Dogs! (Oh heck and why not cats too?)

 I've wanted to do a post about my dogs since coming back to the blogiverse, and since I've caught the curse that's befallen my siblings, today is the day for that lazier path. 

Long-time readers will know about my first dog, Bootsy, and Rhonda's pupper, Shadow. Bootsy left us in 2013 after a short and kinda disturbing set of illnesses. That was a pretty tough one for me, and I still miss her from time to time. 

Bootsy wasn't gone for long before Rhonda dragged me to the Humane Society, and we dragged home an adult Husky I named Leika after the first dog in space. 

Leika was a pretty challenging dog. She had a drive to run - especially away, and she was never easy to walk despite practicing every single day. But she did have a lot of love in her heart and was unflinchingly protective of the kids. Like Bootsy, she had a very short but extreme decline at the end of her life in late 2020, and we said goodbye to her while we were in lockdown.

In 2013, we started to notice that there were an awful lot of mice around the 100-year-old house we moved into that year. So we decided to get a cat. And so we adopted Chopstick from a farm. He was a famous scrapper on the farm, and the family there thought he might do best if he was taken away from the other cats in the area. 

Chop really was an excellent family cat. He was patient with the young kids who would drag him around, knew how to keep our big dogs in check and kept the mouse population in the house at zero. But he never lost his scrapper attitude or his wanderlust, and he paid the price for it over and over. More than a few times, he came home with severe fight-related injuries to his face, eyes and ears. 

Most famously, Chopstick was a victim of violence at the hands of an unknown assailant in the neighbourhood. One evening in late June 2017, Chop came home dragging his rear hind leg behind him. We couldn't figure out what had happened, and when we took him to the vet, it was quickly determined that he had been shot in the butt by a BB gun. The pellet shattered his rear hip, and unfortunately, it led to an amputation of his hind leg. 

Chop would spend the remaining five years of his life as a tripod who still loved to go out and scrap, catch mice and keep the dogs in check. While Chop got along famously with all of the dogs, when Liberty showed up, he no longer had patience for dealing with dogs. Chop moved himself outside permanently when Lib moved in, and he stopped coming by the house for visits in late 2022. We don't know what happened to him, but I suspect someone will find a kitty skeleton under the deck someday. 

Like when we lost Leika, it didn't take long for the thought of another dog to start making the rounds in late 2020. So it was in November 2020 that I got my first real puppy - though she wouldn't stay small for long. We got my first purebred dog from a breeder, the Newfoundlander dog, Ahsoka. The new Star Wars series of the same name debuted that week, and Ahsoka is one of my favourite Star Wars characters. So it was an easy one to do. 

Ahsoka has been the most successful dog I've had so far. Maybe it's the breed, maybe it's because she was the first dog I raised from a puppy, but she's been easier to walk, train and communicate with. She is absolutely the big teddy bear that everyone thinks she is, and is just a pleasure to have around. But she's unfortunately enormous, and I've not got the body I need to have for such a big dog. Because she's still a dog and they need to dash at squirrels and cats, even if I'd rather she doesn't.

Ahsoka is also my first pet with a social media account. But we basically never update it anymore. I wonder if people think she's gone? 

As mentioned earlier in June 2022, Liberty, the Great Pyreneese/Border Collie cross, joined the family. His owner, Gary, passed away, and we agreed to adopt Liberty and give him a good home. This made the family a three-dog family for a short while (tragic foreshadowing). 

Liberty is a pretty good dog, but he's also quite anxious. We've never been sure if it was some of the stuff that happened when his owner passed, or just his nature, or both. But he's always been quite reactive and headstrong. And he's obsessively protective of Rhonda. He reminds me a lot of Leika a lot of the time, especially when I walk him. He's got his own path that he wants to take at all times. 

And so we come to late 2022 with our last welcome and our last farewell. 

During Christmas break in 2022, we welcomed a new mouse management officer to our home in the form of a tiny little grey/gold tabby named Baba. For my own reasons, I rarely call her that and have just nicknamed her an altered version of "Chop" to "Chip". She's a very small cat compared to Chopstick, but she's extremely fast and very bold. Despite living in a home with two large dogs, she rules the roost. And she might be even better than Chopstick was at mousing. Because there has been ZERO sign of mice since she took over the job. I think she's just able to fit into spots he wasn't. 

She's a troublemaker, but she's cute and clearly thinks she's a dog that weighs over 120lbs. No one's bothered to correct her. 

And I've hinted enough, but we said goodbye to Shadow just as 2022 turned into 2023. He was nearly 18 years old, and the last year of his life was not very high-quality. Shadow was a fierce protector, despite his diminutive size, and I don't think he ever needed a leash in his whole life. 

And so our family has been filled out with two big dogs and one tiny cat ever since. We fostered a beautiful reddish golden retriever, whom we nicknamed "Honey" because her name was also Liberty. The owner wanted us to adopt her, but with my gout and two dogs we already needed to care for, it wasn't to be. She stayed with us for a few weeks and was definitely part of our pet story. I miss having a fish tank, but I don't think the cat would leave them alone. Her killer instinct is too strong. We tried to have a few guinea pigs, but Leika made a snack of one, and that experiment ended prematurely. 

And now, I'm finally caught up on my pet story here on Pilot's World. My pets really are important to me, and in looking at my Instagram to put this together, I'm realizing how much I love animals in general. Maybe someday, Rhonda will let me get a highland cow.