Why Does Wildlife Love Us So?
If you haven’t already, first go read my tiny dog adventure about Fat Tony.
Then come back here.
Posted by: ssjane | July 30, 2008 | 5:06 pm
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New Tiny Dog Adventure!
New adventure that took freaking forever to upload because the nav bar was pushed underneath, so I resized all the pictures multiple times and reuploaded, only to eventually find out the problem wasn’t with the pictures at all, but because I had left out a slash mark in an html tag.
Grrr.
Posted by: ssjane | July 30, 2008 | 12:19 pm
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Where The Wild Things Are (Apparently Wherever We Live)
One of the few benefits of living in a condo on a busy street is the small yard. Our new home was chosen carefully to have a yard just big enough for three chihuahuas, but not so big that it could support, say, a herd of wild turkeys, a family of deer, and a really retarded rabbit.
I figured that at least here, we were urban enough to be free of the ticks and wildlife-induced diarrhea that plagued us in Wayland, but before a week had passed in the new house, we had spotted suspicious pellets on our deck.
The pellets looked a lot like the deer/rabbit poop we’d seen in our Wayland yard, and then when I saw flies congregating on it, I knew for sure that it was one of my worst fears: Poop of Indeterminate Origin.
The Poop of Indeterminate Origin soon became the Poop of Determinate Origin when Chris spotted the lone animal in our yard that didn’t require us to regularly feed it: a squirrel.
For reasons known only to himself, Christopher has christened this squirrel, “Fat Tony.”
Fat Tony nimbly jumps from one fence post to another, occasionally pausing to chitter mockingly at the dogs below. This never fails to infuriate Mina, who races along our chicken wire fence, barking madly and leaping in the air. Stanley is usually right behind her, although there was one time when he actually caught up with Fat Tony. I hadn’t seen this momentous event for myself, so Chris told me about it later.
“And then what happened?” I gasped, envisioning a situation similar to the Great Rabbit Massacre of 2007.
Chris shrugged. “Stanley didn’t know what to do with him once he’d caught him.” And so Fat Tony easily escaped, to return another day to taunt the dogs.
Paco has never had to depend on himself to find food, so although he allows himself to be peer-pressured into joining the barking, he soon stops and wanders aimlessly away. Paco knows only that these animals in our yard are apparently supposed to be fun to chase and/or eat, according to the other dogs, but he has never quite seen the point of all that running unless there was someone waiting at the end of it all to cook, slice, and serve the animal to him.
On days that Fat Tony doesn’t deign to show up himself, he will often leave his calling card on our deck. Instead of a large clump of tiny pellets of poo like the deer and rabbits left for us, Fat Tony appears to have a slower constitution. In other words, one or two pellets will appear at one side of the deck, and another pellet will show up ten feet away and around the corner at the other end of the deck. Cunningly, Fat Tony will secrete his poo pellet in the crack between two deck boards so that we humans cannot spot it, but Miss Mina Beana can.
It took me and Chris two weeks to start filling our refrigerator, but only a few days for Mina to find her own local, organic, sustainably farmed food source. We have Whole Foods; she has squirrel poop.
Posted by: ssjane | July 26, 2008 | 8:37 pm
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The Moment During Which Both My Sisters and My Husband Turned To Me In Fear That I Would Walk Out
The privilege of having your flight to California delayed six hours and your subsequent flight from California delayed four and a half hours: $379
The amount of the food voucher American Airlines gave you, upon demand, for the delay of the first flight: $10
The cash you stuff into an envelope as a wedding gift for your cousin: $200
The opportunity of hearing the reverend officiating at the wedding ceremony read from what sounded to be Ephesians 5, during which he exhorted the husband to love his wife, and the wife to submit, respect, and honor her husband, and concluded by saying, “you have made the two one” to which you mentally add, “although admittedly one of you is only worth 3/5ths of the other”: Priceless
Posted by: ssjane | July 9, 2008 | 12:15 pm
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Warning: “Diarrhea” Is Mentioned Frequently In This Post
The dogs recently went through several bouts of liquid diarrhea. First was Mina, who got rushed to the emergency vet when we spotted blood in her poop. About $500 later, we found out her bloodwork was fine, her urine normal, temperature normal, and everything evidently just peachy keen, other than some slight dehydration caused by all the diarrhea, and the liquid poo running from her bottom.
They gave her some IV fluids, and sent us home with some kind of canine equivalent of Imodium that needed to be given for about a week.
About a week and a half later, I came home from work to a smell so hideous that I wanted to vomit. Apparently Paco had now succumbed to the diarrhea. I called our regular vet, and the vet tech/receptionist who answered the phone tried to convince us that the problem was related to their food.
“It’s that premium kibble,” she said. “It doesn’t have preservatives in it.”
I was deeply suspicious of this answer, since we’d been feeding the same bag of food since Mina got sick, and yet the dogs were getting sick at different times. So I brought Paco to the vet, where we got the same medication for diarrhea that the ER had given Mina. They found nothing physically wrong with him, other than his weight, which was still too high after two years of getting half the food of the other dogs.
When I told Chris that Paco still needed to lose another pound and a half, Chris was optimistic.
“Maybe the diarrhea will speed up the weight loss,” he said hopefully.
Two weeks later, just as Paco was nearly over his diarrhea, Stanley began having diarrhea. By now we were getting used to this, and I immediately put him on boiled chicken and rice, and off we went to the vet. He was apparently in great shape, just like the other dogs.
“It could be something they ate,” the vet said. “Or worms or parasites. Have they eaten anything unusual, gotten into any trash?”
“No,” I said. “Although we do have a rabbit that comes into the yard a lot, and…”
“Yes, they could have picked something up from the rabbit,” the vet said.
“So then they could get re-infected?” I asked. Horrified, I was now envisioning our house drowning in a sea of diarrhea . “The cycle will start all over again?”
“Well, it could,” he admitted, with the casual attitude of one who didn’t have three diarrhea-stricken dogs in a house that was about to be sold.
“If they start coming down with the diarrhea again, we’ll just worm them all,” he said.
And sure enough, Mina began to have diarrhea again while Stanley was still taking medication for his diarrhea. We were supposed to be out of our house within a few days, so we dosed everyone with the pills from the vet and kept an eye out for the rabbit.
I wasn’t happy about the dogs and their diarrhea, but I still couldn’t help but have a grudging admiration for the rabbit. It had taken her a year or two, but she’d finally gotten her revenge for the babies she’d had to abandon when Stanley dug them up.
Posted by: ssjane | July 8, 2008 | 10:36 am
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