Dogster

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live to run, run to live

Mornings with Sky

Every morning I wake up to a forty-five pound dog licking my face. That is Sky’s ritual way of greeting me, telling me she needs to go outside. If I try to push her aside, she whimpers and paws at my face. One morning she even scratched me without meaning to. I was not happy that morning. Eventually, I push the covers aside and she wiggles and jumps off the bed, squirming in delight. Sometimes she even omits a playful puppy-like bark, but she never fails to give a little jump in the air as I reach for the door to the hallway.
Bounding down the stairs, clumsy Sky often slips and falls on the hardwood floor. Her nails grow quickly and have already started clicking against the grain again. It is interesting to watch in the early morning as the sun’s rays haven’t fully come up to illuminate the house or her antics, but she sure seems to make herself known.
Sky has already become trained on our Dogwatch invisible fence, so she waits by the door and gets her collar put on with a wiggle of impatience. Once outside she greats the old Aussies before I do, then runs the length of the back drive. I smile knowing she’ll save the major play for after breakfast.
Going back in I feed my two old black tri Aussie Mixes, then take Sky in before she can steel their’s. I call her my “Kibble Theif” because she is always raiding the other animal’s feed bowls as if she is still starving (which she is NOT). Twenty minutes later we return back out, after Sky and I have both have breakfast we take another walk, this time we enjoy ourselves. We play for a bit with the other Aussies before heading off for a run on a gravel road or taking a trail through the woods to a near by lake. There are several fields back behind our house, and there I let Sky off her lead to run flat out if she so chooses, but often she just trots by my side, quite content and tired after a run. Sky has become a content dog and she’s even learning to tolerate the cats. . .most of the time.

first experience at the lake

Something my mama loves about me is that I am completely housebroken. From day one I have been in the house and have let my family know when I need to go out. Whether it’s by standing by the door, or licking my mama’s face to wake up in the morning, I let her know when I have to go. For the most part, I go outside after meals. I did have an accident once, but it was only because I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I haven’t done it again.
Today I went down to the little lake (we have two) near our house and I really liked it. I wanted in, but mama didn’t wanna give me another bath, so mama only let me get my paws wet. One of the docks was partially under water (due to the swelling from rain) and my mama didn’t expect me to go past the waterline, but I trotted right out to the end of the dock. It was very exciting. I was on top of the water!
I was able to prance through the reeds and sniff at bugs and rocks. Everything on our walk was new and exciting. My Aussie brother Ben came along and actually swam in the marshy area getting his curly coat all tangled up with briars. He was one happy dog, but I laughed at him when he had prickly things in his coat all the way home.
Mama says that she was more worn out than I was on our jog, but once home I settled in for a nice nap while she went back to her school work. So, over all I think it was a fun afternoon for everyone.

My first week with Sky

Because Sky is a true Australian Shepherd, even though she appears to be chocolate in color, she is a tri red and has that starting blue/amber eye coloring that is unique to the breed. She has four white socked feet and is one of the tallest female or male Aussie’s I’ve ever seen. My mama says that when she walks, it’s like she’s floating. She just prances, and she never pulls on the lead, not ever.
The noise my sister heard in the garage was the lid to the dog food container crashing to the concrete floor. She is the first animal to have ever managed to get it off, but she didn’t get a single piece of the food, we stopped her before she ate anything. Now she’s eating her own food and is gaining weight rapidly, she’s looking like a completely different dog. She has a pallet at the foot of my bed (on the floor), but after I climb in bed and snuggle down she hops up and curls up on my feet. This morning I woke up several times because she’d stretched out in her sleep and I found myself being shoved off my own bed. Either I need a new bed or she needs her own. As I type she is taking a nap on my bed. . .or is it hers? I don’t know. Whatever it is she seems content. I think she realizes how spoiled she is here.

Although she is well behaved, she doesn’t have basic obedience down. So, on day two I started with “sit- stay” she is getting the hang of “sit” but the “stay” not so much. She has progressed to "down" and already has "come" and "off" in the bag, so there is no questioning her intelligence.

Sky is a fairy mellow dog. She doesn’t rough house or play with chew toys, although she seems to like pig ears and dentabones. I give them to her and she prances off with her head held high and her bone in her mouth, fifteen minutes later there isn’t any evidence that I gave her anything. I wonder if she hides them or actually eats them. Who knows?
I do know that she likes to run outside and does not seem to mind the rain. She does NOT like cats nor female dogs. Poor Pinni. Sky does get along well with Ben and Bear and she does not chase cars. Yesterday, a rabbit ran across the front yard when she wasn’t on a lead. She started to go after it, but when I called her she came to me without hesitation.

She didn’t whine a bit about getting her nails clipped. When I gave her a bath she laid down and was very pathetic, but she didn’t fight it. I think I used half a bottle of dog shampoo on her, but she came out very fluffy. She has clean milky white teeth, but very bad breath. There is a tiny bit of tarter on them which I am trying to clean off with doggy toothpaste (which she doesn’t like). I guessed that she was around 2 years old, due to her disposition and minimal tarter on her teeth. Upon taking her to the vet, they said I was off by a year and she is probably around 3. My dad and I talked it over in the vet’s office and decided that since we didn’t know her birthday, we’d choose they day she came to us. So, February 18, 2005 is Sky’s birthday, but she will have to wait another year to celebrate it. This past year she came in from the cold and found a warm dry place to sleep as well as a good meal and people who loved her. So, I think she had a good birthday.
I know I could have rushed Sky to the vet when she first showed up, because she was so malnourished (only weighed 28 lb). But, she seemed to be eating well and I was still working out how to pay for the bill if I was to keep her. It took most of the week to figure out the finances of a big Aussie on a broke college student income. But, I’m single and I’m not in a relationship and when my life has been going well it has been revolving around a kid or a dog. So, I worked it out. Once I called the vet and got over the sticker shock of a new dog (new dogs require tests that you normally do not have to run on your own pet that you know doesn’t carry worms and diseases) I spent the next few days leading up to her visit in agony, thinking of “what if she was micro-chipped”. Sure, I planed on getting her chipped as soon as I could, because I knew I’d want her returned to me if she was lost. I knew that she had been on her own for a while, but somewhere in there she had been loved by someone at some point and time because she loved people and she even walked up to kids and licked them.
Being brave, I introduced Sky to the people at the Animal Hospital and told them my situation. I lifted all 32lbs of her onto the table and waited. . .and waited. . .and waited. . .someone came in with a digital camera with a zoom lens.
“You are planning on keeping her right?” I nodded my head enthusiastically. The vet tech snapped the picture and told us it would come in the mail with her shot records. I gulped while Sky breathed heavily over my shoulder. All the guy had done was waist more time while I squirmed in the unknown world whether or not she would be claimed. Finally, the vet came in and Sky’s tail thumped merrily. She began chatting about pet health and my dad interrupted her seeing my pained expression.
“Before we get started, can we scan the dog for a microchip?”
The vet tech raised an eyebrow but picked up the instrument while Dr. Mann said
“Of course,” I vaguely remember the tech said that he doubted a dog in her condition would have one and he felt over her ribs, around her neck and even down her back. Saying, sometimes they move. But the scanner didn’t pick up a thing. So, in a matter of seconds (which seemed, much, much longer to me) she was mine.
A few vaccines later and Sky was registered. I told the Dr. Mann all about her runny nose and found out she had allergies (I guess my dog is a lot like me). I told her about her torn ear, but was relieved to hear nothing should bother it. I was told to watch her for hip-dysplasia, but as for now she appears fine in that area. Everyone there was taken by her mix-matched eyes and they were both given a clean bill of health (whew!). Her malnourishment is a concern so I was told to put her on IAMS puppy food (which I promptly did) to help boost her weight. She also has hook worms, which is common in dogs on their own, eating anything they can find. So, the price went up again. She was also put on a specialty heart-worm medicine to prevent the hookworms from coming back. Sheesh, Sky is a SPOILED dog.

I’m waiting to get her fixed for two reasons. The first, the vet bill was two hundred dollars and she eats like a horse. And second, the vet said she needed to be at least 40 to 45lb before she can be spayed. Maybe in another month or two she and I will both be up for it.

Sky was supposed to be sleepy the evening following her shots, but that only lasted about an hour. The rest of the night she was her usual comical self. Clumsily knocking thing over, whacking things off the comfortable with a swish of her tail, bumping into objects, people and/or animals. She even managed to trick my mama into feeding her at 12:30 in the morning when I got up to use the bathroom. She gave that “please gimme some food” adorable pout. And my mom who never feeds her, fed her. So, at 12:40 am I was walking my Aussie while I was in my pjs. Yeah, lethargic from shots.

Sky has a skinny neck. Perhaps it is because she is under weight and needs to fill out, but it only measures “16” around. If you go to Pet’s Mart or some other pet related store like that you will find that the majority of dog collars reaching 16 inches in length are relatively skinny. Sky is a big dog, she needs a ¾ or 1” collar not something that fits on a Chihuahua or a Jack Russell. I was looking for a leather collar and did find one I like, but it was nearly $18 and I didn’t wanna spend that much money on a collar I was unsure of. I did find a rusty orange organic cotton 1” collar that looked amazing against Sky’s coat, but it was one size too big. Right now, we’re just looking while she gains weight, maybe it’ll fit in another month. Until then she is wearing her tags on Ben’s red puppy collar.