This weekend we are dogsitting Doti the amazing spotted puppy. Chester is in the midst of a “I am 15 months old and kind of a dick” phase right now so I thought it would be prudent to take Chester over to play with Doti to make sure everyone had the capacity to be civil to each other.
No worries. After 15 minutes of sniffing, hiding, avoiding, running away from, and ignoring, they decided to play. and play and play and play and run and play and chase and wrestle. As far as I was concerned it was all good.
Then Chester decided he’d try something new, something he tries on Maddie but rarely succeeds at. He climbed up on Doti and started humping like mad. Doti didn’t really care so much. This was pretty much the awesomest thing that could happen for Chester
Is this awesome y/n
YES YES YES
Being a decorous person, I pulled Chester off each time I found him on her, but he didn’t mind. At one point he let out a long, whistley fart as he was humping Doti. Add some tube socks and a beer and Chester is a total dude.

Okay, so what happens when your dog eats over a pound of roasted, salted virginia peanuts?
More specifically, What happens when your dog knows that he is not supposed to be eating the peanuts, that he should not have grabbed the bag off the table and brought it to the bed? He knows he’s not supposed to do this, he knows that if he is seen he will be in trouble? He knows that if he eats quickly the likelihood of being seen is lessened. Eating quickly means that he will have to give up things like chewing.
So, what happens when a little dogs eats more than a pound of peanuts without chewing? You don’t want to know. Really you don’t. You think you are disturbed by corn and carrots? You stop by and check out Senor Clowns Special Fountain Of Peanutty Goodness sponsored by the good folks that fill the bulk bin at the grocery store.
When I did find the peanut bag on the bed I figured it was Maddie, that she had found them while we were out earlier in the evening. I showed the bag to her and all she did was snuffle it. Curious. I showed it to Chester and looked away, wagged his tail like a furious helicopter, laid down, scooted away, came back, rolled over, looked away again, and then went completely belly up. Dogs are so easy. They are so incapable of lying. This makes them 10 times easier than kids.

There are moments when I am driving down the road listening to the news and I need to start screaming at the radio. I’m aware of how dumb this is, it’s not a two way transmitter (no matter what the foil hat brigade tries to tell me).
They want to ban certain dog breeds in Minnesota. I wonder how often I can use the word “asinine” in a post. Let’s not find out.
Banning specific breeds will do nothing to solve the problem. Nothing at all. The third paragraph of that article even illustrates that this really has nothing to do with facts or statistics, but with knee-jerk reactionism…the kind of knee-jerk reactionism that an uneducated constituencly loves. “You saw something troubling on a 45 second newsbite stuffed between the weather and jokes about hairstyles? You say they used scary graphics? Well, let me get right on that!”
Banning specific breeds for dog bites is a lot like banning alcohol completely for drunk driving deaths. These dogs themselves are not violent, their owners are. Their owners do not take the time to properly train their dogs, the owners may even be trying to make their dogs violent. You cannot blame the dogs, you must make stronger legislation to hold the owners responsible.
We do not blame the car or the alcohol, we blame the person who shrugged off responsibility.
And I say this even though I live in a neighborhood where every month I see a new wanna-be thug and their pit bull puppy walking around. I have seen guys jabbing and poking their dogs as they played so that they would become angry and aggressive. I have these thugs kick their dogs for pulling on the leash when they took them out for the daily thug strut. I look at each of these dogs and my heart breaks because I know that each dog has been handed a death sentence by its owner and it will never be able to plead its case.
I’ve seen these dogs out there. I understand the fear people have, but it is misplaced.
The dogs that are raised as such surely will have to be put down. I understand this. If you cannot trust that a dog trained to be violent will forever be non-violent then that dog must be put down. This is sad, but necessary. We do not, however, need to ban all dogs. We need to make the dog owners as responsible for the damage their dog does as they would be if they used a weapon on a victim. These dogs are raised to be weapons and should be treated as such.
The dogs that are not, should not be treated like this. Milo, Doti and Bela are and were the sweetest dogs around. They do no harm, they are well trained (or being trained). They are fun and gentle and rambunctious happy dogs. Under this legislation it would be a misdemeanor for Dena and Levi to have these dogs. That is wrong.
People need to stop being reactionary and start thinking for once.

Friday hauled ass out of work to get home, grab maddie and get to the other side of town to the vet’s office.
Let me demonstrate for you the amount of driving I had to do
1) hold your arms in such a way that your left arm is down at an angle, perhaps 4 inches from your hip. Hold your right arm in the air, about 180 degrees from your left arm.
2) I work somewhere to the right of your navel
3) I live on your left wrist
4) the vet is on the middle finger of your right hand, right there on the tip
I did all of this on the day when they decided to turn the bowels of hell into a steam room but they didn’t bother to seal it very well. The land was covered in a thick hazy, steamy, humid heat. The AC is still broken on my car. The AC will get fixed very soon. I missed the exit and ended up driving about six inches past your middle finger and had to turn around and go back.
I was hot and crabby and I was damn fucking tired of the MPR member drive. Maddie thought she would express her discomfort by sitting in the back seat and panting wet dog breath on my face.
We got there, on time even, and she tried to figure out if she could actually fight the cat in the cat carrier. Ever since my mom’s cat tried to kill me and bury my body in the dirty laundry Maddie has issues with cats. She choce not to fight the cat, though it seemed obvious the cat wanted to fight her.
As a side note, I could not sit down as my butt was all sweaty and I did not want to leave a sweaty butt print on the bench.
Then the magic time came, we got in to se Dr Pierce Fleming, International Vet of Mystery! You know, whenever you go in to meet him he’s just regular. His name truly suggests he’d pull some crazy James Bond gadget out of his pocket and incapacite me while grilling me on my plans to take over the world. He doesn’t do that. He just does vet things. Don’t get me wrong, they are awesome vet things, but I haven’t yet seen him use his spy stethoscope, his nerve gas filled ear cone light looker thingy or even his secret rectal thermometer radio transmitter.It’s so weird that he would be named Pierce Fleming and not utilize his special spy tools more often.
On the other hand, he utilized much awesomeness and that is an acceptable substitute. We discussed Maddie’s condition. Not only did her infected feet come flaming back in but also she was losing patches of fur. The patched of fur are a staph infection that comes from the same staph infection in her feet. Okay. So that can be fixed. Our previous plan of “hold down this infection and punch the shit out of it until it dies a wet and gasping breath” did not work out as well as we hoped. We now moved on to Plan B.
Plan B involves trapping the infection in a cage and regularly poking it with a stick for the rest of Maddie’s life. We’re still going to beat up the infection with the cephalexin. Beat it up so hard it will beg for mercy. It will get no mercy. I will eat a giant turkey sandwich while it begs and I will laugh at the infection, spraying it with partially chewed sandwich as that is the most disrespectful thing I can come up with (maybe Pierce Fleming and I should join forces and he can catch the baddies and I can interrogate them…hmmm). At the same time that she is receiving the cephalexin for the infection, she will also be getting a lot of prednisone to help keep the swelling and inflammation down.
Once we get everything under control we keep doing the same thing for 14 more days. This is important. Even if everything looks perfect we still keep kicking the infection in the ribs. If you are a staph bacteria on my dog, I will be a total asshole to you.
After her 14 days we will then ramp the prednisone down and try to find the lowest dose we can give her that will still be effective on her feet. This is where things can get troublesome in my heart.
If we can get her down to 1/2 pill every other day there should be no long term side effects to her health, even if she takes it for the rest of her life. I know without a doubt she will need more than that. Long term usage of prednisone can cause some side effects that may tend to shorten a dog’s life. This is where we balance quality and quantity. Obviously I want my dogs to live forever and never leave me. Obviously I learned last November just how impossible that it. As such, I want my dogs to live the dog-happiest lives possible, I want them to not only be comfortable but to feel good. Last year when we treated Maddie her whole demeanor changed. She was happy. She brightened up, she was goofy and playful. She was enjoying her life.
And as a person who tries not to anthropomorphize her dogs as much as possible, I mean it when I say she was happy.
This is my goal. I would rather she have fewer happy years than more uncomfortable years. You’d think that would be obvious, but it’s hard to accept. It’s hard to know that you are going to choose a course of action that could shorten your dog’s life, even if you know that the infections make her miserable at least that was not something you chose.
Maddie had such a tough time of it before she came to live with us and my commitment to her is that for the rest of her life, she will be happy, she will be comfortable and she will live without fear.
Last night when I got into bed she laid down next to me and stretched out against my belly. I wrapped my arms around her and kissed her head and I knew I was right.

I’ve got one dog obsessed with the junebugs. Every time he finds one (and they’re everywhere and they’re slow and they’re entirely unconcerned about the 3 bodies and 10 feet heading their way) he picks it up in his mouth. Upon being picked up the junebug reacts in the only way it knows how:
Is this mating: Y/N
If yes then commence with the mating
If no then fly away from it
No
So he picks up the junebugs, they buzz his mouth, he spits them out and looks perplexed and reacts in the only way he knows how:
Is this awesome: Y/N
If yes then do it again
If no then try again just in case it GETS awesome
No
Over and over and over he does this. I consider tying him to the railing on the other side of the block so he can do this all night. I’m sure it will become awesome.
Both dogs fancy themselves rabbit trackers of some sort. There are rabbits everywhere and they’re dumb as…bunnies! While Chester was entranced with his junebug game and Maddie was replying to her pee-mail (bitch got herself a lot of friends. She’s probably got a DogSpace account with shitty animated gifs and autoplay music and pics of all her frenz kikken it old skool…
wait, where was I? Oh yeah, the dogs are distracted and I watch two bunnies considere us and then hop around the corner. When we get close to the corner the dogs pick up the scent. This apparently qualifies as “awesome” so they continue to snuffle and follow it. We round the corner and they snuffle deep of the fresh rabbit scent on the grass completely ignoring the 2 goddammed rabbits not 10 feet from their heads. The rabbits take off and the dogs try to take off but I give a resounding “Leave It” and “uh-uh” because I’m all about commands and the “no reward marker”. I get Chester’s attention. My words are decidedly not “awesome” but he decides to listen because it might involve treats and those are “AWESOME”! Of course Maddie was all about the rabbits because once she focuses on something she forgets there are other things that exist until she reaches the end of the leash.
The rabbits got away.
We head into the alley and the dogs are still trying to find the scent of the rabbit. Then the dogs are snuffling hard on something. Before I can figure out that it’s not just some rabbit shit (rabbit shit is “awesome”) Maddie has it in her mouth and is trying to chew on it and I see a dessicated toad leg hanging out of her mouth and I react in the only way I know how:
Is it dangerous:Y/N
If yes then get it out of her mouth
If no then chastise her
No
Is it really gross: Y/N
If yes then chastise her loudly and tell her that you are currently looking into options for trading her in for a case of whiskey or a carton of cigarettes
If No then sadly shake your head and cluck a few times.
Yes
And Maddie ponders…
Could she really trade me for whiskey or cigarettes: Y/N
If yes then drop tasty but leathery toad carcass
If no then try to figure out how to get that last leg in my mouth
No…I wonder if I have a good face for hats.
We made it home no worse for the wear, but I am not letting their faces near mine for a very long time. Assholes.