Dogs

I miss my dogs. I miss walking dogs, playing with dogs, journeying into unknown places with dogs. I miss showing my dogs new things like cows and horses. I miss saying 'wanna go for a ride?' and watching the tag wags, the grins, the energy that says "Oh yes, let's go!'

I live in a tiny house -- 638 square feet -- that's filled with furniture, books, cat toys, photographs, and a lot of things I have gathered along the way in my life that I don't want to part with. I have downsized tremendously, but I like my stuff. That's all there is to it. In this small place, there is no real room for a medium-large size dog, and that's what I like. And I'm also a renter and I'm gone from my home almost 11 hours 5 days a week because, unfortunately, I didn't win the $758.7 million Powerball jackpot in August or any lottery jackpot for that matter. My dream is to somehow retire soon and live nicely so then I can find another dog to love, to walk, to go on adventures with.

Maybe this dog would even like dog parks. 

Kodiak, my Shepherd-Chow mix, liked dog parks but he usually wanted to hump all the girl dogs so I constantly had to watch him and stop his amorous leanings. It always amazed me that he had inclinations in this area of dogdom because when I adopted him at 8 weeks old from the Humane Society of Tampa Bay, he was already neutered.

My Border Collie mix, Sully, hated dog parks. He didn't want to have anything to do with other dogs (except for his big brother Kodiak). He would hide behind me or immediately head for the gate to leave. The only time Sully played with other dogs is when I took him camping at Fort de Soto Park and he got to run free on Dog Beach -- no borders, no chainlink fence -- just soft sand and water and sand dunes. He had a blast! I wish I could have taken him back there, but whatever it was that killed him ($4,000-$5,000 worth of veterinary testing never found out) started a few weeks after that beautiful day. 

I watch "Dr. Jeff Rocky Mountain Vet" on Animal Planet. On last night's episode, Dr. Jeff and some of his staff went to help Theresa Strader, the founder and executive director of National Mill Dog Rescue (read about NMDR here: http://milldogrescue.org/), assess a huge van full of rescued puppy mill dogs. One of the small dogs (she looked like a Pekingese) came with the usual puppy mill story: spent her entire life in a wire cage, only valued for the puppies she constantly produced, never lovingly touched by a human hand, never allowed to walk on the ground or the grass, never allowed to play, no treats, no toys, no name, never talked to or socialized, her cage rarely (if ever) cleaned, fed enough food and water to keep her alive. We treat our death row inmates with more humanity than is shown to these puppy mill dogs. This particular dog (whose name I forget; it was given to her by Dr. Jeff and his team who took 4 of the dogs to the animal shelter connected to his veterinary building) was (is) being fostered by veterinary tech Hector Martinez. This little dog had to learn how to walk on solid ground, how to be around humans, how to be around other dogs, how to be touched with love. Thus far, she just looks stunned, absent, so far inside herself she is lost to the outer world. Hopefully one day she can understand that the world that she grew up in, the world she knew for her entire life until Theresa and her team rescued her, is gone forever. in her new world, she is valued for who she is, she is loved for who she is, not for what comes out of her uterus.

When the day comes that I can finally be a dog's companion again, I will look for a dog who needs a new lease on life, a dog who is broken but hopefully fixable, a dog who survived hell and now looks forward to life as it should always have been for him or her.