Category: dog ownership

My Three Dogs

We have three dogs.  AJ, The Good Dog, Charlie, The Green-Eyed Monster, and Orso, The Drool Machine.  AJ, The Good Dog, a seventy pound Labrador, is sweet and loving, soft and gentle and totally devoted to me.  Most of the time he has a serious expression on his face, but when the mood strikes him, The Good Dog is full of the Devil.  I’ve seen him put Olympic style wrestling moves on a ninety five pound Doberman and take him to the ground, laying on top of Rocky just chewing on his neck.  Now at eleven years old, the moments of the Devil are fewer and farther between, but it’s still there when needed. 

We got Charlie, The Green-Eyed Monster, when he was ten weeks old.  AJ acted like a proud papa watching over him and playing with him as Charlie grew up.  It was pretty amazing watching AJ play to Charlie’s level, never too hard, only as hard as the puppy could handle.  As Charlie grew the play got rougher, teaching him how to handle himself.  Charlie is a sixty five pound half German Shorthair half Labrador and total psycho dog.  Even though he  was almost raised by AJ, he will get extremely jealous of the attention we give AJ or Orso.  At seven years old, he will still look at you with an expression that says, “I’m the baby!  Don’t play with him, touch me.”

I didn’t want Orso, The Drool Machine, didn’t want to even go look at him.  A coworker of Mitch’s has a son that had a nine month old Chocolate Lab who needed to get rid of him.  I kept telling Mitch two dogs was enough.  The was no tension, both dogs got along, nothing was getting destroyed, life was good.  But Mitch said, “Let’s just go take a look see.  We don’t have to bring him home.”  What a crock.  Mitch knows me well enough to know that if I see him, we’ll be bringing him home.  So long story short, we came home with a ninety five pound puppy.  At five years old, The Drool Machine has wormed his way into our hearts, so he is here to stay.

Fast and Deadly Charlie

Charlie once again proved that he is a fast and deadly hunter.  I’m not sure how I feel about it.  I let the three dogs out to do their business and Charlie shot up the steps, and disappeared behind the car before I could run up the steps behind him.  As I walked to the back of the car I heard a squeal and found Charlie flinging a squirrel to the ground.  Evidently he had run it down before the squirrel could get to the safety of a tree.  I called him off the wounded squirrel before he and the other dogs could finish it off.  The squirrel laid on the ground panting heavily for a few moments before getting up and scrambled to the closest tree, barely escaping death. 

I took the dogs back inside and checked Charlie for any wounds from the squirrel and found a couple of places below his right eye that looked like the squirrel had scratched him trying to get away.  I cleaned the scratches up and put ointment on them.  He looked up at me with a quizzical look of his face.  He wanted me to proud of him for his quickness and precision at snagging his prey and a part of me was.  I’m proud that he is fast and doesn’t have any hesitation when going after prey.  When we’re pheasant hunting it’s important that the dog is willing and without any hesitation, rushes into brush, tall grasses and plum thickets to flush and retrieve birds.  But at the same time I was appalled that he ran the squirrel down, grabbed it, flung it to the ground and if I hadn’t stopped him, he would have gone back in for the kill. 

Does that make me a hypocrite, it’s okay for us to hunt and shoot pheasants (we do eat them), but not let the dogs do what comes naturally to them?  It’s not like squirrels are on the endangered species list, and are terribly destructive, but somehow my sense of fair play was bothered by it all.  I felt bad for the squirrel and at the same time was proud that Charlie had once again proven that he will be an asset when we go pheasant hunting this fall.

My Burr-Fect Dogs

All three covered in stick tights, happy and tired after a three mile hike.

Charlie always on the hunt.

 

Orso, watching the others and waiting.

Ah, The Quiet of the Early Morning, Not!

Where is a large bird of prey when you need it?  We’re on vacation this week, which means we get to sleep in past our normal 2:45 am wake up call.  Sounds wonderful, but only in theory.  In reality we have a neighbor that owns two very obnoxious “squeaky toys” with four legs.  They were up and at it barking their heads off at 4:15 this morning.  I know because I looked at the clock.  I laid there for a few minutes thinking all sorts of evil thoughts of different ways of their demise.  Of course, I could never actually follow through with any of my mental wanderings, because ultimately it’s not the dogs fault.  The blame rests squarely on the owner’s shoulders.

Maybe he was lonely, I don’t know, but getting a dog requires a lot more than just being a cure for loneliness.  You have to interact with them, a lot.  There’s training, training and more training. Affection and lots of exercise.  We have labs, and labs have a ton of energy and if left to their own devices, can get very hyper and destructive, mostly from boredom.  Everyone that comes to our home always comments on how laid back they are.  Don’t get me wrong, we don’t have giant rugs here, these guys can destroy a room in no time (and have) if we would let them.  Our neighbor even built a doggie door for them so that he didn’t have to get up to let them out.  Which means now he has even less interaction with them.  He fenced off a tiny little area in his yard for them to run around in. Maybe a six square foot area.  He fenced it off with a garden fence, something my dogs wouldn’t even notice as they walked through.  So now these two loud obnoxious animals rush outside at all hours and bark incessantly. Amazing how something so small can be so loud.  It is beginning to grate on my last nerve.  Even my dogs are tired of their irritating rants.  On our walk yesterday, Charlie turned and started to charge at the dogs with hair raised down his back.  I was almost tempted but I was sure there might have been witnesses.

I’ve even tried to make up to them with no success.  No I really don’t want to see the dogs dead, just quiet.

Games dogs play

Cooler weather means more wrestling

 

 A great game of keep away

Come on in the Water’s Fine

Cooling off before finishing the hike

My Mental Health Day

I took a mental health day today.  It’s just the dogs and me today and I decided that I needed a day to do something that I really love to do, (besides going wine tasting).  I mulled over all the different things I would really love to do if I had a day all to myself.  The winner hands down is taking the dogs hiking someplace pretty rugged and primitive.  There is a place not far from here that fits the bill perfectly.  The only problem is that I’ve only been there once and am not sure how exactly to get there, so I came up with the most logical solution.  I co-oped a friend of ours that takes his dogs there all the time to take us along. 

I’m so excited, the weather will be great, 58 degrees this morning with a high of 70.  The dogs are already out of control, using the front room as their personal wrestling arena, killing time chewing on each other’s faces.  I know, we’re really warped.

I promised that I would wait until 8:45 before calling our friend, but could only make to 8:30.  Thankfully he was up and had started on his first cup of coffee.  I loaded up the dogs and headed his way.  The morning was beautiful.  Sunny and cool, perfect for a hike.  The dogs were so excited, pacing around the back of the station wagon on the drive over.  We parked the cars, unloaded the dogs, he brought one of his, Stella, a Belgian Malinois mix.  She weighs in at about 65 pounds and the sweetest little girl.  The dogs could barely contain their enthusiasm, all the smells calling them, teasing them.  They were in sensory nirvana.  They all headed off down the road, sniffing and peeing on every weed, AJ immediately took a dump right in the middle of the road.  The first of many this morning.  That’s my AJ. 

Charlie ran back and forth across the path and into the underbrush and woods around us, always on the hunt searching for a promising scent.  What surprised us both was Stella was right on his heels the entire hike, following him everywhere.  Charlie acted like they had been hunting buddies forever.  For Charlie, that’s really something.  AJ and Orso stayed pretty close to the path and us, not wandering too far, but we would have call Charlie and Stella back often.  Neither one of us wanted to try out my de-skunking kit. 

We were the only ones out there.  It was wonderful.  A truly refreshing, relaxing and invigorating mental health day.  I can’t wait to go again.

Mine!

Nothing like a good game of tug o war to start the day on a cool September morning.

Enjoying the cooler weather

AJ letting Orso know he can still hold his own