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Pets

Decision Made! Dog scored!

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Meet Cassie:

Cassie is a two-year-old Pembroke Welsh Corgi. I found her at the Humane Society, among the woebegone cast-off, lost, and abused mutts. She looked like she’d been immaculately cared for — her long hair was clean and perfectly groomed. What an amazing little dog!

It’s hard to believe you could find a relatively rare, apparently pure-bred pooch in the Humane Society shelter, but lo! there she was. Her picture had been posted for nine hours when I found it online, and I was at the door the next morning when the place opened. Eight people had already inquired about her.

Here are the advantages of adopting an adult dog from a rescue organization:

  • You get around the various puppy stages that entail destroying the carpets with excreta, unearthing the flowerbeds, and shredding the furniture.
  • If you’re lucky, the dog is already obedience trained.
  • You can see what the dog will look like when it’s grown up.
  • For $50 (make that $25 if you’re over 65 years old!), the Humane Society gives you the dog, throws in a cheesy collar and leash, neuters the dog, updates all its vaccinations, and treats the animal for fleas and ticks. You also get a free veterinarian’s check-up and five weeks of free care for common ailments picked up in kennels.
  • And you do the planet a favor by taking in an unwanted dog that’s already here rather than bringing yet another puppy into our overpopulated world.
  • Financially, adopting a grown dog represents a large savings, because dogs cost you the most when they’re puppies and when they’re old codgers.

The reason her humans gave for getting rid of her was that she barked. Apparently they were in the habit of keeping her in the house all the time they were home and then when they left, locking her outside.

Well, you’d bark, too, if you were locked out of your home in 100-degree heat.

We’ll return to that issue in a moment. Meanwhile, what a difference between a 23-pound dog and an 85-pound dog!

She eats 1 1/3 cups of dog food a day, barely a mouthful for a Ger-shep. She’s a dainty little eater and drinker, never slopping food and water onto the floor. That means the water dish can be in the house instead of on the back porch, and she only needs one bowl of water. In the backyard, instead of mounds she deposits pellets. Like a rabbit!

She doesn’t go on the furniture — won’t even go on a seat in the car. She did want to get into the bed with me last night, but finally settled for a nest on the soft rug next to the bed. She’s not interested in the pool and apparently doesn’t much like to get wet.

So we went for a doggy-walk this morning, down to the park. This exercise revealed a number of amazements.

Item: We don’t try to bring down vehicles by their oil pans. Anna’s atavistic psyche regarded cars and trucks as buffalo and mastodons, and she craved to chase them down and grab them.

Item: We’re not interested in yanking the Park Service’s lawn sprinklers out of the ground.

Item: We don’t even want to plunge into the flying (untreated!) irrigation water and frolic around in it. We will cross the street to avoid getting the stuff on our elegant fur.

Item: We like dogs. We do not trick them into a false sense of confidence by grinning and wagging at them before going for their jugulars.

Item: The human needs to find its old Sierra cup so we can have a drink of water en route.

Item: We can slip our collar. Yipe!

Item: But if we do, we don’t go very far.

Now about the barking issue:

The pound was a madhouse. Reports that people are abandoning their dogs as they’re evicted from their foreclosed homes are not exaggerated. The shelter was overflowing with dogs, most of them barking, yelping, and screaming nonstop, and it was jammed with prospective dog owners. But Cassie was absolutely silent.

When she was taken out of the dog run, she remained quiet and very calm.

“That dog doesn’t appear to be a barker,” I said to the volunteer.

“Sometimes people lie about the reason for turning in a dog,” she said.

Hm. Why do I doubt it?

Here’s why: Cassie is a Velcro dog. She wants to be with the human at all times. She doesn’t want the human out of her sight.

Cute, endearing . . . and not a good sign! Velcroing is never a good sign in dogs. It means the dog is uncomfortable in one way or another, either physically or psychologically. In the case of dogs that bark nonstop or rip up the furniture when the humans leave, it reflects canine separation anxiety.

It’s a sign of bad habits on the part of the dog’s humans: doting on the dog, carrying on with lots of cooing and petting when you leave, carrying on with lots of excited fawning when you come back in the house, failing to persuade the dog that it has to do something for you to obtain what it wants. I’m not suggesting you abuse or be cold to a dog; merely that you have to behave as though you’re the head of the pack and you expect the rest of the pack to believe you’ll be back when you leave. And not to act like ninnies who will bring predators to the den by yipping and whining while you’re out bringing down a mastodon.

I tried walking out the front door last night, and indeed, Cassie started yipping about 30 seconds after I shut the door. Stupidly, I’d left the side gate locked, and so I couldn’t walk around the house and come in another door. Walking back in the same door after she had begun to vocalize meant, of course, that I rewarded the vocalizing. Argh!

But this morning I took the opportunity to close the door behind me on the way into the garage, walk away from the door, and then walk back and open it before she could start to make any noises. And I locked her out of the bathroom when I went to the john without creating a fuss.

Then I started some sit-down-stay training, a crucial skill for the process of helping the dog get past this sort of behavior. It looks like someone trained her to sit, but the trick is remembered fuzzily. She will go down, but she’s so submissive she wants to roll over when you try to coax her into the “down” position. And “stay”? Surely you jest!

So, there’s some hope here. If a dog can be gently relieved of separation anxiety, it takes about two months of steady, consistent training. This could be a challenge, because I have to go to work.

However, because my house is on a third of an acre, she can bark herself stupid inside the house and not disturb the neighbors. I will alert my closest neighbor Sally, though, and tell her to let me know if the dog makes her crazy. If push comes to shove, I can take Cassie with me to the office (ah, the joys of working at a university in an office where your dean can’t see you!) until I can take some vacation time to focus on this matter.

So, we join the Queen of England and the House of Windsor in our admiration for these funny little dogs. Just call me Betty! Or “Your Majesty” will suffice.
Thanks to everyone who commented on yesterday’s post!

2 Comments left on iWeb site

Pinchnickel

That dawg has a sly look about it, as though already aware of a favorite air conditioning vent.Which part of the dawg carries the rear forward?

Saturday, June 14, 2008 – 12:33 PM

Mrs. Micah

Aww! She’s adorable!! And she sounds like a real sweetheart, if clingy. Good luck with the whole desensitizing training. 🙂

Sunday, June 15, 2008 – 05:55 AM

How do you make a long-term decision rationally?

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What strategies do you use when you need to make a decision that will affect your finances and lifestyle for years? Possibly for the rest of your life?

They may be huge decisions: Should we have a baby? Should we adopt a child? Should we move Mom into the spare room or pay to put her up in a life-care community? These are moves that will change your life permanently.

They may be decisions that, while still big ones, can be reversed or won’t necessarily last forever: Should I buy a car? Should I rent or buy housing? Should I quit my job and go back to school to finish a degree?

Or they may be smaller decisions that, while they won’t change the course of your life, will affect your finances for months or even a year or so: Should we get that new Play-Station? Maybe we should buy a $5,000 wide-screen HDTV and subscribe to cable when regular broadcasting goes off the air? Should I lend my weird cousin a couple thousand bucks to start a business, money that he’ll probably never repay?

Thinking through the costs and consequences of decisions like these takes some strategizing. And I must say, strategize as I might, I’m never perfect at arriving at the “right” decision, whatever that might be. Often I end up just going with my gut instinct.

Today, for example, I’ve discovered the Humane Society has a beautiful little Pembroke Welsh Corgi up for adoption, two years old, female, spayed…perfect! The Corgi is one of several breeds I’ve considered as a likely candidate for a new doggy roommate. They’re relatively small—about 25 to 40 pounds. And although they do shed, they’re generally sound, very smart, and because they’re herding dogs, they have a German shepherd-like disposition. They also have a big dog voice in a small dog body, a consideration for a woman who lives alone in an inner-city neighborhood.

When I consider the pro’s and cons of adopting another dog, I end up listening to a schizophrenic conversation between the Voice of Rationality and the Elf of Whim:

Rationality: You don’t need another dog. You need an engineer to fix the trolley that you’ve slipped!

Whim: Engineers can’t fix a broken heart. And as soon as that engineer has fixed the trolley, he’s outta here. I need some company, and at my age, you can be sure it’s not going to come with two legs.

Rationality: Moron! You spent $21,000 on Anna and Walt! Think of your pocketbook.

Whim: I spent it because I could afford it. You shouldn’t let your cheapskate instincts limit your life.

Rationality: The floors are clean. They’ve been clean for two solid weeks! You don’t even have to vacuum the darn things—you just dustmop and run the steam cleaner. There’s no dogsh** in the backyard to clean up every single day. The Burglar Portal is sealed shut. Corgis shed doghair dunes, just like Ger-sheps, and they track in mud that has to be scoured off the floor! Do you really want to do that again?

Whim: Uhm…well, no.

Rationality: You’re finally free—FREE, I tell you!—to go someplace on vacation! Do you really want to spend the rest of your life vacationing in the backyard?

Whim: Doesn’t much matter. I’ve seen the world and don’t need to see it again.

Rationality: What do you need a dog for?

Whim: To keep me company. To alert me if someone comes around.

Rationality: Join a club. Get a burglar alarm.

Whim: <<sob!>>

Rationality: Okay, okay. List the pro’s of getting a dog.

Whim: Companionship. Something alive to come home to. Rescue a nice dog. Walking burglar deterrent. Entertainment value. Maybe I will stop crying every day.

Rationality: Ducky. Now list the cons.

Whim: Expense, expense, expense, and expense. Dog dunes to clean up every day. Twice-a-day feeding. Filthy floors to scrub on hands and knees. Daily yard cleanup. Risk of dog drowning in pool. Possible excavation of landscaping. Restriction of activities—have to be home to feed dog, can’t travel without extra hassle and expense.

Rationality: I just can’t see a rational trade-off here.

Whim: Who are you, Mr. Spock?

Rationality: Have you thought of adopting a tribble?

The problem with making lists of pro’s and cons is that it’s very difficult to assign weight to subjective elements in the list. In this case, for example: What, really, is a dog’s companionship worth? How much, really, does having a dog limit your life and your ability to meet other people? How much, really, do you care about that?

Do you have any strategies that actually work when it comes to making decisions that involve both financial and subjective considerations?

Friday, June 13, 2008

5 Comments

Mrs. Micah

No tribbles. Ever! Wait…maybe just one would work, maybe it’s when there are 2 that problems start. But I think tribbles just might reproduce asexually.

Maybe while you’re still recovering from the loss you could spend a little time at an animal shelter? Volunteer or somesuch? It might make you want a puppy even more (in which case you could get to know the dog a bit) or you it might give you just enough. Or help your rational side emphasize the downsides.

Friday, June 13, 2008 – 02:13 PM

Debbie M

Oh, sure, I make the lists.And they are both the same length.

Then I weight each item on the list, and the two lists still total the same amount.

At this point I decide that either decision would probably be okay.

Another strategy is to think of the worst-case-scenarios for both actions.Or at least worst-case imaginably likely scenarios.For example, if you get a dog, it could be all sweetness and light during the interview, but once you get it home it shreds everything and is always escaping and biting someone.Or maybe you turn out not to enjoy the companionship of that particular dog after all.(Not: the dog could really be an illegal alien in disguise and since you saved it, it’s now going to destroy the planet.)

And if you don’t get the dog, you will always be unhappy and bitter, unable to make connections with anyone, and you get fired and kicked out of your house and die … oh, wait, I am exaggerating again.

And you can think of other ways to handle your concerns (like your “Join a club.Get a burglar alarm.” response)

You can think of ways to minimize the probable and possible negatives of both decisions, like start a pet savings account or brainstorm ways to find companionship.

I’m wondering if calling one point of view Rationality and one Whim is a hint for you.One could also argue that continuing having a dog is rational and suddenly deciding this is the time to go dog-free is a whim!

Good luck.

Friday, June 13, 2008 – 02:17 PM

andyjean

Hey there. I’m a believer in having a dog. The trick is to get the right dog. You’ve got other comments already with good advice on the list making. My only additional advice is that you need to start your list from true zero. When you made your list you were already focused on a specific dog so you are already locked into some of the cons. Think about starting over from the point of view that you will manage the cons any way you can, including choosing a breed of dog that will eliminate some of them, and then figure out ways to minimize the rest.

I had to go through the same process two years ago. When my baby girl wanted a puppy for her graduation, I was against it. My list of cons was very similar to yours. I know I’m not going to stay on top of cleaning up dog hair every day, and I’m not willing to live with it. Most of the year there is nobody at my house for 10 hours a day. That’s no life for a young thing. I also knew we couldn’t stand the chewing, puddling puppy phase. I also had concerns about traveling with a dog, how it would behave in public and whether it would trash my car. The list got long, but my baby wanted a puppy and all my reasons for denying her were selfish.

So for months I secretly researched dog breeds, finally settling on a miniature schnauzer. They don’t shed. Not at all. The breed also met my size requirements and had a decent reputation for health, temperament and activity level. With the breed picked out, I started looking for the right dog. I didn’t get far before I realized I had to define what was right for us. Based on past experience, I knew we needed a dog with a temperament midway between total alpha and trembling submissive. Instead of a new puppy, we needed one that was four to six months old. At that age they can stand more alone time, and if you get one that is socialized properly, lots of the bad puppy stuff is over.

As baby girl’s graduation date neared, I scoured pet ads, rescue organization postings, talked to local veterinary assistants, and tried every other possible source looking for leads. Then I went and actually saw all the pups I found in the right age range. It was hard to walk away from some, but I knew it was best in the long run to pass on the timid and the hyper, no matter how cute they were. With four weeks to go, I found the perfect little five month old male. His family had to let him go because they discovered their son had a pet allergy. Because I could see the dog with the family in their home while we visited, I could tell that there was a very good chance that he had the right temperament and had been well socialized. They were even willing to give the puppy a temporary home with the child’s grandmother until my daughter’s graduation day so that once he joined our family, she would be home with him all day every day for three months. That way he’d be even older before he had to face a 10 hour stretch without his family.

All the work and waiting paid off. We can’t imagine being without the little guy, and he is almost no trouble at all. The key is that I held out for the right dog even though it took four months to find him. The rest of the cons on my list have been easy too. He was mostly trained from the start and has practically trained himself ever since. The house stays cleaner than I imagined it could be with an inside dog. Keeping him clipped every month ($35/mo for me and well worth it) means he doesn’t drag leaves and crud into the house. I manage the muddy paws by keeping the doggy door locked on rainy days and meeting him at the door with a towel every time I let him in. I feed him outrageously expensive food made from human-grade ingredients with no cheap fillers and low on potential allergens. I’m fine with the expense because I know it will pay off in less pooper scooping and stave off expensive degenerative diseases. Now that he’s fully grown, he eats once a day in the morning before I leave for work. I feed him just enough to keep him trim and limit snacks and treats the rest of the day. Feeding him last thing before I leave helps to minimize the separation anxiety. It also means that I can run errands after work or go out with friends without worrying about him home alone wondering where his dinner is. When we go on a trip without him he goes to a doggy daycare. On the financial side, yes, we spend money owning a dog, but we’ve got it to spend and there is no question that having him improves our quality of life.

Wow, that was long. Sorry. I’ll be stepping off my soapbox now, except for one last thought – Walt and Anna gave you lots of good blog material. Are you really ready to give that up?

Friday, June 13, 2008 – 03:37 PM

Bret Frohlich

I learned about worst-case-scenario decision making a while back and it has changed my life for the better.Now, I can make quick well-reasoned decisions and I feel confident, even if it doesn’t turn out perfect.

Before, I used pros-and-cons decision making and it always left me with a nagging doubt, even if everything turned out OK in the end.

If you want the dog, then just get it.Life is too short to deprive yourself of the companionship.My friend had a Corgi and she loved it.Me, I love my aging German Shepherd.She sheds a lot, but nobdody jumps in my backyard.

Friday, June 13, 2008 – 11:13 PM

vh

I like the “worst-case” approach. It cuts through a lot of dithering…and listing pro’s and cons certainly does lend itself to dithering.

Finally I decided in favor of getting the little dog (see the next day’s post for a photo). It may be dumb…but what’s the worst that can happen? She’ll chew up $3,000 worth of leather furniture, bark until the neighbors call their lawyers, and end up back at the Humane Society. Hey…how could I turn her down?

Saturday, June 14, 2008 – 09:24 AM

How I spent $48,346.36 on my dogs

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You read that right: one German shepherd and one greyhound cost me, all told, about $48,346 over thirteen years.

How many times have I said on this blog that the cost of pet ownership is beyond the means of the average single middle-class earner? The instant you say any such thing, you run the risk of being excoriated by passionate animal lovers, who argue that adoration of a furry friend is soooo worth it, and who imply or say outright that there’s something obscenely cruel, materialistic, and downright sacrilegious in suggesting otherwise.

I’ve always based those remarks on a general sense that I was spending too darn much on the dogs, particularly on the shepherd, and that the vet had me helping to make payments on a Porsche. Though one swift Quicken report suggested I’d spent something in excess of $18,000 on dog care, I never really looked hard at it.

Well, last night in a moment of idleness I ran a Quicken report on the category “Dog” and dated it back to October, 1995, when I bought Anna as an eight-week-old puppy. Walt came along seven years later and lived with us just over five years, from March 2001 until he died of cancer in September 2007.

Between October 1995 and June 1, 2008, when I sent the new vet flowers for kindness above and beyond the call of duty after she put Anna down, I posted $20,515.44 in Quicken’s “Dog” category. Feeling agog at that? Check out the figures here. This accounts for food, veterinary bills, endless medications for the shepherd, training, construction of a dog run (huge rip-off by a guy who ran a short length of chain-link fencing between the house and a block wall and then charged over $435 for the job), toys, dog beds, collars, leashes, and the like.

But that’s not all.

It doesn’t count the $635 that I paid to install a “security” dog door in a wall, supposedly near-impermeable to burglars when deadbolted shut, at the time I moved into my present house: $20,515.44 plus $635 = $21,150.44. I carried that as a capital improvement, so it wasn’t picked up in Quicken’s category report for “Dog.” Nor does it include the several hundred dollars in meat, vegetables, and starches I bought at grocery stores during the Great Chinese Dog Food Scare, charges that got lumped in with “groceries.” For our purposes, we’ll have to write off that cost—it was relatively minimal, anyway, compared to the next one.

Oh, yes. There’s more.

As a young dog, Anna was extremely vocal. A vocal German shepherd is a loud German shepherd.

I was driving a Toyota Camry at the time. It was a very nice car, only about seven years old and running exceptionally well. When I would put Anna in the back seat, she would become very excited and emit a loud, constant “are we there yet?” stream of yaps. Better yet, she would position her head so that her muzzle was right next to my ear, between my head and the driver’s-side window, and she would SCREAM every inch of the way between Point A and Point B. Nothing, including tying her to the seat belts with a special and wildly complicated doggy car harness, would ameliorate this. When I would drive her to the vet or to a hiking trail, I would get out of the car with my ears ringing and literally hurting.

I realized that if I didn’t do something about that, it was going to damage my hearing. No amount of training—and I’m pretty good at training large dogs, folks—did anything to shut her up. The only strategy that worked at all was to open the rear passenger’s side window so she would stick her head outside to scream. But that put her at risk, to say nothing of creating quite a distraction for fellow drivers.

Finally, I decided to buy a larger vehicle. But instead of trading in my perfectly good Camry, as a normal person with even a smattering of IQ points would do, I gave it to my son, whose junker was falling apart like the Minister’s One-Hoss Shay. He took it to San Francisco, where he was living at the time. There he parked it on the street, where a teenaged girl came along at a fast clip and rammed it, full bore, into the back of another car, crumpling it like a beer can. Of which she no doubt had plenty in her own car.

The car I bought to replace mine was a Toyota Sienna, a minivan large enough to pen the dog in the back so that at least she couldn’t shriek directly into my ear. This worked to save my hearing, but it did nothing good for my bank account. The Sienna cost me $27,195.92 (not counting the vastly increased cost of registration over the next several years and the cost of increased gas consumption).

Think of that: $27,195.92 + $21,150.44 = $48,346.36.

That is what Anna and Walt cost me, approximately. Yes. That’s $3,718.95 a year, or $391.91 a month.

If I had kept the Camry for ten years, as planned, and then bought a similar vehicle, the cost out of my pocket would have been around $10,000 to $15,000. And had I put $391.91 a month into savings over 13 years, that 48 grand (plus interest!) added to my other funds would have plumped up my retirement savings to the point where there would be no discussion of my working to the age of 70. No, indeed, my friends: I would be retired today, yea verily, even as we scribble.

Except for the Dog Chariot, most of these costs came in more or less affordable, not-very-noticeable chunks. The $21,150 represents the gradual accrual of expenses such as food and veterinary care, plus the usual doggy gear one picks up at PetSmart.

The pet industry has evolved into a huge cash cow whose primary purpose is to separate animal lovers from their money. And, as anyone who thinks objectively about it can see, it’s very successful at that. Too bad we can’t all think clearly while we’re in the process of letting ourselves be sheared.

5 Comments left on iWeb site

BeThisWay

Uh huh.I spent a very ugly amount on my dear departed Jonah.My current dog is costing far, far less.I hope it stays that way!

So, are you getting another dog?

Tuesday, June 3, 2008 – 08:26 AM

vh

Right now the greyhound people have a gorgeous little fawn female up for adoption, ohhh so pretty and I do love greyhounds….

But no, snap out of that!!!!

LOL! Probably not for a while. I think I need to decompress from dog ownership. As much as I miss Anna H. Banana and Walt the Greyhound, gee…it’s nice to have the floors clean. It’s sorta neat to have my old, still viable area rugs back on the floor in the living room and family room, and to have a soft rug on the floor next to the bed that’s not full of dog hair or wadded up and shanghaied for use as a dog pillow. It’s amazing not to be up to my elbows in grease every morning, trying to slip pills down a dog’s throat and cutting up chicken to persuade the dog to eat its food. It’s a relief not to be quietly wondering what kinds of adulterants lurk in commercial dog food (and did they give Walt cancer?). And wow! No daily dog poop patrol…

Most likely I’ll wait two or three months and then give in. You’ve gotta have a dog. Don’t you?

Tuesday, June 3, 2008 – 09:08 AM

Mrs. Micah

Wow. Micah and I may have a dog since we’re probably not going to have kids. But like a kid I want to be sure that we can handle it financially before we take the plunge. I don’t think we could have both…

Tuesday, June 3, 2008 – 05:36 PM

Mike

Thats amazing! just under $400 a month, although i think you are a little hard on them allocating the full cost of the car to the dogs, surely you got other benefits from having a larger car? The <a href=”http://www.nationalpayday.com/education/need_money/I_need_money.asp%22%3Ecosts%3C/a%3E associated with pets is still extremely high, Just the basics Vet+Food+toys+time cost families lots of money.

Thursday, June 5, 2008 – 01:35 PM

vh

On maybe two or three occasions, the van came in handy for hauling materials from Home Depot and the brickyard. In general, though, the Camry would have been a better ride: cheaper, classier, and on budget. I could have rented a pickup to haul junk for a lot less than the cost of a Toyota Sienna.

Thursday, June 5, 2008 – 08:00 PM

R.I.P. Anna H. Banana

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This morning I finally had to give up the fight and take Anna on her final chariot ride to the vet. She was in so much pain, it just wasn’t right to continue trying to keep her going.

Even when I’d made up my mind and SDXB helped me get her there, I still wasn’t sure…maybe if the pressure sores were what hurt so much, maybe there was something else to try. The vet, Dr. Brooke Hoppe, examined the sore spots carefully. When she manipulated them, the dog evinced no discomfort at all—didn’t blink an eye.

Dr. Hoppe said the large sore on her right hip was not a pressure sore and that there really was no sign of infection in it. She concluded that it was a patch of somewhat inflamed skin, and that handling it did not cause any pain. That was why Anna could lay on the hard floor on top of it—because that was not what hurt. Ditto the elbow pain: her elbow patches were just the usual calluses. One had been a bit abraded, but it was not a pressure sore.

The pain was not on the skin: it was bone-deep. Her spine was effectively calcified into an inflexible rod, and her hips were becoming deformed from the arthritis and probably, too, late-stage dysplasia. She could no longer sit at all, and to lay down she had to cantilever herself halfway there and then slide to the floor with a thud. The hair on her hocks was dirty and worn where she’d had to slide to a down position. Dr. Hoppe said there were a couple of other painkillers we could try, since the Tramadol was doing little or nothing for her. But it was unlikely they would help much, and if they did, the effort would be strictly palliative: there was nothing we could do for the condition of her bones.

So, it was time.

It’s going to be pretty lonely around this place. While I was vacuuming out the double-sided dog door preparatory to sealing it into its burglar-proof mode, I looked up and expected to see Anna standing in the door to the room, where she would be watching me whenever I indulged any such behavior. And throwing away poor old worn-out Toy was pretty hard.

But on the other hand… Now I can go out of town for a weekend. I haven’t even made a day trip in longer than I can remember, or visited my friends on the far west side, because I’ve had to be back here by six o’clock to feed and medicate the dog. I have exactly no one who can be imposed upon to come over here and feed the dog twice a day and medicate her upwards of six times a day. By the time the end finally dragged around, I was giving her 16 pills a day, smearing two different ointments on her twice a day, and administering four eyedrops every day. No one is gunna do that so I can take off for Flagstaff or Santa Fe. Now I don’t have to scour dog poop out of the porous CoolDecking around the pool-almost every day!-and now I can take down the jury-rigged fence that kept her from falling in the drink. Now I can trade in the gas-guzzling Dog Chariot for a more fuel-efficient car. Now when I clean the house, it will stay clean for a few days. And now that I don’t need a big fenced yard, I can sell my house and move someplace smaller and easier to care for.

It’s amazing to think that dog has been with me through several major phases of my life. When I brought her home as a puppy, I was solidly middle-aged. Now I’m old. That was part of the dilemma about putting her to sleep. Hey! My bones ache, too—my back aches when I get up, and my shoulders hurt and my neck hurts, but I’m not ready to shuffle off this mortal coil because of it. Why should anyone think she would be? But I have to allow, I can get up, which she could barely manage.

Now what? On the one hand, I think no more dogs!!!!! On the other, it’s hard to imagine being without a doggy companion. I’ve had dogs—big ones, shepherds and retrievers and a dobe and a greyhound—all my adult life. If I get another dog, it can’t be another 85-pounder. It will have to be small enough that I can pick it up to get it into the car if it’s sick or hurt, small enough that I can pick it up to take it out of harm’s way (oh! the aggressive off-the-leash curs Anna and I engaged!). Since I don’t much care for little yappers, I can’t imagine what kind of dog that would be.

So for the nonce I’m done imagining.

I probably won’t post tomorrow. The rest of this weekend will be spent in a cleaning frenzy.

Later!

Month of extreme frugality (NOT!)

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Wow! If there’s any question about whether Karma is mad at me, the laughable effort at a month of extreme frugality answers it! Not only did I fail to save extra money to apply toward the Renovation Loan Payoff Fund, for the first time since I started the weekly budgeting system, I ended the month-long cycle in the red!

I was $23.57 in the black on May 16 and thought I might make it to the end of the billing cycle, but just couldn’t do it. The main reasons were the dog and the astronomical cost of gas.

The dog went off her feed, causing her to barf up the meds. So I had to go by Sprouts to pick up some ground lamb and lamb neck bones to persuade her to eat; while I was there I got some hamburger for myself (totaling $15.89). Then I had to buy a new prescription antibiotic for her, relatively cheap at $26.80 but still more than I had left in the budget, even without the cost of food. These two trips consumed just enough gas that I wasn’t sure I could make the 36-mile round trip to the office on what remained in the gas tank, plus I had to come home the long way to go by a client’s office and deliver a completed project. My van gets 18 miles to the gallon, so I bought about 2 1/3 gallons at Costco: 13 cents a gallon under the going rate, but still $3.47 a gallon. These expenses put me in the red.

This compares abysmally with the first three months of this year:

Before this disastrous month, the worst I did when I wasn’t trying to save had me $151 in the black!

What did the job on my budget was the cost of veterinary care: $379.75 to my old vet and $278.08 to the new vet, plus assorted extra meds. Plus special food. The cost of gas didn’t help-really, if gas were not exorbitant, I might have ended in the black despite the dog headaches.

Luckily, I kept $500 of the previous months’ savings in the money market checking account used to pay these costs as an emergency “cushion.” So when the American Express bill arrives, there will be enough to pay it. But it frosts my cookies.

At this point, it looks like the only hope of getting the vet bills under control is to put the dog down. The vaginal infection is better, but the nose thing just keeps getting worse. She can barely breathe through her nose. Just the cost of diagnosing what ails her starts at $300, to X-ray her skull. If she has a tumor, then she should be put to sleep right away, because it’s terminal and there’s nothing effective that can be done: $300 + $379.75 + $278.08 = $957.83 that I might as well have run through the shredder. If she doesn’t have a tumor but probably has something stuck in her nose, they have to thread a lighted tool into her nasal cavity, which in a dog is an extremely complex maze, to try to fish it out. The vet said this would be “expensive.” When a veterinarian calls something “expensive,” you can be sure the term an ordinary mortal would use is “ruinous.”

So, it may be better just to put her to sleep now. She’s had a long run: she’s almost 13 years old, two years past the normal life span of a German shepherd. I hate to contemplate it: a stuffy nose shouldn’t be a capital offense. On the other hand, heavy panting and rapid breathing are signs of doggy pain, and with the vaginal infection pretty much healed, we know the pain isn’t coming from that. The fact that her nose doesn’t appear to be congested while she’s sleeping (i.e., unconscious) suggests the noisy breathing isn’t caused by a nasal blockage but indicates discomfort or pain. She keeps me awake half the night every night, and I have to get up and get out of the house by 7:30. I’m running on fumes myself at this point-this has gone on for a couple of months-and I’m starting to get sick from the stress and fatigue. If she’s in pain, at her age chances are the cause is cancer. It may just be time to say good-bye.

Poor old lady.

3 Comments left on iWeb site

Jennifer

What a tough call on the dog.We were in this boat a few years ago and you are right about when a vet says “expensive” that means it is ridiculously expensive.our dog had a thyroid tumor, i.e. cancer, that spread to her heart.Well once that happens there is no hope.It is sad either way, but it is important that the dog not suffer.And it is hard to tell if a dog is suffering because they can’t talk.Good luck with the dog, that is hard to deal with.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 – 06:03 PM

Allergies

I went through the same thing with 2 family dogs.It sounds like allergies.I got a lot of help by going to the online medical sites for dogs and humans too.What the vet doesn’t tell you is that dogs can tolerate most of the same medications people do, just in lower doses for their body weight.I would try a childs brand and dosage. Todays dog foods are not very good for your dog.You are better off feeding them meats and oatmeal with fruits and vegetables.or meat and potatoes.An allergy may be to meat also because of the amounts of chemicals they treat foods with today.Have a little patience and you will find the right combination to make your dog feel better.

Friday, May 30, 2008 – 07:11 AM

vh

Alas, this dog isn’t given to allergies. When the Great Dog Food Scare arose, though, I started feeding her and the greyhound real food. They indeed do perform a great deal better on human food: dog food is substandard and provides substandard nutrition.

However, turning out 28 pounds of dog food a week is no joke. Unfortunately, I have a job and I have no partner to help me with shopping, food preparation, and cleanup, and so even if I could afford the cost of buying huge quantities of better food than I eat myself, converting my kitchen into a dog-food factory is not a practical option.

Subsequent trips to the vet show that what’s causing the manifestations of pain is pressure sores. She refuses to lay on her soft blankets–about the middle of last winter, she developed an aversion to dog beds, of which she has a half-dozen scattered around the house and back yard. Washing them did not help. Buying new ones did not help. She is so averse to a soft place to lie down that she will not even walk on them–she walks around them. Lay one down in the hall, and she treats it like a roadblock. As a result she lies on the tile flooring, which is throughout the house. The yard is desert-landscaped, and so there’s no grass to lie on out there.

Pressure sores are extremely difficult to treat, even in humans who can understand instructions not to lie on them. Eventually, they eat through to the bone. They are very painful. They get infected, and such an infection can and will kill the victim. Old folks in poorly maintained nursing homes routinely die of the effects of pressure sores.

There’s evidently nothing I can do about this. I tried tying an object to her torso so that it would force her to lie on her side. This worked for about 30 minutes, after which she just lay down on top of it.

Friday, May 30, 2008 – 07:28 AM

Dog redux

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Seven hundred and eight dollars later. . .

Yes. That’s over seven hundred bucks. So much for the Month of Extreme Frugality. How laughable.

Yesterday I took the dog to a new veterinarian, not feeling at all satisfied with what I got for $430 from my regular vet. When I took her to the the latter vet late last month because she stank so violently you couldn’t stay in the same room with her, he said she had a vaginal infection and gave me a bottle of antibiotic pills and a tube of antibiotic ointment, with instructions to smear it on her nether parts (at great risk to life and limb, we might add). This was a week after he saw her for restlessness and hyperventilation and gave her a cortisone shot to quiet her down. Shortly after I got her home, I found a large lesion on her leg. He-or rather, one of his staff-said he had seen it, it was a pressure sore, and I should put the ointment on that, too.

The sore didn’t get any better, and neither did the stink, to speak of. They charged me another fifty bucks for a second round of antibiotics. On my own, I tried myconozale, which helped a little; the problem was, I couldn’t get the stuff on the dog because she threatens to bite me every time I try to apply anything to the affected area. She has to be muzzled, wrestled down, held down, and medicated. It’s no small trick to do that once, much less several times a day, and I am not of an age to be wrestling on the floor with a ninety-pound dog!

Meanwhile, when I called back about the leg sore, the same unhelpful and vaguely rude staff lady proposed, with a straight face, that I lock her in “a small room” where the floor is padded with several layers of comforters. Well, the only such room in this house is the bathroom where the only truly functional toilet resides. The door opens inward. You can’t pad the floor where the door swings. So I had to drag the dog into the bathroom and then barricade the entrance to the bathroom with a couple of dining room chairs. A German shepherd has no problem moving a couple of chairs out of its way. So I had literally to barricade the door with several dining room chairs, jamming them into the hallway so she couldn’t budge them. As you can imagine, this was not very good for the chairs, my back, or the dog. The only other way to keep her on a padded floor is to tie her to a doorknob and spread the comforters, several layers deep, over an area too large for her to escape.

Neither of these strategies was any too practical.

I also very much doubted that the sore was a pressure sore, because the dog is too active for such a thing to have developed. She’s in motion much of the time and never lies still longer than about four or five hours. I know: that’s about as long as she will allow me to sleep for any given stretch. It’s the wee hours right now, and we’re up.

So I decided to try a friend’s vet.

Well, the place was very impressive-and much, much closer to home. It’s clean, with absolutely no typical veterinary odor. Very spacious and shiny, with several vets and at least a half-dozen staffers that I could see. Meaning, of course, that the practice is cranking the bucks.

Lots of brochures laying around detailing all the expensive things you can do to/for your dog. The basic “senior well dog” checkup is $275, and that’s a fishing expedition that looks for chronic ailments to treat for the rest of the animal’s life. Onward.

The vet was a young woman, very smart. I overwhelmed her with two pages of the dog’s symptoms and four questions:

  • What is the sore on her leg?
  • What can be done about the vaginitis?
  • Why does she pant and hyperventilate constantly?
  • Can she be treated in a reasonable way that does not drive me to wacky behavior like tying the dog to doorknobs and barricading the bathroom with the dining-room furniture?

She examined the dog, shaved the hair off around the irritated rear end, and, having learned to her surprise that the other vet had not done a culture on the diseased area, swabbed up a sample for culturing in a lab. After this, she opined that the lesion is not a pressure sore, because it’s not in an area where a bony prominence comes in contact with the floor and it does not look like a pressure sore. She thinks it’s a hot spot, probably brought on by an insect or spider bite. About the infection, she thinks the dog is in a great deal of pain.

About the heavy breathing, she noted the dog’s nasal secretions are bloody and said she may have a tumor, an expensive item to diagnose and treat. To find out whether she does have nasal cancer, which as it develops is pretty likely, will require a $300 X-ray. If that is positive, the dog will have to be put down.

(As I write this, ominously enough, no air is flowing through the dog’s nose and she’s breathing, loudly, through her mouth.)

The vet then gave me four different medications: a spray, fistfuls of medicated wipes, goop for her rear end, and goop for the sore. She recommended I continue the antibiotics I have until she can get the results of the lab test back, at which time she probably will recommend some other $50 antibiotic. So at this time, the dog is supposed to get FOURTEEN DOSES OF MEDS A DAY. She did, at least, say it is unnecessary to try to force the dog to stay on pads, so I can leave off that aspect of the wacky behavior. IMHO, medicating a dog 14 times a day is quite wacky enough.

At any rate, she charged $278 for all this.

Compared with the other vet’s bill, it seemed like a bargain. Consider:

Vet 1: $430

Services and products:
cursory exam
cortisone shot for agitation
2 bottles of antibiotics
1 tube of ear ointment
not so much as a clue about the leg sore
absurd recommendation for management of leg sore

Vet 2: $278

Services and products:
thorough exam
shaved hair from affected area, allowing access for medicating
lab culture and test
ointment for leg sore
pain-killer for vaginal infection
spray-on antifungal for vaginal infection
antifungal, antiseptic wipes for vaginal infection
consulted at length and made more or less rational recommendations

I said I suspected the dog really does not need Soloxine, because at the time the other vet put her on it, she had no visible symptoms of thyroid dysfunction and because I had learned that hypothyroidism is the most overdiagnosed ailment in veterinary medicine. She said the only way to tell is more bloodwork: $125. To test for thyroid function in the presence of Soloxine, you have to test about 5 hours after the drug has been administered. Since I dose Anna at 6:00 a.m. and it was by then after 3:00 p.m., that scheme was obviated. I’ll have to bring her back another time to find out if she really needs thyroid pills. But first we probably should find out if she has a tumor in her nose, a situation that would do some more obviating.

When I got the dog home, I could not get her out of the car. She couldn’t stand up. She’d jammed herself up against the driver’s seat so that she couldn’t get enough purchase to pull her weakened hindquarters off the floor, and she threatened to bite me when I tried to help her get upright. It looked for a while like I was going to have to drive her back to the vet and have them put her down, right then and there. Finally I pulled the car into the garage and just left her there with the door open and the lights merrily running the battery down. After a half-hour or forty minutes, she managed to get herself up and out of the vehicle.

The four Benadryl I walloped her with an hour ago have finally taken effect. She’s out cold on the floor. On a positive note, she’s now breathing through her nose (more or less), which she was unable to do when she woke me with the steam-engine sound effects. So maybe the nasal problem is just allergies. Probably not, though. You don’t get a bloody discharge from allergies.

My head hurts, my neck hurts, my back aches, my iced tea has gone warm, and even our pet house fly is asleep. Now that it’s quiet, I’m going back to bed.

Month of Extreme Frugality, indeed!

2Commentsleft on iWeb site:

Pinchnickel

Gasp!Have you asked the veterinarians to treat your pooch “pro bono?”I watched a Hollywood TV show, All Things Large and Small, that portrayed veterinarians as compassionate, caring, green-minded people, generous with their time and money.

Thursday, May 15, 2008 – 07:15 AM

vh

Isn’t that the loveliest program? You know, it’s based on a series of semiautobiographical books whose author was an English veterinarian. Each of them is equally delightful.

Veterinarians are compassionate and caring people. But compassionate and caring people have to eat, too. Veterinary school is said to be more difficult to get into than medical school, and the course of studies is extremely challenging. After one of these very bright young people graduates, she or he goes into the business of veterinary care, which IS a business, not a hobby or a charity.

Veterinarians are not in business to give away their skills. They’re in business to make a living. Given how hard they have to work to acquire their skills, they rightly expect to make a good living. Many vets, however, earn only a middle-class income; it’s a lot less profitable than you would think.

Compared to what Vet #1 charged, I felt Vet #2’s fee was pretty reasonable: she devoted a lot of time to examining the dog and talking with me in detail, she provided more medications, and those medications appear to be more specific to the ailments at hand. And she did not leave me in the dark, wondering what is wrong and whether it can be treated at all.

Am I willing to pay $300 to have a 13-year-old German shepherd’s skull X-rayed? The jury is still out on that one. Since I’ve already spent more than half (!!) of this month’s disposable income on the dog, it will have to wait until another couple of paychecks come in, so there’s plenty of time to make a decision.

And at the rate the poor old gal is going, she may not last that long. She has a tough time dragging her crippled hindquarters off the floor, and so frankly, I suspect the end is in sight.

Thursday, May 15, 2008 – 09:06 AM