There’s a proper haunted mansion not far from here that’s been an item of fascination of mine for a while. After  tax company lost ownership of it to, amusingly, to back taxes it sat empty and deteriorating for a while. When one of its walls started coming down the city stepped in. They stabilized it and sold to to a guy for $1 because he promised to restore the place. But he was unable to secure loans so it sat again empty and falling apart. Finally the city sold it again for $1 and this time I’m happy to say that it’s being worked on!

More history and earlier pictures are available here and here.

I can’t wait to see what it becomes!

We lost another dog today. Dizzy was our first family dog. Jason and I had both had other dogs before, but Dizzy was our dog.

He showed up one day, right around the time we were thinking of looking for a dog. He was underweight, intact and made a home in our very tiny backyard. It wasn’t fenced, he had no reason to stay. But he drank out of a puddle for three days until we gave in and accepted that he was ours. And Mister named him “Dizzy-Dog”.

We’ve been through a lot with him. Being crappy pet owners who couldn’t keep him up to date on anything but the absolute basics to keep him legal, trying to teach him not to pull (which in the end just taught him to follow me around the house.) Three different houses, Mini’s birth and a number of puppies now.

Lots of people say they have the best dog in the world. Dizzy was the kind of dog that other people said was the best dog in the world. Nearly everyone who met him fell in love with him. A number of people said they hoped to have a dog like him at some point in their lives. Until the last two years, when he started dropping weight I couldn’t walk him down the street without getting requests to breed him.

He was rock solid, dependable, calm, cheerful, protective in all the right ways.

Today I took him into work to get an exam because he was losing weight and eating dirt. We found that he’d lost over ten pounds and his stomach was filled with rocks and sticks and a penny (we could see Lincoln’s head on the coin). I expected to go in, run some bloodwork and put him on a higher calorie food. Instead he started to bloat around lunch time.

We don’t know how old he was when he showed up in our yard, but we had him for about thirteen years. I am told this is amazing, that even the vet didn’t manage to keep her rotties past ten.

But it isn’t long enough.

It kind of feels like I’m burying a child.

So here’s my goodbye to the best dog ever. I hope you find a place where you’re always allowed on the bed, someone is always there to blow bubbles for you, kids learn to read to you and every night is bacon and peanut butter night. And I hope you wait for the rest of us.

I went shooting for the first time ever a few weeks ago. I had never fired a gun before so I was all kinds of nervous about it. Like when I was learning to drive. I expected there to be some sort of cartoony magnetic attraction from “weapon in hand” to “bad shit happening”. (I still expect my car to be magically drawn to the cars parked along the side of a crowded road.)

I didn’t do too bad! And I didn’t shoot anyone one or make a fool of myself at the range.

Like all good hunters I brought my trophy back to hang on the wall too.

I have a sneaking suspicion this is going to turn into an expensive hobby.

I’m a part of the rescue community here in Louisville. That’s a really loaded statement. There’s a lot of issues I have with some of the people and ideas I run into. One example is the rescue world’s view of dog breeders. Some people blatantly say silly things like “I wish all dog breeding would be banned” or “We should punish breeders.”

Well, we have a dog at the clinic right now who wandered or was dumped onto a client’s property who is probably 20 pounds or more underweight and who we had to do abdominal surgery on to remove a blockage because he was so desperate for calories he ate everything (in this case it was sticks, what looks like a wash cloth and a corn cob). I know very well how damaging stupid, irresponsible selfish breeders who are just looking for money can be. And I know they make up a whole heck of a lot of the breeders out there.

But I also know about a friend and coworker who breeds poodles and cares very much about who they go to (mostly she keeps them and shows them). And her sister who shows and “breeds” french bulldogs, but has yet to ever have a litter since even though she’s paid heftily for good quality dogs, they’ve come down with issues she doesn’t want to pass on, so she sterilizes them and ends up with pets. And a former coworker who has bred and shown Staffordshire Terriers and Rotties and always had a waiting list before she even bred her females, of people she approved, after doing background checks.

I was also told about a friend of a friend who bought a cocker spaniel from a breeder and about a year after received a call from the breeder because one of her dogs had been found in an area shelter. (The breeder always microchipped her puppies and always pledged to take them back should they need a home.) The breeder asked them to pull the dog, funded vet care and neutering, but the family fell for dog #2 and opted to keep him too.

There are good people breeding dogs out there. People who love dogs madly and want to see them as a species healthier and every bit as important to our species. People who understand that “dogs” is sometimes more than just “this dog”. I know it gets hard to see sometimes, but it’s important that we remind ourselves because rescue is just one aspect of animal care.

Second is the idea that every time you buy a dog you kill a shelter dog. This is utterly untrue, for many reasons.

First, many areas are exploring some form of no-kill. Louisville’s city shelter isn’t no-kill, but it also does not have a set amount of time before a dog is euthanized. Adoption is a priority.

Second, some people know what they want and that is not likely to be a rescue dog. People do still use their dogs for all the reasons we used to. There are still hunting dogs and herding dogs, farm protection and police dogs. Many of the service dogs you see are purebred just because solid genetic knowledge about the health and temperament of the parents leads to some really good guesses about the future health and ability of the pups, which makes job training tons easier. It takes years and lots of money to train seeing eye dogs and the like. You really want to know that that dog isn’t going to come down with dysplasia in three years or anything.

Some people also just love the reliability of “their” breed. For aesthetic reasons or sentimental. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Third, not everyone is prepared for the unknown and potential issues of a rehomed dog. Most shelter dogs are amazing, wonderful critters who make great companions. No dog is perfect. Every dog, like every person, has their habits and some people are not prepared to translate “is this a quirk or is it dangerous”. Or they might be looking for a jogging partner and adopt a slightly-disappointing couch potato instead. Dogs in shelters often have bad habits from lack of training, lack of “normal” socialization with people or just the fear and anxiety of the shelter life itself. Dogs are not always the same at home as they are in the shelter, and some people don’t do well with personality surprises.

(Other people, like me, like the challenges and excitement of new dogs, new personalities and new things to try out and learn.)

Finally, what does guilting the shit out of someone who wants to provide a loving, safe home to any dog accomplish? The key is education, not bitchiness, which I know is hard (I break sometimes too). But we’re trying to help here, not spread a culture of bitchiness and miseducation.