My Turn: A Weighty Matter, by Levi

I have a bone to pick with the vet. Ordinarily, I enjoy picking bones (I am, lest you forget, a dog), but in this case, the sport of chewing is overshadowed by the seriousness of the issue at hand. According to our vet, Dr. Mengele, I assume, I need to lose weight! Me, Levi!



To further his agenda of starving dogs and cats, the vet said that Rocky and Erica were "a little overweight" as well. Chi-Chi's always been a fatty, but then it turned out she has diabetes and she's not nearly so fat now. In fact, I'd say she's just about right. Dr. Kevorkian would disagree. He says dad should be able to feel all of our ribs and spines easily. That's loony! Sure, he should be able to feel we have ribs and spines, but there shouldn't be anything easy about it. This is what I look like now:



I've heard it said that you can never be too rich or too thin. Maybe that's true about being too rich, but I can assure you, anyone thinner than me is dangerously thin.



"Why dangerously," you ask. "Aren't you engaging in hyperbole again, like when you compared the Fed Ex man to Hitler?" To that I say, "No, a hundred million times, No!"

I am not fat! This is what I would look like if I was fat! I do not look like that!


When that deranged vet says that I'm overweight, he's just demonstrating his ignorance. What he calls, "overweight," I call, "famine-proof." A smart dog like me knows trouble often lurks right around the corner. With an extra 10% or so bodyweight, I will be able to face that trouble head on, without crippling hunger thwarting my ability to plan and think clearly.



Let's suppose, for an instant, that, heaven forfend, dad and grandma ate some bad clams and keeled over dead. It could happen. Where would Chi-Chi, Rocky, Erica and I be then?



Certainly we'd be hungry, but we wouldn't starve to death. If we were what Dr. Crippen says is "ideal" weight, we would be so hungry that we would have no choice but to start eating dad and grandma immediately. Then, when help arrived, we'd look like the bad guys. That won't do. Levi never plays the villain!

With our famine-proof physiques, though, if sudden death overtook dad and grandma, we'd have at least a day before we had to start eating them to fend off death by starvation. We'd have a whole day to figure out which parts of them would be best to start with. We wouldn't have to just start eating willy-nilly, like "ideal" dogs would be forced to do. Also, maybe we'd be able to wait it out, until fortune smiled upon us once more.



In a horrible situation like that, it's possible someone could come save us. Or maybe dad and grandma would stop being dead and feed us, because we would be very hungry. But if dad and grandma stopped being dead, that would mean they hadn't been dead at all, just sleeping, maybe.



So, if we were maintained at what that crazy bastard vet says were our "ideal" weights, it could be a tragedy waiting to happen! Dad and grandma might be sleeping too long, and in our state of near starvation, the pack and I might think they were dead forever, and start eating them! Not only would we be in trouble, but it would be embarrassing. I do not like to be embarrassed.

So, in conclusion, dogs and cats should, ideally, be 10% above their "ideal" weights, so that they are famine-proof, and terrible mistakes happen less frequently. If a veterinarian says something different, he is wrong and a bad vet! He doesn't care if your dog eats you! Do you really want a guy like that treating your pets? No, of course you don't.



If your dog is more than 10% overweight, you still might want to be careful about trying to impose a diet on him. Talk with him, emphasize the health consequences, but whatever you do, let his weight-loss be his idea. When a fat dog is put on a diet he gets very hungry, and while I'm not saying a fat dog is going to eat you and your family if he gets extra hungry, I'm just saying it isn't something you want to find out about.

Editor's Note: I don't have a note today. This is just how Levi wrote it, and I think it speaks for itself. For more of Levi's interesting views, click here.


© 2009, All Rights Reserved, Rich Sands
ScottsdaleDogMan.com
ScottsdaleDogMan.blogspot.com

My Ugliest Dog

Speaking ill of the dead is usually considered bad form, but, if I'm going to write truthfully, unflattering facts will need to be addressed from time to time. The fact is, the first dog I ever got on my own, with Karen, in the early 80's, was an unattractive, unintelligent, pretty much altogether unappealing, beagle mix of some horrible kind or the other, whom we named, Holden. I don't have any pictures of Holden, so those posted with this article are approximations.


Holden wasn't grotesque like the dogs in the ugliest dog contest. He was just an ugly dog. He was represented as a "beagle-mix," but exactly what that meant was anybody's guess. He was about standard beagle size, and he had floppy ears, but the resemblance essentially stopped there.

Like Levi, Holden was a yellow dog. But Levi's yellow is a bright one, evoking sunlight and gold, while Holden's yellow had a dullness, like dead leaves on a forest floor. It was a muddy yellow. He had a dark, saddle marking, visible across his back, not enough to make him two-tone, just enough to make him muddier. 

His coat was short and bristly, like a pig's. His eyes were beady. He was fat, with bad breath, and gassy, to boot. On top of all of this, Holden was dumb as a doorknob. He had a certain slyness he could call upon to do things, like escape from the house, but nothing that would indicate anything that could reasonably be termed intelligence.

The day before we got Holden, Karen and I had moved into our first apartment, a tiny second-story walk-up in a 100 year old house on Monroe St. in Bloomington, IL. The first thing we had to get was a dog. We'd been in dorms, and, setting out on our own, we were going to have dogs with us. Karen was going to get her first Seeing Eye dog in a few months, so we wanted to get a dog immediately, so it would be acclimated by the time the new Seeing Eye dog arrived.

It was early March, and when we looked through the newspaper, usually full of free dogs, we were disheartened to see very slim pickings. In fact, in the age and size range we were seeking, there was only one choice, and it was about 25 miles outside Bloomington in a little town called Rantoul. We got in our completely unroadworthy car and drove to meet our destiny.

We got to a manufactured home with a poorly constructed wire fence around the yard. It was cold, so no dogs were outside. We rang the bell and a howling arose, the likes of which I honestly haven't heard since. It was the howl of at least a dozen dogs, every one of which matched the description I've given of Holden almost exactly. They were all ages and colors, and it seemed like a dynasty of dump dogs had been assembled in this humble home.


We were shown the puppies, two of which remained for adoption. The ad had said they were three months old, but with my subsequent knowledge of dogs, I'd venture Holden was at least six months old when we met. His sister, our other choice, was too badly socialized to even approach us. Holden did, and so we took him. He proved to have been badly socialized as well.



I'm a terrible shopper. I'll always take the first one I see that meets my needs, whether it's a pair of jeans, a used car, an apartment or a puppy. I try to have someone with me during these important purchases now, but that day Karen was my companion, and she was blind, so I don't think she fully appreciated the lack of attractiveness of Holden. Or, maybe, like me, she was determined to get a dog that day, and, having no other options, it was going to be Holden.


After vomiting and urinating on us several times during the ride home, we brought him in, where he proceeded to act like a petrified freak for a week. Of course he finally came around, and grew to love us, then his sisters, Lyric and Chelsea.

I adored Holden. I doted upon him like I now do on Levi. I objected vehemently whenever anyone else pointed out that Holden was ugly and dumb (he was bad, too, but examples of that are for another day). He was my dog, and I loved him, and that's all that matters. He didn't have to do anything but be Holden to be loved, and with all his deficiencies he seemed to understand this basic fact. I think back objectively about Holden, and, as you can see, I can't exactly articulate a redeeming quality, but somehow I loved him with the same devotion as I now do Levi, who happens to be the best dog in the world. 


That's the thing about dogs and people. It doesn't matter to one if the other is ugly and dumb any more than it mattered to me that Holden was. He was my boy, and that's about the end of the story. 

And when I remember Holden, before words like "dumb" and "ugly" and "smelly" come to mind, I remember that I loved him with everything I had, and thinking about him does nothing but help me revisit the glow of an old friendship. The faults of dogs, or people, that we love, don't die with them, but neither do they diminish the love we feel for them. With twenty years distance, I can look back and see Holden for the poor specimen he was, but I don't feel any less love for him than I did when he was my dog. 

Excuse me. Holden will always be my dog. 


© 2009, All Rights Reserved, Rich Sands
ScottsdaleDogMan.com
ScottsdaleDogMan.blogspot.com

Saturday's News of the Dog

Welcome to Saturday's assembly of dog news. No reports on dogs starving, or abused, or fighting…just decent dog news for ordinary, decent, dogs like yours. 

I'll keep up on what's going on in the world of dogs, so you don't have to.

Part of a series about Scout, the puppy, who today swims indoor in Manhattan! City dogs have the life!

How a dog's mind works. This is a GREAT article from the NY Times about the latest theories of the mind of dogs, and how they can learn to do such incredible things. The article talks about how dogs are intellectually about on par with a 2 ½ year old human, and emotionally on a whole different level than people. Incredibly interesting!

Church services for LA area dogs. I suppose they couldn't get less out of it than some people!










It's official. Both dogs and cats can get swine flu, so I guess it's time for them to panic, too.

A mutt in Pittsburgh is nursing nine African Painted dogs. Very cool!

A marine finds a stray mutt in Iraq…and gets the dog home with him! A story of how man and dog should care for each other.

And, finally, here's Bob, the fattest dog in all of Scotland. I have no further comment.


© 2009, All Rights Reserved, Rich Sands

ScottsdaleDogMan.com

ScottsdaleDogMan.blogspot.com

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