Three Dog Day

Coco came to us with no vet history whatsoever. That's not too unusual but it meant that I needed to get her in for vaccines as soon as possible and get her spay scheduled as soon as possible. We had an appointment for that this morning and she was great. Coco is coming around to me and Clay, but she really likes women and the vet we saw and all the techs she saw today were women. So there was none of the shy, scared, little girl we had at home for the first couple of days. She was outgoing and friendly, and well behaved for the exam, vaccines, and blood work.

I had her spay scheduled for the second week of September when I realized I hadn't heard the results of the test for heartworms and tickborne diseases. She's a young girl, between a year and two, probably, so I wasn't overly concerned about it. She lucked out on the tick diseases but she tested positive for heartworms. This is what comes from keeping your dog chained outdoors and not even bothering to give it heartworm preventative. Really pisses me off.

Coco is young, healthy, and there's every reason to believe that she will come through the treatment fine, but it's expensive, it's hard on the dog, it will delay her being spayed, it will delay finding her a home (by several months), and it wouldn't have been necessary had the owners had a bit of decency and common sense. Enough bad things can happen to your dog, why wouldn't you at least try to prevent the easy ones? I have zero patience for people who don't even attempt to take care of their dogs. I'll end my rant here, but I can't promise I won't re-visit this over the course of treatment that this little girl will go through.

Mercedes came along on the vet visit too. She had been vaccinated before she came here, not by the former owners of course, but by the woman who had taken her in after she was dumped. All Mercedes needed was the 4dx test, and she passed it with flying colors, no heartworms, no Lyme, Ehrlichia, or other nasty tick diseases. And of course Mercedes was the perfect model of good dog behavior. She sat when I asked her to, she was friendly, and easy for the blood draw. The vet said she was in great shape for a 10 year old dog, although her age and quality of life shows a bit more on her teeth. She's missing all her incisors (front teeth) and her canines are quite worn. The skin and sparse hair on her back near the base of her tail shows that she probably had a rather persistent flea infestation that went untreated for far too long. Still, all things considered, she's in great shape for a somewhat senior girl, and she's pretty darn perfect in every other way.

The vet visit took a few hours out of my day, but I got home and got some work done, and even some mowing before the next dog event of the day. Green Dogs was having an event on the downtown mall this afternoon/evening so of course I wanted to take Harvey. Clay came along and we used two leashes on him, not knowing for sure how he was going to be and not wanting to take any chances.

He's been great here in the two days that we've had him. We are learning more about him, he does a great "sit" and usually transitions immediately to "down." He was the exact opposite of Hunter and Indigo the first time we took them downtown. They were freaked out by the noise, activity, people, everything. Harvey is Mr. Cool. He just took it all in, and was unphased by everything we saw, which included bicycles, a motorized wheelchair, other dogs, and hundreds of people, many of whom stopped and wanted to pet him. He seemed to be checking out all the passing kids to see if they were "his kids."

The only bad thing I can say about him is that he walks like a drunken sailor, lumbering from side to side, bashing into Clay and me alternately. He has no concept of a straight line. We'll work on that, but if that's his only problem then he really doesn't have any problems. He was a good dog. We went to Champion Brewery for a beer afterwards. His drink was much bigger than ours, but he wasn't driving and it was just water anyway.