had come to sit on the stool just over her head. The dog made a loop around to the other side of the kitchen island, searching for a better look at Moz, and then came back, suddenly appearing surprised to find Nita just sitting there overhead, inches away.
We were pleased to see Nita hold her ground, and even swing to tap away Lilah’s nose when she felt it was getting too close for comfort.
The phrase, “friends, not food” is being repeated often around here lately. I think we are getting the message across.
Just missed.
Ball is hard to spot; in line with the truck front bumper.
Relative Something 