more life with dogs

Jake, Buck or Noodle ...my hero dog, sweet, gentle & perfect in every way

This is his season. He's got a job to do and he takes it very seriously. He was put on this earth to retrieve things from water and as much as he loves his food & treats and loves his people ...get outta his way when there's a stick being thrown into the ocean. I've mentioned earlier in this blog that Jake will be 13 this Dec 04th and my heart literally swells with happiness as I watch him every morning bound through the waves on his morning mission. Returning to shore, wet and dripping, he has the physique of a very young dog, trim & shapely and not an ounce of fat. This job he has keeps him healthy, and that's the important thing. Most dogs do have jobs, historically most breeds were bred to work at something. Guarding, hunting, herding, retrieving ...dogs were only meant to lie around sleeping because they're exhausted from their real job. I believe that to have a happy & healthy dog you need to make their lives interesting and purposeful ...it's just like us, how boring would our own lives be if we didn't do anything all day. Mid morning every day I sit at my desk and draw and listen to the contented snoring breath of tired dogs and the twitching paws of chasing rabbits in their dreams, they're pooped for now ... but by 3:30 each afternoon Jake begins his campaign to get me to leave my desk and let's get going again. He barks from downstairs, and if I don't respond to that he comes upstairs to lie by my desk and sigh deeply and eventually he will begin to whine & whimper... like clockwork every day.

It's important to somehow try and recreate their day job in your own daily life. Now there are exceptions - take Miss Dixon for example, she's a terrier mix, bred to kill rodents and small mammals, now that's a tricky one to recreate especially with a house full of cats. She seems, thankfully, to have turned the kill mode into lord over mode and since the arrival last summer of kittens Gussie Gus & Oliver she has taken the role of Kitten Police very seriously. Our two big long walks a day, sitting at the beach lapping up lots of love and pats from the girls that we walk with, driving in the car with her head out the window and making sure the kittens aren't doing anything that she doesn't approve of, seems to take up the better part of her day. Winnie's tires much easier because she's anxious - she wears herself out worrying about this & that and really her job in life seems to be to feel loved & secure ...that's an easy one - so she's happy to just lie on the beach and chew on a stick and be a spectator to her brother's athletic endeavours or to plod along happily with me wherever I might decide to go.