Belated Happy Birthday

by Bryan

8 comments

1 hipparchia { 04.19.22 at 5:23 pm }

i’ve got 3 that will turn 15 this spring/summer. i can not tell you how many times i keep promising my self NO MOAR ‘PROJECT’ PETZ ELEVENTY-ONE !11!!11!

2 Bryan { 04.20.22 at 11:25 pm }

Then someone leaves a pet behind when they leave and the dog/cat shows up at your house and looks pathetic… Been there, etc.

3 hipparchia { 04.22.22 at 7:45 pm }

yep, kits happen 🙂

also, i am a sucker for the ones in the shelter who are only hours away from execution because they are deemed unadoptable. both curmudgeon cat and the dog that came before fbd were last-minute rescues (a couple of decades apart, so they never met, which was probably a good thing).

both times, i was just about to choose the nice, calm, quiet, friendly, lovable, well-behaved, floofy floof, just before the shelter was about to close for the day, when some keen-eyed shelter worker spotted the invisible ‘sucker!’ sign above my head and said, ‘just take one more look at this one over here, today is his last day.’

4 Bryan { 04.22.22 at 9:13 pm }

There’s nothing like guilt to make a sale. I encourage people to go the county shelter first because they are a ‘kill’ shelter and you have to get the shots and neutering for adoption. If they try to adopt an unsocialized feral, they are asking for trouble that leads to the shelter.

5 hipparchia { 04.26.22 at 9:40 pm }

fluffy red dog was an amazing dog, and i totally understand why he had been turned in to the shelter — imagine a small-ish border collie (in brains, energy, agility, and herding ability), dyed irish setter red (with all the irish setter energy added to all the border collie energy), with the guarding and attack instincts (and energy and agility) of a schutzhund-trained malinois…

he was my best buddy for the next 14 years, and it was just pure luck that i was living a lifestyle where i could give him enough outlets for all that drive; few city dwellers could have.

i never took curmudgeon cat out to see if he would herd the horses, but in pretty much everything else he was a carbon copy of fluffy red dog, which worked out well, because me and fbd were 2 wimpy scaredy cats living in a dodgy neighborhood at the time and needed a protector 🙂

6 Bryan { 04.27.22 at 9:23 pm }

I have a friend who is a vet tech. The vet she works for has a border collie and he brings him to the office. The poor dog is ready to explode with all of the build up energy. He needs something to herd.

We had a German shepherd that liked to herd cows, whether the farmer wanted them herded or not. The farmer was lax about maintaining the fence between the properties and as soon as they put a hoof on our property Suzie went into full herding mode returning the cows to their barn through other peoples front yards. I don’t know why people got upset, they got free fertilizer 😈

7 hipparchia { 04.30.22 at 9:18 pm }

free fertilizer! what’s not to like? 😈

the first time i took frd out to the barn, he leaped out of the car, froze, and dashed off at full throttle into the pasture. no, of course he couldn’t hear me calling him, and i had visions of $$$$$ for vet bills and fence repair bills from the stampeding horde swimming through my brain as my eyeballs rolled back in my head (i had no idea he was a herding dog).

but as he got closer to the horses he did the full border collie thing, carefully and quietly rounded them up and moved them off to one corner of the pasture, and dropped down into the grass for a rest break, keeping an eye on them.

8 Bryan { 05.03.22 at 9:27 pm }

The herding instinct comes out, usually at the most inappropriate moment. The basic training took place at some point and it never goes away. People who take in herding dogs need the space and energy to tire them out.