Dogs

Mooka, our Husky mix, is considerably more attached to my wife, Laurel, than she is to me. Laurel does the dog training. Laurel takes Mooka for her favorite morning walk. Laurel takes Mooka to the dog park, another favorite place.  I feed Mooka in the late afternoon and give her a pre-dinner walk most days. But I'm under no illusion about who is the Alpha in Mooka's mind. It's Laurel. So when Laurel left last Friday for a four day trip to Indiana to see her relatives, I knew that Mooka wasn't going to be thrilled about being left with…

I keep reading about how modern dogs are evolved from wolves who became domesticated when people realized that they could be useful, and stopped chasing them away from their prehistoric camps. That's probably true. But now the dog-human relationship seems to have swung almost totally in the direction of dogs benefitting from living with us.  Sure, I enjoy the company of our Husky mix canine, Mooka. However, she doesn't contribute very much around our house. The most useful thing she does is occasionally catch a mole or vole that's burrowing in our yard. Meanwhile, she regularly drives my wife and…

All dogs are strange. Every dog owner knows this. That's part of what makes them so interesting and adorable -- their strangeness. Of course, if dogs could talk, I'm pretty sure they'd say, "Hey, you humans are even stranger!" No argument there. I wasn't a dog person until after a divorce I got married again to a woman who had a purebred German Shepherd. I had a cat. But not for long, since the dog and cat didn't get along. Fortunately, we were able to find a cat lady on the Oregon coast who was able to adopt my cat.…

Don't get me wrong. I didn't want our beloved older dog, ZuZu, to die. But she did last night, put out of her misery by a dose of morphine at Salem's emergency vet clinic. What made it a good day -- and now the tears are coming, as I figured they would when I set out to compose this blog post -- was how ZuZu and I got to have a pleasant day together yesterday, since she went downhill really fast, as I'll describe later on. Monday ZuZu and I had come back from central Oregon a day before my…

About six weeks ago my wife and I were told by our vet that our nine year old Shepherd mix (ZuZu) was in the late stages of her chronic liver disease and likely only had a few days or at most, weeks, to live. Her belly was filling up with fluid. Her eyes were yellowish. She was lethargic and didn't want to eat.  Along with having the fluid aspirated twice, putting her on milk thistle drops, diuretic, antibiotic, and a cortisone medication, I decided it wouldn't hurt to get some dog CBD -- the non-psychoactive component of marijuana.  Twice a…

Today's WillaMutt Strut at Salem's Riverfront Park (put on by the Willamette Humane Society) was a poignant dog event for me. Our dog, ZuZu, is in the late stages of chronic liver disease. Her vet has told us that likely she will live weeks or months, not years. So this probably was ZuZu's last Mutt Strut -- which she and I have gone to quite a few times. We had a good time, though. I was grateful for that. I'm also grateful that while we humans can grasp impending death, dogs can't.

Serena, a.k.a. our Wonder Dog, reportedly is a Millenium pup, born on January 1, 2000. We got her from a man in Portland when she was a year old. Great deal. Serena is priceless, yet cost us only $75.  She doesn't look like she did in her younger days. But heck, who does? Surely not me. Being almost fourteen, Serena is something like 100 years old in dog time. Serena is a Shepherd/Lab mix (her sisters looked like black labs; we were thrilled to get a kind-of German Shepherd-looking dog with a laid back Lab personality -- great combination). Her back…

Today the Salem Statesman Journal's "Pet Click" feature ran an adorable photo of our dogs, Zu Zu and Serena.  Here is how they looked in the paper. And here is the SJ web site version. Laurel, my wife, posed them with their "mini-me's" -- felt art portraits/sculptures marvelousluy fashioned by Amelia, of Amelia Makes Art. Interestingly, Amelia does her animal art thing (also cats, pigs, horses, maybe others) close-by, in northwest Portland. We can highly recommend her to anyone who wants a unique "portrait" of a pet.  This was Laurel's birthday present. She instantly fell in love with Amelia's work…

Here's a simple fact, lovers of loud fireworks: your enjoyment is being bought at the price of animal pain. Many dogs are terrified of fireworks. So also, I'm sure, are wild animals -- deer, birds, raccoons, etc. On behalf of our dog, Zu Zu, I just want you to be aware of what you're doing when you set off loud fireworks. I can't inject a sense of compassion into your fireworks-loving brain, though I sure wish I could. I just want to speak for the stressed-out dogs who can't write a blog post. And even if Zu Zu could, (she's a…

Our youngest dog, Zu Zu, sometimes goes into a Dog Frenzy. On a walk along the Metolius River in central Oregon, I was fortunate to have been making an iPhone video with Socialcam (great app) when Zu Zu went into a frenzy. It's shown near the end of my four-minute video, "Metolius River dog frenzy," which also features scenes of the beautiful spring-fed river and Zu Zu exhibiting her agility dog ability in some water'y stick fetching.   After an extensive five minutes or so of You Tube research, I am prepared to boldly claim that this is the most…

The state trooper guarding Mahonia Hall, the Oregon Governor's mansion here in Salem, gave me some faulty intelligence. I'm not blaming him; the enemies I asked about are notoriously sly and unpredictable. "Is it OK to bring our dogs in? We'd been told that the First Cats might be running around the mansion." "You're fine," the trooper replied. "They'll be shut away upstairs."  (Martha Russell photo) So began a saga that could have ended in a public relations nightmare for the Willamette Humane Society. Imagine the headline: Oregon's First Cats terrorized by dog pack at lunch won by donors at…

Dogs, we're told, evolved along with humans. So just as what other people do is a source of both joy and exasperation for us, family dogs are adept at the same behaviors.  As are children, of course. This is why I never regret having only one child. Early on I realized the truth of basic arithmetic: a mother and father together (2) outnumber a child (1), and apart equal the child (1 = 1). However, a mother and father together (2) equal a pair of children (2), and apart are outnumbered by them (1 < 2). Which explains the qualms…

Fame. It's fleeting. Especially if you're a dog. Got to divide potential human fame-years by seven. So today Laurel and I were thrilled to see Serena and Zu Zu prominently displayed at the top of page 6D in the Salem Statesman Journal. (Just five pages from page 1! And three sections from section A!) Naturally you'll want to click on the image to enlarge our dogs closer to full size. And if you want to preserve the PetClick in another electronic form to become part of your Important Historical Archives, here's the PDF file. Download Pet Click Statesman Journal  The…