Category Archives: critters

pets

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There is an old dog in my house. When I met him, he was a small, young, upstart of a puppy. That was over fifteen years ago.

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He is now old. Some say that he is past his life expectancy. He doesn’t seem to always know that. My Alyosha loves to play fetch, although instead of all day sessions of running back and forth in a field, he now can seem to only muster enough energy for two to three rounds of bringing a tennis ball from one end of the yard back to me. His hips bother him quite a bit, but he is stubborn.

Yosh has always been an anxious dog. But it has gotten to the point where his daily life is greatly impacted by this tension. He pants and paces, he claws at carpet and doors. He is often inconsolable.

When I was 13 my childhood dog, Hoka, died. He was a 14 year old Shepherd mutt and my best friend. He had gotten into a fight with an opossum and hadn’t fared so good. A bite from that opossum on his face became infected and in his old age, he became a sicky dog. My mom made the final decision, and it made sense with that old and sick dog.

I understand making that decision when your pet is physically ailing, obviously in physical pain and unable to care for him/her self. But how do you make that decision when it is their mind that is going? There is no measurable quantity. The critter can’t tell you how badly they are ailing either by voice or by veterinary test, only by their actions. And those actions could be misinterpreted. When do you decide that all reasonable options have been exhausted? A dog at 15 years old is an old dog. A very old dog can get up around 18 years old, but rarely with good quality of life at that point.

Our responsibility towards the creatures we keep in our lives as pets includes feeding, healthy care, giving and receiving love, and end of life comfort. It is a unique situation that we have agreed upon as a society that ending the life of these creatures is also our responsibility. Some people are more pragmatic than others. I have seen pet parents who have been unable to make that final decision, and instead, watch their pet wither away for years. That is not the quality of life I want for my critters, but how do you decide when is that date? Do you decide once you see the inevitable downhill slide of their physical and/or mental state? Do you wait for them to be unable to groom and eat for themselves? What metric do we apply to this process?

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alyosha

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I grew up with dogs, but had never trained or had one solely under my care. When I was a kid, Hoka was my close friend and exploring buddy. There was no discipline or off-limits…That was moms to worry about.

Hoka died when I was 13, and we soon adopted a pretty 40lb collie mix. Her name was Honey because of her coloring. She was very sweet, but disappeared not long after we adopted her. Mom figured that Honey got taken down by coyotes.

We didn’t have another dog and I missed having that companion.

I adopted Alyosha doggie from a small run down shelter in southern Illinois when he was just a few months old in the Fall of 1999.

When he was two years old, a friend told me that my Border Collie mutt would probably start to mellow around age four or five. It wasn’t until he was in his double digits that I noticed any sign of him slowing down. He wouldn’t chase a ball all day – just half a day.

He’s getting old now. His eyes are getting cloudy and he has difficulty getting into the car.

He had a small seizure last month and it worried me, but it hasn’t happened again.

The other day he started to limp. It wasn’t a bad limp, but noticeable. I wondered if I should take him to the vet. But the limp seemed to resolve itself by the next morning, so I didn’t take him. That following evening, he started to limp again. And the next morning it was worse, so I called the vet.

Somehow, my 14-year-old dog managed to strain a ligament in his left front shoulder.
I am now tasked with keeping him on “bed rest” for at least two weeks.

Yeah, good luck with that.

I will do my best to keep him mellow.

When he was young, I could say with a decent amount of confidence, “oh, he’ll be fine.” But now, I don’t have that same confidence.

One of these days, and probably not too much longer, I will have to say goodbye to my dog. There is no way to prepare oneself for this eventuality. I can acknowledge it, and understand it, but only when he is gone will I feel the loss of my dear friend.

father’s day 2011

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Today I was thinking about motorcycle racing… as I frequently do. However, today I was thinking about what happens if I crash and break something…perhaps break something important like my spine? How would it affect me emotionally to not be able to walk, for instance? It’s not a good line of thinking, but the little annoying thoughts creep in sometimes. This is when I realized that I take a lot of things for granted – my health, my mom, my living situation, my dog, my breathtakingly good looks (heh) and so on. These are things that normally I don’t think too much about. Which is why I can say that I realize now and then that I take them for granted.

My dad was a jerk. He could be a real asshole. He was a slob. His refrigerator was a garden for botulism and e-coli. If he didn’t eat he would get cranky. Eating with him was a test of willpower to not get up and move out of spittle distance.

He was also tender and compassionate. He was an artist with pastels and watercolor and words. He loved beauty even if he had trouble creating it in his life. He had an innate intelligence and book-learned smarts. He was my existential question go-to guy.

I think in a lot of ways, because of our difficulties, arguments, hassles, I frequently took the good side of him for granted. I resisted visiting him because of his grubby ways. He was demanding of my grandmother, which I resented, and his mood swings were so large that spending any amount of time with him was exhausting.

But he was my pop. And I loved him immensely. We sang loudly off-key together, we played aggressive games of foos ball and Mortal Combat. He taught me how to add and subtract by shuffling through numerous hands of Blackjack. I learned from him wise words of wisdom such as, “never play cards with a man named ‘Doc’,” and “don’t bet on lucky horse number 7.” When I was a kid, he’d take me to Broadway shows. I got to see Michael Jackson perform in “The Wiz,” Diana Ross perform in “Dream Girls,” and Matthew Broderick in one of my favorite Neil Simon plays, “Brighton Beach Memoirs.”

I learned how to pour a proper whiskey on the rocks and how to bet on race horses. I also learned about meditation from my pop. We would have long, winding, philosophical conversations about the nature of “existential heebie-jeebies,” and came up with an idea of “damage assessment” of how much damage a person incurs by living in a city (as opposed to living in the more serene and relaxing country)

My dad had a great sense of humor and when we were together, if we weren’t fighting, we were usually laughing.

I dislike Father’s Day. I remember my pop frequently, but this commercial day with weeks of advertising leading up to it only makes me sad. I am reminded of the ways in which I lacked as a daughter. “I should have visited more often,” “I could have been more patient.” I know it’s pointless to beat myself up over these things, but I still do. The lesson I try to take from it is to make sure to not take the people who are presently in my life for granted, including myself.

So, friends and family and critters… thank you.

From me to you, this is your day too.