It's just a dog.

[TNKen]

Sigh. Always a thread that makes an empty spot for all of us.

Our white boxer Piper was 6 this week, and Gracie the reverse brindle was 4. Boxers have a life expectancy of only about 10 years. :-(

[MarcusBrody]

We had to put my dog, Kaylee, to sleep on Monday. She was 7 or 8.

She had been a healthy, seemingly indestructible dog (save one ACL that was surgically repaired) and had eaten many things supposedly toxic to dogs with little effect beyond some vigorous pooping. We went on a cross country road trip this summer to visit my parents. She loved riding in the van with us on any adventure, but particularly liked visiting my parents as they live in the middle of the woods where she could just roam and sniff/chase things whenever she felt the doggy desire. Then she had a seizure and six weeks later she was gone from a brain tumor.


I love dogs, but hadn't wanted to get one when we did. My life was too unencumbered at that point. I could get up and go biking before work or shoot off to ski with no planning whatsoever. My wife was a bit lonely in a new place though, so we got a dog. My wife visited the animal shelter and fell in love with Kaylee. She said she was the only dog that wasn't barking wildly. Which was odd, because in the next 7 years, Kaylee would bark wildly at everything. They said that she was a cattle dog mix. I didn't believe them but years later when I did a DNA test, it claimed the same.

It took a few months to train her to be reliable off leash, but once she was, we started a long mutually beneficial tradition of going to the woods every day to let her run off her crazy. I'm a person who likes people, but prefers to have a good part of my day devoid of them, so we were a good pair. When my son was born, we spent even more time in the woods, with him strapped to my chest, so my wife could rest. We built a whole mini-trail network on the hill behind my house/employer. It was absolutely all that kept me sane for a few stretches of my life, but without having Kaylee to force me to go out, I know I wouldn't have.

She biked with me, hiked with me, ski toured with me (during the rare winters we got enough snow close to home). During Covid, she would just ride along in the car with my son and I as we searched for new out of the way places to explore. I thought of us as a three person adventure team. She was a wonderful pup.

[riser4]

Fuck. I got something in my eye.

[stealurface831]

fucking vibes man.

[tango uniform]

That's horrible man. I'm really sorry.

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[MarcusBrody]

Thanks everyone. She was a really good dog and I was looking forward to enjoying the "mature dog lounges around with you and goes on long walks" stage, having completed the "bonkers energy stage."

The reason I did the DNA test a year or two ago was actually because she was chilling out and losing a little bit of stamina/desire to run non-stop a bit more quickly than I expected. I was curious if she was a shorter lived breed than suspected. She wasn't. Cattle dogs life a long time and catahoulas aren't short lived, but I wonder if something was going on even then.

My grandma died the day before the dog, and in some ways the latter has been harder on me. I loved my grandma a lot and she was one of the most wonderful people I ever met but I could respect and smile at her going out on her own terms, at home, and consciously avoiding the unpleasant, end of life medical ritual that might have happened. I'm going to miss her forever, but she had a good life and got to go out as she wanted so I can respect and smile at that. I think I feel more responsible for my dog's quality of life and while there wasn't really anything to do, the thought of her depending on me and looking to me as she lost control of her body still makes me tear up. Still, it was a really rough weekend overall.

[seano732]

Fuck Marcus I’m so sorry…….Vibes to you and yours.

[mcski]

Argh. What a great dog. Sorry for your loss

[Mazderati]

Yeah, that's rough. RIP.

[dan_pdx]

that's a hell of a double whammy, I'm sorry for your loss. It sounds like Kaylee was a great dog.

[Core Shot]

RIP Kaylee.

What a good dog.

[bendtheski]

Sorry for your loss.


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[Bunion 2020]

I am not a huge fan of PETA but this is a pretty good albeit heartbreaking round up. Sorry behind the WAPO paywall.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magaz...re-top-stories

From the front, the one-story clapboard house looks dingy and dilapidated, and the lawn is cluttered with crap. The backyard makes the front look like Versailles.

The wooden stairs from the back door to the yard are rotted through and have collapsed. In the grass is a rusted-out 1990s-era Camaro. There are tangles of scrap metal, discarded car parts, a sodden mattress, corroded appliances, a deceased push mower, a toolshed boarded up with plywood. There are ripe piles of garbage and moldering pits of ashes where trash and food scraps have been burned. As a portrait of desperation, destitution and decay, the tableau is almost literary. Faulkner’s Snopeses, meet Steinbeck’s Joads.

No person lives in this house, which is in rural northern North Carolina, a financially annihilated area where many people are living thin. Let’s call it No-No Land. The house has been abandoned since January, when the owner, an elderly man, died of covid-19. We are here in late July. The squalor seems lifeless, but, terribly, it isn’t.

You hear the three dogs baying before you see them, and then you see them and recoil. Each is tethered to a metal cable, which is tethered to its own primitive wooden doghouse. Each animal has only a few dozen square feet within which to move. The dogs can see and hear the others, but it is a tantalizing cruelty — they are so far apart they cannot touch or play. Neighbors never stop by. These three females have been alone outside, imprisoned apart in the same spots in this rotting place, day and night, for six months. Today it is 85 in the shade. They are panting. To Faulkner and Steinbeck you might have to add some Dante.

When the owner died, the house and animals were inherited by his daughter, who lives in another state. She has a relative who is supposed to stop in every once in a while to replenish the dogs’ food and water, but his visits appear to be intermittent and momentary. For reasons that defy common sense and decency, the daughter has chosen this heartless system rather than adopt the dogs herself or surrender them to someone who will care for them.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals knows about this place, and, with the grudging consent of the new owner, the animal rights organization sends a team of field workers to visit from time to time. They clean and refill the bowls and distribute flea meds and chew toys and straw for bedding and skritches under the neck, but they can’t alleviate the big problem, and they can’t come here often. Their headquarters are in Norfolk, 100 miles away, and they have hundreds of other mistreated animals to check in on, and new ones to find. And now the conditions here have deteriorated to this.

The three PETA workers fan out to take a look. The first dog, a youngish black hound and border collie mix, is named Sharon. Sharon is exuberant. Somehow her spirit is not yet broken. But her water bowl is filled with a noisome black, brackish liquid — what has fouled it, and for how long, is anyone’s guess. Her food bowl, a big plastic pail, contains soggy, rain-drenched kibble, and roaches, maggots and snails. This squirming swill is her only sustenance. Still, she’s wagging, starving not so much for protein but for affection.

The second dog, 100 feet away across the yard, is Lady, a small mixed breed with a tricolor, patchwork face. Her body is rat gray, but that’s deceiving. The PETA people know she is mostly mashed-potato white; among the few things nearby is an ash pit, in which she rolls obsessively to ease the torment of fleas. Even from several feet away you can see she is a wriggling carpet of parasites. The PETA workers have nicknamed her Pancake because when she greets people she playfully flattens herself against the ground. This dog’s spirit is also not broken, but her body is. She is emaciated. There is no food within reach. Her ribs protrude like barrel staves. In a photo PETA had taken just a month before, she was still adequately fleshed.
Roxy wears a heavy chain in North Carolina. Some dog owners use big chains to thicken dogs’ neck muscles, making the dogs look bigger and tougher.

“She’s lost a quarter of her body weight!”

This is Daphna Nachminovitch, PETA’s senior vice president of cruelty investigations. Her domain is a part of PETA that is less familiar to the public than the organization’s more notorious side, the provocateur side that has historically reveled in public confrontations and flamboyant stunts.

Nachminovitch is 50, a native Israeli with fine features, a faintly sibilant accent and weary, seen-everything eyes. As a PETA executive, she sometimes is a speaker at fancy fundraisers, where she rocks the evening-wear look under lush, shoulder-length silver hair. But in the field she mashes that hair into a bun and dresses in T-shirts, cargo pants and sturdy waterproof boots for trudging through turds, puke, pee, slop, chiggers, mosquito larvae, soil fungus and septic-tank runoff, so that she can get to animals trapped in grievously inhospitable places.

Nachminovitch walks on to find the third dog, Shortie, a little black and brown mutt. In the past year, in this place, Shortie has lost her heart and her mind. The deterioration has accelerated since she’s been trapped here 24/7. She is hiding under a rusted automobile drive train and muffler, an aggressive snarl of weeds, and a big curved metal frame that might once have been a hotel luggage cart. When Nachminovitch approaches, the dog cowers and shrinks deeper into the junk.
Read more
In Search of Healing: America is facing one of the deepest divides in our history and a difficult path forward
The Beating Heart: A tragic crime. A medical breakthrough. A last chance at life.

Nachminovitch is a firebrand by nature, a diplomat by necessity. Her teams must try to work with the cooperation of the pet owners; if an owner orders them off the property, legally PETA must leave and cannot return, which means the animals are often goners unless the organization can wheedle the cooperation of the local authorities. That is never a given, even where the conditions are unambiguously illegal — which, often, they are not. Local ordinances do not tend to favor the nonhuman. So Nachminovitch and her workers are unfailingly polite and ingratiating, even when confronting the obstinate, the ignorant, the hostile, the unapologetically inhumane. But right now, with this situation, and with the homeowner elsewhere, she is white-knuckled, pop-veined and ominously silent.

“I am not leaving these dogs today,” she says quietly to Jenny Teed, her deputy.

Teed, who is from Baton Rouge and whom everyone calls Gator, tells her boss that she has tried to phone and email the owner for permission to extract the dogs, with no luck, and the woman probably would refuse anyway. She has refused before.

“I. Am. Not. Leaving. These. Dogs. Today.” Nachminovitch repeats.

She means she is going to steal them.

And she does, after a brief cover-your-ass phone call with Ingrid Newkirk, PETA’s founder and president.

The chains are unlatched. Sharon is walked to the PETA van. Nachminovitch carries Pancake, the starving one. She looks at the two dogs, in cages in the air-conditioned vehicle, and says, “They’ll be more comfortable than they ever have been in their lives.” It is true; almost as soon as they are in they fall into untroubled sleep.

[riser4]

Oof. Slippery slope. POS shit owners. But no way am I fan of vigilante actions. And PETA can suck an oozing syphilis infected dick.

[Supermoon]

No, sorry riser, if someone abandons dogs like that they give up claims to them. They are living beings and if they are being tortured anyone getting them out of that situation. So yeah, I might not agree or like some of the things PETA does, but in this situation they absolutely did the right thing.

[Jax]

Congrats, freaking adorable.

[bendtheski]

He is. I moved the post over to doggie stoke. Hopefully just good news on the doggo front for at least a little while.


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[Tips^Up]

Last Friday, after 14.5 fluffy years, we put Fia down. She was a college graduation present to myself, always by my side - until I met my wife and I became Fia's 2nd favorite person. She's seen mountaintops and river bottoms, oceans and cliffs, blue ribbons as the town's most talented dog, and also caused a lot of trouble in her day (like eating the Johnson's family's Christmas roast, or an entire holiday ham during my brother and my Monarch ski trip, or ruining the kickball game at first pitch because she chased down and popped the only ball, or barking all night long with arthritic pain). She was eventually partnered with Huckleberry, and then welcomed and stood watch over our 2 kids. It was a sad decision but she's no longer in pain and can chase frisbees forever in doggy heaven. Thanks to everyone that's ever known her or helped watch her. Her last day was memorable, drinking from the Eagle River, eating steak on top of a mountain, and being in my arms, surrounded by her flock.

[tgapp]

Last Friday, after 14.5 fluffy years, we put Fia down. She was a college graduation present to myself, always by my side - until I met my wife and I became Fia's 2nd favorite person. She's seen mountaintops and river bottoms, oceans and cliffs, blue ribbons as the town's most talented dog, and also caused a lot of trouble in her day (like eating the Johnson's family's Christmas roast, or an entire holiday ham during my brother and my Monarch ski trip, or ruining the kickball game at first pitch because she chased down and popped the only ball, or barking all night long with arthritic pain). She was eventually partnered with Huckleberry, and then welcomed and stood watch over our 2 kids. It was a sad decision but she's no longer in pain and can chase frisbees forever in doggy heaven. Thanks to everyone that's ever known her or helped watch her. Her last day was memorable, drinking from the Eagle River, eating steak on top of a mountain, and being in my arms, surrounded by her flock.

I'm so sorry for your loss. Thanks for taking the time to write and share such a touching eulogy for your friend and companion. It sounds like Fia enjoyed a wonderful life.

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[bendtheski]

Very sorry for your loss. Sweet looking pup.


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[TNKen]

Sorry for your family and your puppers. Beautiful dog.

[Bosco]

Sorry for your loss. As bad as it feels when they go, it was a good thing that we were there in the good times.

[skiJ]

I'm so sorry for your loss. Thanks for taking the time to write and share such a touching eulogy for your friend and companion. It sounds like Fia enjoyed a wonderful life.

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+1. Great tribute - thank you.

my Condolences.
With love, tj

[garyfromterrace]

Fia was so lucky to have you and your family Tips^up. Sorry for your loss man.

[happytimefunbox]

Mr Ridgemont started to get lethargic and dropped 20lbs in 2 weeks. Looks like he is ate up with cancer in his spleen and liver and elsewhere in his abdomen.

FUCK

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