I swore I wouldn’t let foster dogs sleep in our bed this time around. I swore it up and down and backwards and forwards. And for two solid weeks, I stuck to that plan.
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After a five-year hiatus, the Farnival is finally fostering again, specifically we’re fostering Pearl aka Queen P. She had been dumped on a country road surrounded by nothing but thick woods and cotton fields. She was severely emaciated and had the worst case of demodex mange I’ve seen since I visited Cuba.
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From the time we jumped in Amber's cargo van until we pulled back into the Halfway Home’s gravel drive six hours later, we picked up ten dogs, eight from a kill shelter near Memphis.
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If the Farnival had a motto it would be: “A Tired Dog is a Good Dog.” Seriously. We live by this saying because when our dogs are tired, they don’t have the energy to be bad. There are a lot of different ways to exercise your mutt, including but not limited to swimming, visiting dog parks, throwing frisbees, and tossing tennis balls. These are all great choices, and I’m not discounting any of them.
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Recently, several people wrote to me about fleas. They seem to be particularly bad this year. It’s really important to prevent flea infestations because besides being gross, they are uncomfortable and unhealthy for your pup. Fleas can cause skin problems, anemia, and tapeworm. They can even kill puppies.
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Did you know that one dog and her offspring can produce 67,000 puppies in six years? Just think about that. Take one long second and think about it. It’s staggering, right?
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I found Carly Sutherland on Instagram. Her pictures caught my eye because they are fantastic. But I also pay attention because she fosters dogs and cats for the SPCA of Northeastern North Carolina and welcomes a constant stream of animals into her home, a home she shares with her husband Bryan and their pack of three, Chuck, Meg, and Pig.
Read MoreMason recently told me he wanted to rip out Mr. Pine’s stump. I wasn’t happy. Granted, stumps aren’t exactly attractive, but we’re not talking about just any stump. After a few days of negotiations, we settled on building a memorial instead.
Read MoreOur greenway has been shut down for weeks, so we’ve been walking through town in the mornings too. Last Saturday we passed a church. From two blocks away, we saw a packed parking lot and cars wrapped around the street. Two cops were directing traffic. Springfield has been so eerily quiet that we often walk in the middle of the road, so seeing that many people caused us to pause. It looked like traffic after a drag race instead of during a pandemic. I checked the courthouse’s clock tower and it read 8:45 a.m.
Read MoreMultiple people asked how I felt about the Tiger King documentary. My answer isn’t simple. Was the Tiger King entertaining TV? Absolutely. A documentarian couldn’t have asked for a more dramatic storyline. Concerning character, every person was more outrageous than the last. But when I viewed it the second time, when the shock value lost its impact, I felt incredibly sorry for all those tigers.
Read MoreA strange screaming came from the woods thirty-six hours after tornadoes leveled parts of East Nashville. The tornadoes touched down twenty-plus miles from our house, and local creeks had flooded but nothing more serious. The cries weren’t human, yet we never heard anything like them before.
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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the hardest part of loving my freaks is leaving them. And soon, I’ll be leaving them for ten days. There are two things that make being away worth it. One, I’ll be visiting a magical place, a.k.a. the Golfo Dulce in Costa Rica. I’ve heard rumors that creatures like sloths, macaws, and monkeys live in those emerald green forests, and I’m as excited as a twelve year old to see them. I wasn’t able to sleep last night just thinking about it.
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It stayed brutally hot, like 90-degree and 70-percent humidity hot, until mid-October. Three weeks later we woke to snow on the ground and a thermometer reading 13. I write about animals on this blog because everybody needs a focus. But based on current weather patterns, I’d say we should all be concerned, or at least aware of the environment.
Read MoreMason and I started rescuing dogs almost twenty years ago this winter. Over those two decades, we’ve rescued and rehomed fifty dogs. But even after all those mutts, the day we saved our first dog, a Doberman called Puff, remains in my mind as clearly as this morning for two reasons. For one thing, it revealed my life’s work. And secondly, we broke the law.
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Yesterday I posted a story about the dog overpopulation problem in Cuba. Click here to read it. It’s not easy to read about suffering dogs. Believe me, it wasn’t easy to write about them either. It took me over a month to finish that post, and there were times I almost gave up because I just wanted to forget about the Alamar dog and the Muraleando puppy. Yet, I couldn’t pretend like I didn’t see them. If we don’t see the problem, then who will? The good news is that there are practical ways we can all help Cuban dogs. I’ve listed four below.
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When my mother-in-law asked if I wanted to go to Cuba with her, I said why not? The Castro mystique, the old cars, and the architecture vaguely interested me. Visiting a communist society also intrigued me, but these were all ambiguous ideas floating around my mind. The only clear reason I could articulate for wanting to visit Cuba was the dogs.
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