Because We Couldn't Be Sane, Normal People With Just Two Dogs

When Roxy passed, I wondered if I was up for getting another dog in the near future. With Wiley and Flick, we are hardly dogless. And with my late-night writing schedule, I've been kind of bleh about dragging my butt out of bed before dawn on weekends for agility trials lately. And there's no question that walking two dogs is much easier than walking three.

Then Doug started to ask when we were going to get another dog. And I realized that some of the reason I've been less than enthusiastic about agility lately is that Wiley's getting older and slowing down quite a lot lately, and Flick (who is a hyper vigilant dog who occasionally decides she just doesn't like someone or other) will never be the kind of dog I can just relax with in noisy, chaotic trial environments.

Still, I wondered if it was the right time to start looking. School's kicking my butt this semester, and some nagging and vague health issues have robbed me of my energy and motivation lately. And the universe seemed to be telling us to wait too. We narrowly missed out on a couple of prospective dogs at our local shelters (Other people beat me to the adoption). And while perusing petfinder for kelpies, border collies  and their mixes, I realized that the canine population had really shifted in our state. Herding breeds are increasingly rare (it's nearly all bully breeds and Chihuahua mixes all the time there for some reason).

Not that I'm complaining. It's nice to know that the owners of herding breeds are getting more responsible in our neck of the woods. A friend suggested a McNabb breeder to me and the person who hooked me up with the shelter that had Wiley back in 2006 said she'd recommend me to them. But I wasn't quite sure I was up for buying a dog. I really want to save a life, or at least clear up a slot in one of our local rescue groups that keep dogs out of shelters. So maybe it would be best just to wait for a while.

Then I saw a picture of a 1.5-year-old border collie/Australian cattle dog mix on petfinder. He was at the Wags and Whiskers rescue group down in Modesto, and he sounded very promising. Our application was accepted, and the people were very nice about agreeing to hold him for us on Saturday, so we could drive down without worrying about losing out to someone who got there right before us again. He interacted nicely with Flick and Wiley, and is really just an awesome boy. Evidently, his original owner purchased him from a breeder of what are sometimes called "Texas Heelers," because they intentionally cross cattle dogs with border collies or Australian shepherds for ranch work down there.

Flick seems to like Austin a lot so far

So we adopted him and named him "Austin," in honor of his Texas roots. He's really sweet. Energetic and loves to play ball, but he has an off switch and is willing to lie quietly and chew on a toy too. He's got a nice, sound structure, and he's got a touch of that border collie focus and eye without the over the top edge that some of that breed have, yet he's softer and more biddable than many purebred cattle dogs. When he gets interested in something, like another dog or a cat, he redirects easily. Flick loves him so far (which was a worry I had), and Wiley is slowly coming around to the notion of no longer being the only boy dog.

So life just got complex again.

Roxy would have liked him too, I think.

Goodbye, Sweet Roxy

Doug and I just made a very hard decision today--releasing our beloved Roxy from her failing body. It's not the first time we've had to say goodbye, but this choice was especially hard because there wasn't a sudden crisis or catastrophic diagnosis. She was just growing increasingly feeble, and the arsenal of drugs and therapies we had at our disposal were slowing the decline, but not halting it. She had bad days when she could barely walk, and good ones where she wanted to go out and sniff, but the latter were growing fewer and further between.

Roxy: Feb 2000-Oct 2015

 It's hard to know exactly when to say goodbye to an animal that's probably not in severe pain, yet is growing progressively weaker and takes joy in fewer and fewer aspects of  her daily life. But it was at the point where Doug and I agreed she was becoming a shell of her former self and wasn't having any fun.

Roxy was the first dog Doug and I adopted after we got married. We jumped the gun a bit and went to the Sacramento County animal shelter after we closed on our house but before we'd actually moved into it. Our lease only allowed one dog (Astra), so we fudged a bit on the adoption agreement (it asked if you owned your home, and in fact we did), so we didn't have to get permission from our landlord. We brought Roxy home, and one week later we found Simon. So we moved into our new home in November of 2000 with three dogs and four cats.

One of Roxy's first trials in Carson City.

Roxy was a very special dog, but I'm too broken up right now to describe all the ways. Suffice it to say that she was gentle, loyal, and willing to do anything I asked of her. She was my agility partner for many years, and we earned a NATCH and a CATCH title, but as she got into middle age, she lost much of her enthusiasm for the sport, so I retired her. She's the dog who convinced me to commit to positive-reinforcement based training and to expunge "corrections" and coercion from my training toolbox. I still made mistakes. She was such a sensitive creature, even a sharply indrawn breath on my part felt like a leash jerk to her. But I think our relationship made me a kinder, more patient person overall.

She had a good, long life, but damn, it never seems like enough. Roxy is gone, and she's taken a piece of me with her. My scientific world view has never given me a lot of reason to hope there's anything waiting on the other side, but if there is, I hope she's with her old pals Astra and Simon now, and with my dad and his beloved dog, Florence.

Roxy, Simon and Astra

Roxy running at WAG in Elk Grove

Roxy at the Huntington Dog Beach

Goodbye, dear girl. Thank you for your love and friendship.

Link to Article About Medieval Pet Names

This was a cool article about names people gave animals in the middle ages. I've been thinking lately about the changes in the way animals have been regarded throughout history, and about their appearance in literature that is not animal focused lately. I always have a tough time feeling sympathetic towards a character who is cruel to animals in a story, or who mindlessly accepts things like dog fighting etc., even if it is plausible for him or her to do so in the context of his or her culture. I know it's a bit hypocritical, perhaps, like a vegan reader who hates characters because they eat meat, cheese or eggs or wear wool or leather in a pre-industrial culture. But it can be hard to set one's sensibilities completely aside when reading.

This is an amusing reminder that the human-animal bond is nothing new in history.

http://www.medievalists.net/2013/06/23/medieval-pet-names/