Blog

A reader commented on my most recent blog post (about my dog, Woody, coming face-to-face with the first rattlesnake we’ve seen this year). I...

I’ve been fostering dogs and puppies for my local shelter for 15 years. Wow! Time flies – until I thought about it, I didn’t...

To anyone who has been involved in shelter or rescue work, the idea of intentionally breeding mixed-breed dogs, or even unregistered purebred dogs, seems...

They already know. Even before the carry-on suitcase comes out of the closet, they know. I’m leaving town for a few days. Is it the extra...

None of you actually had any money riding on the question of whether I was going to keep him or not, did you? I hope not.

Yes, I am keeping the puppy, the one I fell in love with from the litter I fostered for my shelter. One of these days, I'm going to go back through all my files and do the math, but I think that if I added up all the dogs I've fostered for one shelter or rescue or another in the past 20 years, the total would come to more than 25, and this is the first one I've "failed" at fostering. At least, so far. I am still not discounting the idea that, if it turns out that this puppy turns out to be the ideal dog for an ideal family sometime down the road, I could, theoretically, still turn him over to a perfect life elsewhere. Who knows? Maybe he will turn out to be a great service dog or therapy dog, as some of you have suggested. He does have the calmest, most centered personality I've ever seen in such a young dog.

Are there breeds you love and breeds you don’t get the appeal of? I think we all do – though I would be the...

My brother passed away a couple of weeks ago after a fairly short and intense battle against cancer. He leaves behind a wife and young daughter. It's been a very sad, hard time for my family. We held a memorial service for my brother last weekend. We rented a rustic building in a beautiful, wooded park in a Sierra town near where he had lived for many years. My sister who is a chef lovingly prepared much of the food. My sister in law's many friends and co-workers helped up set up the hall, with live lavender plants on every table, and a local musician my brother had admired played the guitar. Friends and family members traveled from all over to help us remember my brother and celebrate his life.My dog Otto and my son's dog Cole were present for the event. Every member of my family loves dogs, not least, my brother's five-year-old daughter. She absolutely adores Cole, and his eyes light up when he sees her; they get along like peanut butter and jelly. I thought, correctly, that she would enjoy having Cole at the event – and I knew Cole would enjoy socializing with all the guests. He's happy and polite and well-mannered and his coat is like silk. I thought he could be a good therapy dog for the memorial.

One of my ex-boyfriends from many, many years ago had a sort of dad-joke he’d tell at least once daily. Any time he saw...

You will never find a more ardent lover of off-leash dog walking than me. But I'm lucky: I have access to thousands of acres of "wildlife area" near where I live. It's not quite a state park, but state-managed land where certain types of hunting are allowed in various seasons. Dogs can be off leash there much of the year, except for a short period in spring, to allow the many species of ground-nesting birds to lay their eggs and raise their young. When that happens, I either leash up my dogs, or go elsewhere. As much as I love walking my dogs off leash, and as well-mannered as they are, with near-perfect recalls, I'm not ever going to be one of the many people I see who walk their off-leash dogs past the signs that appear there every spring saying, "Dogs must be on leash from March 15 to June 30 for the nesting season." I appreciate and respect my access to that land the REST of the year; I don't want to risk losing access to it EVER.

Not long after my husband and I bought our house in 2006, we were introduced to another couple who, unbeknownst to us, shared our home address: a pair of skunks. They had a den under the house, and emerged shortly after dusk to wander through the neighborhood, foraging for fallen fruit from ornamental and backyard fruit trees, digging for grubs and worms in freshly watered lawns, and helping themselves to cat food on various porches where some people feed cats (feral and otherwise).

For the past three days, anyone who has called me has asked, "What's wrong?" I keep thinking I'm doing a fine job of covering my irritation and emotional upset, and answering the phone the way I always do, but apparently - not.For weeks, since the evacuation of my shelter, I've been fostering a young dog who was brought into the shelter a few days before the evacuation. The people who brought him to the shelter said they found him as a stray. It later developed that someone who saw him in the shelter recognized him as the dog who belonged to the people who surrendered him; they pretended he wasn't their dog when they surrendered him. That happens often enough that no one at the shelter was surprised to learn this. The dog is adorable, but he's got problems - physical and behavioral.I think he's been kept in a crate or small pen his whole life; he has the least amount of muscle tone of any dog I've ever met.

Dogs are incredibly quick to pick up on patterns of events that predict what we are about to do, or what we are about to make them to do.