This is Dobby, aka Marmadork. We got him a year ago next week. My previous dog was mine alone, I had him before I met my hubby, and it took years to get over his passing before I thought I was ready for another dog, and this one would be ours together. We picked him out of the shelter because he was the one dog there who *wasn’t* barking and whining, and they told us he’d been there for several weeks already – his ribs were showing and we thought we could do him some good (and vice versa).
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We named him Dobby (his shelter name was “Snickers”) after the elf in Harry Potter – ’cause we freed him from the shelter – and for two or three days he didn’t even make a sound. After that he started to come out of his shell and be a little more of a frisky (and destructive – oh! the destruction!) puppy, we started puppy classes, and were well on our way to normal dog ownership.
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After a while, my husband started noticing breathing problems, and I’ll just skip to the part where we ended up in the ER. Hubby has a personal and family history of heart problems, so anything like this sends up red flags. It turned out he’s allergic to the dog. We knew he was horribly allergic to cats, but he’d never had a problem with my old dog, but sure enough, years of not having a dog in close contact meant it was a problem now to have one in the house.
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We went back and forth for weeks over what to do. Because of Hubby’s heart condition, the shots people often take to deal with animal allergies were not an option. I had managed to line up possibilities for adopting him out to people we knew, but my husband literally cried that he didn’t want to give the dog up, that he’d never had one of his own, and that we had to find a way to keep Dobby.
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So after a lot of research and patience, we seem to have found a balance that works for us. We have very strong air purifiers in the house, pulled up most of the carpet, the dog doesn’t come in the bedroom or get on any furniture, and for the most part my husband can’t ride in my car, which is the ‘dog car,’ for taking him to the park, vet visits, training class, etc.
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It’s worked out okay so far, though Dobby has gotten much bigger than the previous dog, and is, personality-wise, a total brat who will behave like an angel if you’re holding a treat, then go chew on a rug. But he’s funny and still puppyish, and despite all the stress he causes, I’m hoping that all those statistics about people with pets having longer lifespans is still true!
Pet Rescue
Early Morning Open Thread: Dogs of A Certain Age
Good news from commentor William F: A few weeks ago I emailed from NYC with a request to help me find a good home for my dog Richie. I got a few responses from your readers and one of them happened to be the perfect guy for Richie. Thank you for helping him find a good home.
When my wife and started dating, she owned a 147-pound German Shepherd Dog, “Duke.” Duke was an awesome, brilliant dog. He died in August 2006 at age 8 from gastric dilatation and volvulus. 4 months later, we were watching the local all-news cable network New England Cable Network (NECN) when the morning show featured the monthly Boston Animal Rescue League adoption candidate.
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There she was, thin, scared but alert and clearly with it – Perdie, a shepherd/greyhound/collie mix. She had been in the ARL shelter in Boston for 2 years. This was her last chance. We looked at each other and nodded. It was time to get another dog.
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We met with her at the ARL shelter. She was skinny, but healthy, and at age 9, just recently spayed. Her previous owners had hit some financial difficulty and had to give her up, we were told. That day, we hung out with her in the shelter’s auditorium (it’s a former elementary school). We put her through her paces: sit, lie down, speak, stay, paw, come – all perfect.
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We took her home and began to integrate her into our family. Luckily our daughter Kate – a vet tech – was home for Christmas to provide some welcome advice and counsel. Of our 2 cats, Stop-It was the most affected, hiding out in the cellar for 2 months, emerging at night to eat and go out. Eventually my wife, Roze, put her territorial foot down with Perdie and made it clear that in this house, the female HUMAN was the leader of the cats, not Perdie. And things were great from then on.
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We knew going in that at 9 years old and eventually 55-60 pounds that Perdie would be a part of our family for 4-5 years at best. But that was OK with us. We were moved, and Perdie has proven to be a wonderful pet and companion. Stubborn, quirky, but loving and loyal.
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On Thursday, Feb. 24, our son called to say he thought Perdie was having a stroke. Turns to have been the first of 5 seizures over the next 24 hours. The vet says most likely a brain tumor, meningioma. She’s on phenobarbital, and seizure-free since then. But clearly this is the beginning of the end for our poor old gal. She has moments of lucidity through the drug haze, and can still walk – albeit slowly and shakily – eat, and is still mostly house-continent.
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Prognosis is 2-4 months, according to Teh Google. The cats, Storm and Stop-It, act as her escorts as she paces around the house, and when we walk outside. Every once in a while she’ll walk up to us and look at us with recognition and the smile you see in the attached pic. She’s not in pain. We know we’ll have to say good-bye soon, but not quite yet. Our mission was to give her a good quality of life for whatever time she had left starting on that day in 2006. And here we are 4.5 years later, mission accomplished, but not one we’re eager to see end.
Early Morning Open Thread: Dogs of A Certain AgePost + Comments (22)
Chicago Area Dog Bleg
From commentor Moses2317 (aka Winning Progressive), whose dog Bard was featured here on February 14:
Saturday evening my wife and I found a stray dog in the street that didn’t have any tags. We took her in, and have tried to find her owner (posted signs in our neighborhoods, comments on various Facebook pages for local dog groups, visiting the local dog parks, etc.) to no avail. The dog has a microchip, but no one had registered it and the microchip company can only trace it back to a breeder that has gone out of business.
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We can only keep the dog for another day or two, due to the fact that we have our own dog, are taking care of a father with dementia, and are going out of town in a couple of days. So, we are looking for a good home for her somewhere in Chicago or the suburbs.
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The dog appears to be sweet and friendly. She’s about 20 pounds and house trained. She appears to be well taken care of, well groomed. On walks she has been friendly with babies, toddlers, men, women, and other dogs. She has also been friendly with our own dog in our own apartment.
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If people are interested in taking this dog in, they can e-mail me at [email protected]. We would like a reference so we can make sure we would be giving her to a good home.
Tuesday Morning Open Thread
Blue is not my dog. He belongs to a neighbor down the street. He was one of the first dogs that Max met when we started to bring Max to our local dog run.
We do not know much about the first few years of Blue’s life. At some point his family came south from Canada for an errand and they left their dog in Pittsburgh for a reason that nobody knows. Blue’s condition at the time suggested abuse. Blue passed to my friend’s nephew, who thought of ‘having’ a dog in exactly the same way that you ‘have’ a swing set that rusts away in the back yard. After a while he, or someone, bought Blue a dog house, but by then Blue seemed to like sleeping out on the frozen ground. After a year or two Blue stayed with my neighbor while his nephew sorted out a rental situation. My neighbor and the dog both decided that the new situation served everyone better, and the nephew went with the will of the majority.
Blue’s breed background is an open question. You can see some timberwolf in his deep chest and a noticeable shoulder hump, and you can hear it in a bark that sounds like the end of the world. That wolf blood may let him tolerate cold that has my dobie Max shivering in the time it takes to step out for a piss. The other side is anybody’s guess. Flat-coated retriever maybe? The cold didn’t bother him nearly so much as being left in backyard Siberia. For all that timberwolf blood Blue loves people. He’s a people-centric bellyrub junkie that stays within a few feet of my neighbor whether he’s on leash or not. He practically hops up and down when he sees someone familiar and he’ll whine an eager, basso whine that reverberates in that wolf voicebox until he can run up, lean gently on your legs and look up as if you’re handing out steaks.
Some time in the past Blue stepped into a dark street and surprised a car or truck. He was lucky and made it through, but his hips never recovered all the way and his top speed now is a kind of bouncing lope. He will run after a ball, in fact he’ll practically beg you to throw it, but most of the time he’ll lie down where he caught it and zen out for the afternoon. If Max comes to ask for the ball he’ll hop up and bark like armageddon; it’s a bluff and Max knows it. Max, a card-carrying marshmallow himself, rolls over and lets Blue have his ball. If a person walks over Blue will lie on his back and waits for a bellyrub. At that point the only thing he needs is a snowdrift to burrow his happy muzzle in.
The name Blue, of course, references his icy-bue eyes. Blue is not my dog, though sometimes I take him out when the family is away. He is one of my favorites, though. If rescues all turned out like this I would take a hundred.
You Did This…
With so much ugly going on out there, here is something to brighten up your day- remember this poor, sad, Lady who was abandoned by the side of the road with a horrible tumor:
Thanks to your kindness and donations, the good folks at Charlie’s Angels Animal Rescue were able to take care of her surgery, and look at her strutting her stuff on the catwalk now:
The tail really says it all, doesn’t it? I don’t believe in heaven and hell, but if I did, I know two things. First, David Broder would have to alternate between the two for all of eternity to show balance while always yearning for the middle ground of purgatory, and second, the surest way to heaven in my book is by saving helpless people and animals.
And don’t forget, the easiest way to help the folks at CAAR rescue animals is to pick up some Balloon Juice swag for yourself. All proceeds go to animal rescue.
Early Morning Open Thread: Sugar
Back at end of last year, commentor Paul C shared the tale of his dogs Sugar & Sam. He was kind enough to send an update this weekend:
The cardiologist at Georgia Veterinary Specialists ordered a CT scan and verified that it was a lung tumor and that she needed surgery. I gave her a bath the day before (photo above)… They removed one lung lobe containing masses, another that shared an airway with the affected lobe, and sampled her lymph system while they were in there.
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Dogs are amazingly tough. She went in early on a Tuesday morning for surgery. They wouldn’t let me visit her that day to avoid agitating her, but I visited on Wednesday. She had a huge bandage all around her body, and the anesthetic had made the vestibular syndrome worse, and she whined continuously for an hour and a half while I tried to calm her. Then she finally napped for a little while.
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When I told my sister this, she said “Well of course. She had to tell you all about it first, didn’t she?” That she did. The techs said everybody in the back loved her, and I can believe that. She’s the sweetest dog ever.
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That was Wednesday. On Thursday, I went to pick her up and bring her home. She came roaring out of the back, climbing all over me while I was trying to sign the discharge papers, and when she got home she immediately picked a fight with her brother. Two days after major surgery, with a suture almost half way round her body. No way people could do that. If it were me, I’d still be whining.
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Open Thread: NYC Area Dog Bleg
As you can see from the pictures, Richie is a dog (I think a Shih-Tzu and Lhasa Apso mix) with a LOT of character! In October 2007, I adopted Richie from Small Dog Rescue of Princeton, NJ. I was a single guy, looking for a small and loyal friend and Richie provided that. However, I am his 3rd owner (and he is only 8) and he spent several years at the shelter. The abuse he received prior to me has come out in small bursts and has been a very low cost of ownership, but unfortunately, with my fiancee now being pregnant, his jealousy has gotten out of control. Unfortunately, I am now in the position of trying to find a new home for this incredible dog. I know I can always bring him back to the shelter, but he would do so much better with a caring owner who can give him the love and attention he deserves.
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While he is generally calm and relaxed with me, and would be great with a single older owner, Richie does not share well and would probably have accidents (and potentially nipping) if he had to share a home with another dog or small children.
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This is a very sweet, mistreated dog in need of a new home and if any of your readers live in the New York City area and are looking for a companion, they should feel free to email me at [email protected] to discuss meeting Richie and seeing if they’d be friends. For the right owner, I’d be willing to help with the cost of caring for Richie.
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Any thoughts or help is greatly appreciated.
(Reposted from yesterday because I think the little guy got overlooked in the crush — AL)