She’s Young and With It

I just felt like writing to say that this week all energy was zapped from my body. It must be due to the fact that I turned 32 last weekend. Apparently, the moment I turned 32, all energy left my body.

We have an in-home dog training lesson tomorrow. I have no idea what to expect. It has been scheduled for about two months, but I do not really know what we are going to cover at our house versus what we cover at the training facility.

What else has been going on? Seeing The Dark Knight. Swimming. Working. Sleeping (not enough apparently). Reading. Watching it rain (finally). Listening to the new David Sedaris. Watching TV (why, oh why were Elvis & David kicked off Greatest American Dog?). Buying tickets (good seats!) to see The Magnetic Fields in October at The Paramount. Worrying about Basil the cat. Not playing with or training the dogs. Complaining about bad service at Eastside (one of my favorite eateries!) on my birthday. Getting a nice email from the owner of Eastside which made it alright. Watching the bamboo we planted last year suddenly shoot up and explode in height over the fence.

And wishing 5:30 would come already.

Last night I laid outside in our hammock and watched bats fly over for the good part of an hour. We have bats! I probably knew this but had never spent time looking for them. It was a pretty relaxing way to spend an evening.

A red-tailed hawk hangs out a lot as well. Now I just need owls to hang out. We once saw the hunkering outline of an animal on a light post at dusk and that may or may not have been an owl. That was a while ago. We have shrews too. I only know this because I found a half-eaten shrew on my driveway last week. Then I saw a cat come over our fence and I knew the source of the shrew on my driveway. Of course, I had already predicted the source of the shrew damage, considering we once saved a dove from the cat. If only everyone believed in keeping domestic cats indoors…

Not really related to wildlife… I did something dumb last night that resulted in Neko getting away from me on leash. She has no recall skills at this point so I just stood there screaming, “Neko!” Fortunately, she ran up to a guy and his dog who were walking. He grabbed her leash for me, so I ran up apologizing and thanking him and hoping hoping hoping that Neko did not do her happy to greet a dog and then growl and lunge at the dog thing that she does. While I was apologizing, the guy said, “It’s OK. He won’t hurt her.” The “he” was a pit bull and of course, he was much more well-mannered than Neko. It was Neko I was worried about, not his dog. I was so freaked out by her running away that I could not find the skills to tell him that I think pit bulls are great and that it was my little chihuahua mix that I was worried about because she is dog-aggressive.

Speaking of her dog-aggression, we have three more lessons with the trainer this weekend. She is getting better! They said that she is a textbook case of dog-aggression.

This made me think about dogs who are off-leash running up to my dogs when they are on-leash. It happened recently with Callie. A golden retriever came galloping up to her and I kind of froze. The owner came running after the dog, scolding the dog, but never apologized to me. That is just rude. The same golden retriever did that to Neko once and sent her into such a frenzy that I had to take her home. Meanwhile, the owners stared at me like my dog was a freak. She is nuts, but hello, it is rude to let your dog run up to my on-leash dog!

There has been a lot going on. I have not quite had the motivation to write or read email or do much of anything really. Maybe I’ll blame it on the heat. At least we finally went swimming. For some absurd reason, we had not been swimming the past couple of summers. And that’s just crazy.

I had a run in yesterday with animal control. There were two wee loose dogs at work. Whoa, wait a minute, loose dogs in West Austin? That never happens. Someone actually made a joke that they came from East Austin because they heard life was better in West Austin. Anyway, several people were trying to catch the dogs with crates and leashes and chicken, but we were unsuccessful.

In the meantime, what I might call an overzealous security guard called animal control and said one bit him. They were feisty little suckers but really just unsocialized, unaltered, fearful little dogs. I truly doubt the guy got close enough to be bitten. Herein lies one of the problems with Austin. There just aren’t enough animal control officers and there is no sense of hurry to help unless you tell them the dog is dangerous or near a school. We experience this often when we call in East Austin. The usual answer is that animal control will come within 2 to 24 hours. Well, it’s not like a dog is going to stand around in the same spot for 24 hours.

So there were a couple of people willing to foster and maybe even adopt the dogs (not me! not me!), with of course, an effort made to locate the owner. Since we were having difficulty catching the dogs and animal control arrived, someone asked if they (animal control) caught the dogs, could we take them and foster them. The animal control officer, who was very unfriendly and made some pompous joke about people never being happy to see animal control, said they had to impound the dogs but we could put in an adoption application on them. We tried to explain that we knew that the chance of euthanasia was so high in Austin shelters that we did not want to take that chance. They said that they had to attempt to find the owner, so I asked about what I have done in the past when rescuing a dog – I email them the photos and they list the dog on their site and in a book at the shelter. The lady with the animal control dude said she was new and was not sure they could do that. Well, they can. I have done it several times now.

Long story short, animal control could not catch the dogs either. Is it bad that we were actually cheering the dogs on as they ran across the lawn with animal control chasing them? Probably. They ran away and have not been seen since the debacle. If you live in West Austin, please be on the lookout for a tan/white chihuahua mix and a tan wire-haired terrier type dog.

While I sort of understand that animal control has a job to do and they must do that job as they are told, I think Austin has a very bad animal system. We were three people fighting to help these little scared dogs and keep them out of “the system,” but animal control was unwilling to work with us at all. I knew that if they went to the shelter, even if we put in adoption applications on them to get them out… if they are deemed unadoptable during that three day hold time, we would not have been able to save them. And knowing that absolutely sucks.

Lesson learned: Next time I will lie and say that I am the owner of the dogs.

UPDATE: By the time I arrived at work this morning, the dogs were located and captured… by people and not by animal control. Hooray!

This is all over the internet, but just in case you don’t read all the dog blogs that I do and missed it, The Washington Post wrote a very nice article about Michael Vick’s dogs. These beautiful photos accompany the article. They might make you cry so consider yourself warned. The photos of Vick’s property were especially disturbing to me. Kudos to The Washington Post for writing such a positive story about pit bulls.