Rodents Of Unusual Size

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I have rodents in my house. Big ones! They are all four-legged and furry. When the lights go out, they troll the counters looking for food. More than once I have had to come down in the middle of the night, flip on the lights and scatter the rodents. An exterminator is not an appropriate solution in this case since I’m talking about Sammy, Boots and Little Miss!

I think everyone is trying to put on their winter fat. Ten minutes after I feed the dogs and cats, they are milling around in the kitchen staring at me like they haven’t eaten in weeks. One thing that helps is to give them a little extra oil (olive oil) so they feel satiated. The other thing is to keep all food and dirty dishes off the counters. Last night I had to get up twice in the middle of the night (and I DO mean the middle) to stop Boots from eating cookies that were in a box on the counter (her claw was stuck in the cardboard box and she was trying to eat through the plastic window) and to get her out of the sink where she was attacking a bowl that hadn’t been put in the dishwasher.

I have caught Little Miss on the counter countless times attacking the butter dish when I forget to put it away. Sammy waits until we turn out the lights, then waits a few more hours to make sure we’re asleep, then he goes down and puts his front paws on the counters to see if he can reach anything. Now they’re working together in the daylight. Yesterday Boots knocked a spatula onto the floor and I caught Sammy picking it up in his mouth before trying to run outside with it.

I just never know what to expect. This past spring I began to find spoons outside in the thawing snow. Sammy had taken several metal spoons outside and chewed on them, then left them laying around. A month or so ago, after making sure the counters were food free, I went to bed, only to wake up later to hear Sammy doing his late-night patrol. I went downstairs and he had taken a bag of cornstarch off the counter and made off with it. He must have decided he didn’t like the taste because he left it by the dog door, only slightly chewed.

Molly is mostly innocent in this, although she will sometimes share Sammy’s booty if he’s successful. One day I saw them eating something in the backyard. I went out and found that Sammy had taken a bag of raw cacao powder off the counter and they were chowing down on it. I had to spray the powder into the ground to stop them from eating it. Once recently I turned my back for a moment and caught Molly trying to sneak a block of cheese off the counter. She doesn’t put her paws up there, but I found out that she’s not above a snatch-and-grab job!

I think Boots has got to be the worst of them, though. We had a guest a few weeks ago and we were all sitting in the living room having a casual dinner of some great stew that I made, and Boots walked right up to our guest and tried to steal the food out of her bowl. I was so embarrassed. She has stolen steak off my plate. She has run off with food wrappers. She tried to eat cornstarch packing peanuts!

I’m hoping the ROUS’s will get used to the cold weather soon and realize that they are not dying of starvation. I don’t hold out much hope for Boots though…

 

 

Up Periscope!

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This is one of Sammy’s favorite things to do….stick his head through the cat door (pictured) or the dog door in the back of the house, so he can keep tabs on what’s going on. The cat door in the house leads into the utility room and Sammy can also get a view of who is coming in and out of Steve’s office door. He taught Molly how to do this, and sometimes if I’m out there folding laundry or something, she’ll lay on the floor on the other side of the door with her head hanging in the cat door and watch me. I think Molly has separation anxiety issues with her Mommy! :-)

The other thing Sammy likes to do is stick his head out the dog door which leads to the backyard to 1) check the weather, 2) check if the barbeque is in use and 3) check to see if there are any invaders in the backyard. If something looks interesting he’ll jump out the door to investigate. If not, he’ll give a general bark of warning to anyone who may be out there and pull his head back in. When it’s an investigation of the barbeque he’s likely to come back with grease spots on his head from trying to lick the juice coming out the bottom. He’s my little hobo dog….

 

Oh BARF! The Bones And Raw Food Diet

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We started feeding our dogs and cats a raw diet around 2000, when my dad told us about the Bones And Raw Food (BARF) diet proposed by Australian vet Dr. Ian Billinghurst. All of our animals have been on the diet and have done pretty well. It takes a little more work and attention, but I believe they are much healthier than they would have been. Boots, our Queen Feline, is currently 17 years old and shows no sign of slowing down. I’ve never had a cat reach her age and be so healthy.

It’s true that two of our dogs have died from spleen problems, but we’re suspecting now that there may have been extenuating circumstances due to the black mold that has been found in our roof recently. I also believe it has affected our health as well. Our dogs and cats don’t have arthritis, hip displaysia, cancer, or any of the other “old age” diseases that animals get when on a cooked, grain-based diet. And boy howdy, do they love feeding time!

A raw diet is no guarantee of perfect health, but I have to say that our dogs have lived longer than the average life expectancy for their breeds. Their quality of life has been excellent, with a breakdown occurring only at the far end of their life spans. Our black lab lived to be 14 or 15 (not sure of his age – he was a stray) and our Doberman/St. Bernard cross lived to be almost 13, which is considered pretty good for a giant dog breed.

As I mentioned, one of our cats is 17. The other cat eats almost exclusively what she hunts so I imagine she’ll live to be thirty!  :-)  The BARF diet may seem extreme to you at first, but I would suggest that you at least incorporate some raw food into your pets’ diet. They will benefit greatly. Find all about it at http://www.barfworld.com/html/learn_more/Learning_directory.shtml. Be sure to look for Dr. Billinghurst’s book, “Give Your Dog a Bone” on amazon.com.

~ Dooney

 

Enough already!

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Okay, I really think Martha Stewart has gone too far. I was in PetSmart the other day and noticed that you can now get Martha Stewart dog poo bags! Really? In addition to that, you can get all kinds of other Martha branded dog accessories. I wonder if she even likes dogs. :-)

Talk about someone who has really overexposed herself!

 

Top ten reasons for Molly to bark

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1. Someone’s at the door. I don’t care if I know them, I’m gonna eat ’em!

2. Mama’s putting on her shoes! Mama’s putting on her shoes!

3. Mama’s putting on her gloves! Mama’s putting on her gloves!

4. Mama’s picking up the ball! Mama’s picking up the ball!

5. Are we going outside? Are we outside yet? Is the door open?

6. There’s a car in the driveway! I’m gonna eat ’em!

7. Have I met you? I don’t care…I’m gonna eat you!

8. Sammy barked…there must be a reason.

9. I thought I saw….oh, never mind.

10. Turkeys!

 

Put the Bubbie to bed

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Did you ever see the movie “Crossing Delancy”? If not, it’s great so look it up. It’s ’80’s era (oh horror) so you’ll get a kick out of the clothes and the lack of cell phones. :-)  Anyway, in the movie Amy Irving’s character has a Jewish grandma – a Bubbie (pronounced with the “uh” sound, Dad). At the end of the movie, the grandma says, “Come children, let’s put the Bubbie to bed”. Steve and I always thought that line was funny, so we say it about a particular personality trait that we’ve noticed in two of our dogs now.

Molly, our current yellow lab, exhibits a very sweet behavior. When I go to bed, she comes upstairs after I do and comes over to my side of the bed to see if I am there. I give her a pat on the head and she turns around and goes to her bed. Sometimes she’ll go into the bathroom first to see if Dad is going to give her some bedtime supplements. Sometimes if I’m upstairs but not in bed yet she’ll go over there anyway to see if anyone is there. Maybe she gets confused…  :-)  If I don’t respond, she noses any body part she can reach, then gives a huff and goes to bed. In any case, it happens every night and our dog Black Jack who died in 2009 used to do the exact same thing every night.

I’m not old enough to be a Bubbie (well, maybe a young Bubbie) and I’ll never be a grandma since I wasn’t able to have kids, but we still have a giggle over Molly “putting the Bubbie to bed”.

~ Dooney

 

Top ten reasons for Sammy to bark

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1. The neighbors drove past our house. The garbage truck drove past. Somebody else drove past…and another guy. Then another guy drove past!

2. He sees his reflection in the window:  “Hey, there’s another yellow dog here! It looks just like me!”

3. Water is dripping from the edge of the roof. It’s so darn annoying…

4. Something big and brown is in the front yard. Turkeys!

5. A deer had the audacity to walk past his backyard fence.

6. A pine cone fell on the roof. It could be a terrorist attack.

7. Another car went by on the road. It sounded like a ramp-up to a home invasion.

8. A Jehovah’s Witness came to the door. Well, okay, that’s a good reason.

9. It’s Thurday…no, it’s Friday!

10. A dog’s gotta do what a dog’s gotta do!

 

I am Boots. You may worship me!

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I Am the Queen!

Despite what Mother has written about those two stupid, hairy beasts who live in my house, I am the Queen and I am in charge. My name is Boots and I am beautiful and perfect. I can prove it because I have a yin-yang symbol on one of my  toepads. I’m not going to display my toes on the internet, so you are just going to have to believe me.

I have been with Mother and Father the longest, so I am the boss of everyone here. For some reason, Mother and Father love those noisy, hairy dogs! But I am the one who gets to sit on Father’s lap all evening, every evening, not those beasts. I am the one who commands Mother to let me out the front door so I can do my beauty roll on the concrete sidewalk. I am the one who gets food whenever I want.

I have been the boss of them since I made them open the door of their first house and I demanded to be let in. I was tired of roughing it in the neighborhood so I took over their house. Mother was easy to convince….she has no spine. Father took a little bit more time, but all I really had to do was meow a little and rub up against him. Once he named me, a name I suggested, I knew he was mine.

I was totally against them bringing Charlie, the first hairy beast, into the house but for some reason they did not listen to me. That sneaky dog came up behind me one day and tried to sniff my butt! I proceeded to remove myself to the upstairs of the house, and I made them bring my food, water and sandbox up there and wait on me for three months. But I became bored, so I allowed them to bring me down the stairs again.

For some reason, one day they decided to throw me into a car full of their dog-hair-covered stuff, and when they finally let me out, we were in another house! I couldn’t believe they would do this to me, and to top it off, it was somewhere really cold! Then, if you can believe it, they brought another hairy beast into the house! Well, I retaliated….I walked around the in the smelly woods for two days and didn’t tell them where I was. Mother was so worried, I almost felt sorry for her. I made the rounds of the neighbors and ate all the food they left out for their inferior cats.

After a few months I decided not to hunt anymore, and to make them bring me all my food. There’s no reason for me to exert myself. I told them in no unequivocal terms that I would not be going outside when it got cold. I also demanded that they make me a warm bed near the woodstove. Too bad they don’t have my lovely fur. They seem to spend a lot of time standing in front of the stove trying to get warm. Honestly, humans baffle me.

The other thing I can’t stand is how much time they spend petting and hugging those smelly dogs! I mean really! Those dogs are so dumb they can’t even remember that they were just petted and the keep asking for more. It’s so undignified…you will never catch me doing that.

After a while they did something I still can’t believe. They brought another, highly inferior, cat into the house! I tried to convince him to leave during his first week, and I almost succeeded because he was just a punk kid. But he stuck around and got kind of big…I didn’t know that was going to happen. I had to watch my back for a couple of years, but I finally convinced Mother and Father to find him another home, and that I should be the only cat in the house. I had given up trying to convince them I should be the only pet in the house.

Then, wouldn’t you know it, not six months later they took in another inferior cat! At least this time is was a female, so much better than a male. She tried to win me over by rolling on the floor in front of me but I was having none of that. We skirmished for a few years until she decided she’d better back down and let me be Queen. Nowadays I just have to bop her a few times when Mother is putting out our food, just to remind her who is really in charge.

All in all, it’s been a good life here in Montana, even with the continual stream of hairy beasts coming into the house. My favorite time is when they all go on vacation and I have the whole house to myself. Mother always arranges for a surrogate slave to feed me. I could feed myself, but why bother? I’ve killed a few bats for Mother, so she thinks I’m all that. As she should.

~ Boots

 

Synchronized sleeping and bookends

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Synchronized sleeping

One of the entertaining things about having dogs is watching them do all their behaviors. I especially like watching them sleep for some reason. They look so cute and innocent! I’ve noticed that they will frequently lay in almost identical positions (synchronized sleeping) or they will lay in a mirror image of each other (bookends). Is this something they plan on purpose?

I actually think dogs, as well as all animals, are much more in tune with each other than humans. I think they enjoy being together and being close and the way they sleep reflects that. They just naturally mimic each other because it makes them feel like family or companions.

Bookends

 

Dogs who swim

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Orginally posted July 9, 2012 –

We took our puppies to the river yesterday and it was a blast. Sammy is a novice swimmer so I was a little worried. We bought a harness to control him but decided to let him off the leash when we got there. He immediately jumped in and headed for the middle of the river. The Bitterroot river is fairly wide and has a strong current. Sammy only weighs 55 pounds and he’s not used to swimming in a strong current, but luckily when I called to him he turned around. He didn’t quite have the hang of taking a break on the shore, so I had to keep pulling him back.

He got really excited about the sticks that Stevo threw, but every now and then he’d head out to the middle again. Once I had to pull on his tail to get him to turn around, and a couple of times I had to grab his harness and haul him to shore. Molly performed like the water dog she is, whimpering excitedly when we threw sticks, then powering out into the current and stealing the sticks from Sammy every time. She’s definitely an Alpha dog! It’s been really hot here the past few days and the river is finally down to a safe water level so I think we’ll be swimming more in the weeks to come. Stevo and I are kind of hermits, so our dogs tend to be hermits too. It’s nice for them to get out in the world once in a while. We have to be careful with Molly, though, as she gets quite protective when she’s on her leash and encountering another dog is always an adventure.