A Sad Day Made A Little Less Sad

Jr and fido got tangled up, jr landing on top of fido. Fido retaliated, getting jr above and below the eye. Another time, it was on the middle finger. It’s time for us to make a choice.

Fido was born on 17Dec94 (he was 7½ weeks old when we got him in early Feb95). We watched him grow from a little puppy through all the stages a dog’s life has. We moved house four times, and we had two cats and five birds in that time, but fido was always our first-born fur-baby.

Our IVF journey started about 1999, and bore fruit on 21Jul10 when jr came to us as our first-born. Fido and puss were not impressed, and made the usual signs to show this. But as jr grew, that lack of being impressed grew too. Then jr started walking, and fido and puss hated it. Puss can at least escape, but when escape is not possible, he withstands the pats, both gentle and otherwise, for just so long. There was one time when he was considering lashing out, but didn’t.

Fido isn’t as tolerant. He has arthritis, is deaf, and going blind. He doesn’t always know what’s going on, so when a 10kg toddler fell on him, he retaliated the only way he knew how. So yesterday we went to the vets to discuss our options, knowing that we didn’t have too many. We decided to take the lethal option, but to come back today to get the deed done.

The vet was very understanding, and took him out the back to put a catheter in his arm for the injection. But she seemed to be taking such a long time. When she emerged with fido she said that most of the delay was in trying to contact her partner, who was not answering. She offered to take fido from us on a trial basis – they had lost their second dog a couple of months ago and, while fido would not be a replacement, he would certainly fill the void.

I leapt at the opportunity, although mrs_g was not as willing to take it up. She thought we were both crazy. Fido has a number of ailments which do not contribute to his quality of life, but my idea was that this is a vet with access to fido’s medical records, so she knew what she was signing up for. We left the vets without a dog today, but not the way we imagined we would be doing so!

Fido is very well loved both at our place and at the vets’ – he’d been going there all his life and the staff there would have been devastated if we had taken the lethal option. Let’s all hope that he gets on well with this other dog, that the vet’s partner doesn’t mind adopting an older dog (this vet has been with the practice for 6yr and had never done anything like this), and that the trial goes well. Fido is a beautiful little dog who doesn’t deserve to go out the way we’d planned.

* I have spelled fido, puss, and jr with lower-case initials because they’re not their real names, making them regular (not proper) nouns. 

Pets, and how they make our lives more interesting

We’ve had two cats now. The first one took 18mo to figure out that he could get out of the garage we put him in overnight, and this last one has figured out how to get out of the garden shed we have to keep him in. This was after putting him in the laundry for a week or two.

The decision to put him where we do is because of the damage he’s caused to much of the stuff we have in boxes. Many of the boxes were actually shredded from his clawing / stretching / doing what cats do. The laundry here is a little small for him: only room enough for a poo-tray, water, food-bowl, and carry-box.

But after a while I realised that the garden shed, which is lockable, is bigger, despite having more stuff in it (mower, weed-whippers, empty rubbish bins, etc etc). But the shed, along with the rest of the place, hasn’t been kept really well, and the door has started to jam and the lock-hasp didn’t quite make it up to the staple. So I just put the house-brick in front of it and left it at that.

But at 0300 today came a knock at the door. It was the cat. He’d got out. The reason we didn’t let him sleep with us is, well, if you’re a cat-owner, you’d know about the ungodly-hour calls – he had learned that knocking on the wardrobe doors makes a noise which makes us get up and attend to him (even if it was to lock him in the laundry for the next couple of hours).

But this morning, after he came in, he just went to the sofa, and slept there until we got up. I think he knew he’d done the wrong thing. Strange creature.

Other things our strange creature does is refuse to use the cat door to leave the house, or when we’re at home or awake. He will use his door when we’re at home and asleep, and when we’re out and left him out of the house. We’re considering getting a step so the dog can use it as well. 

Pets - can't live with them; can't live without them.