Life in Review
I’m surprised how draining training a young dog is, I knew it would be effort but I didn’t know it would be exhausting whilst keeping to my regular sleep schedules.
Alas, she’s coming along well. Much less anxiety in general, and much less anxiety about being left alone and being put in her crate. It could be much, much worse.
There was a beautiful sunrise this morning, but Kelly superseded it.
Our little girl Kelly spent her first night without any incident, we think she has a little separation anxiety but not a lot. Here’s a photo of our little girl;
We visited the Burlington/Hamilton SPCA today looking at some of the Lab crosses, when a little girl called Kelly walked in. Friendly as anything, we didn’t have a choice. We now have a little terrier cross. She needs some work, but she’s not food nor toy aggressive and she’s friendly with all other dogs.
She was excitable around Baxter, but with a little patience she’s only mildly interested in him now and by the looks of it, Baxter is the boss (from within his cage!).
So it looks like the whole Fred thing isn’t going to work out. It took the better part of a week to get a response the first time, and then the woman from Bluetick and Bloodhound Rescue Ontario was at best impolite on the phone, but more indignant at having to consider us.
She was completely obstinate that he had to be placed in a house with a large fenced in back yard. I find it rather negligent that she cared more about a yard than actually trying to determine if we would be able to exercise the dog. Besides the fact that a yard doesn’t take a young dog out for a long walk, nor does it give it socialization or exposure to new experiences. You should never be letting your dog piss and shit in your backyard, especially if you have young kids as dog excrement can actually cause blindness in small children.
The whole thing just didn’t have the right feel, so we’re going to look at the local rescue shelters that actually seem to take a proactive approach to getting their animals adopted, which means they actually save more.
We received our first call from the adoption place, which wasn’t exactly the greatest call. For an animal rescue, you’d expect them to be a little more enthusiastic about placing a dog. They were extremely concerned about a yard for the dog for exercise, which seems a little asinine to me when any dog expert would tell you that putting the dog in the yard doesn’t count as exercise. This is especially stupid of a bloodhound rescue, as scenthounds are the one type of dog you should never trust outside, because a fence means nothing if the dog is interested enough.
Alas, we’re going to continue with the process. It seemed like we were being tested, which hopefully we were, but next time we talk to the woman I’m going to be calling her out on a lot of things, otherwise we’ll be going somewhere that actually cares about rescuing a dog.
Yesterday was Baxter’s, our pet rabbit’s, birthday. He’s now reached the might age of two. He’s stopped misbehaving nearly as much as he used to, he’s now very affectionate and actually responds (somewhat) to his own name. We’re not sure of his exact birth date, but our estimates landed him right around Easter, so why not Easter Sunday no less?
His birthday is going to be a little late next year, what with it landing on the 24th April (well done Catholic Church, can’t figure out when you saviour died? Jeeze, you call that an organized religion). We’re not going to check his litter box for any Easter eggs, that would be a little too gross.
Anyway, happy belated birthday notice to my illiterate and non-web-active pet (damn animals these days need to go get themselves a twitter account).
Our aquarium gained three new additions this weekend when we bought a few snails to help keep it clean. Goldfish are some of the dirtiest fish in existence and the snails help clean up left over food, poop and most of all algal growth on the rocks and glass of the tank.
I attempted a few photos of the surprisingly agile critters, however they’re too small to focus on correctly through the glass with flash on and it’s too dark to see them properly with other lighting. I’ll keep attempting photos when they get into the various crazy locations we doubted they could get to.
Today’s rabbit pic:
If you’ve never seen a truly contented rabbit, this is it. Not only is he laid down in this, but he was ignoring me sticking a camera in his face. This was taken flash-off, with a light sensitivity eight-times better than any human it’s a little cruel to flash them when they’re falling asleep in a darkened room.
There’s also a hint of his paper genocide to the right of the picture. Rabbits love to kill tissue paper, it’s like their version of catnip.
Baxter is the house rabbit. He was bought for my wife’s birthday, but we extrapolated back and believe he may have genuinely been an Easter bunny, so as we’re not entirely certain of his age (he’s a Dwarf Rex, so it was harder to tell his age when we got him from the pet store) his birthday gets celebrated on Easter Sunday.
In this picture he’s relaxing in his cage, he just got finished being pet. Noticeably his blankets are in one piece. His grooming instinct has since meant he chews holes in the blankets, it started by him removing the little emblems stitched on, but has since progressed to random spots he dislikes on the blanket.
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