a handsome and happy fella' indeed!
Night, Ebony, Sputnick, Diablo, Stoop, and Sonny.
...but I've learned to love the other domestic animal (three letters, starts with'c') also.
And Rusty and Rojo and Sandpaw and Kelly.
I'll add that I like cats too, for perhaps different attributes, but they send me into asthma city. But dogs, hey..
I just wanna smooch that little puppy face.
I just posted this poem in my Allen Ginsberg thread, but then I thought how nicely it would fit in here.
A Dog Has Died
My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.
Some day I'll join him right there,
but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.
Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.
No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he'd keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing.
Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea's movement:
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean's spray.
Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.
There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,
and we don't now and never did lie to each other.
So now he's gone and I buried him,
and that's all there is to it.
Translated, from the Spanish, by Alfred Yankauer
Pablo Neruda
That's exactly the dog we saw yesterday. He was running like hell towards
the canyon and chasing after rabbits. Since it was almost evening and coyote dinner time, we stopped the car and tried to catch him, but he was on a
mission and got deeper and deeper into the canyon. After much wooing,
we caught him and got him in the car. Soon thereafter we found the owner -
luckily.
The Humane Society here (where I spend most of my non-free time these days) was charged with the care of over 50 pit bulls recently -- they are evidence in the trial of a man who "allegedly" was dealing drugs (which I won't hold against him) and breeding fighting dogs (which I most definitely will).
Anyway, this severely taxes the resoures of the shelter, and many potentially adoptable dogs (which the confiscated pit bulls, for the most part, are not). This being a small, rural city, we were besieged by local news crews, and every station that night ran stories about the plight of the dogs at the shelter. This was on a Wednesday.
When the doors opened to the public at noon the next day -- a Thursday -- there were enough people waiting outside that I started wondering about the fire marshal.
By the end of Thursday, every available dog had an adoption appointment, and staff was scrambling to get as many dogs as possible moved up to the adoption floor from preadoptable.
On Friday, all of those dogs got adopted.
The response from the community was unbelievable. In the space of 24 morale at the shelter went from an absolute nadir, with people griping loudly about the f*ucking Department of Justice and why do good dogs have to die so the killers (many of whom are actually quite personable, provided you're not another dog, and have been horribly mistreated) can be kept indefinitely until the state can get its case together to an almost disbelieving elation as person after person -- old people, young people, families, whatever -- came in to do their part and save a pooch or two.
I'm generally inclined towards misanthropy, but the people of southern Wisconsin are still making me see everything in soft focus. Dog bless 'em.
Now, if someone would just come down and pick up Sasha and Cricket. They're very nice old girls, and you can't hold their barking at horses against them...
Schniff.
You have gonads to work at a shelter.
I admire and respect you even more.
Don't worry. It's purely self-serving. Soy el numero uno, la letra ahhhhhh....
Not altruistic. Driven by reason and ambition (or lack thereof, in the conventional sense). I'm a stray myself -- it's where I belong.
mioauuu!
Good to see a cavfancier post from some time back!
We prefer "gonadally unburdened," thank you very much.
patiodog wrote:We prefer "gonadally unburdened," thank you very much.
So...you squat when you go wee wees then?
Hell no. I look for a rabbit, lift my leg, and direct a powerful stream at it.
For an animal so practiced in carnal embrace, your inability to distinguish between "kibbles" and "bits" is astonishing.
I was greatly encouraged by your story, PPD--but also saddened. I worked for a while (for as long as could stand it) as a volunteer at a shelter near the University of Illinois. Many wonderful dogs, perfectly acceptable as a companion to any family, were "put to sleep" because people so infrequently adopt dogs, and there just aren't sufficient funds to support hundreds of dogs indefinitely. There, i saw a problem which i also saw when i worked at another university--students got dogs, and when they finished their studies, and were about to go to a job, or just go home again, they would dump the dogs, usually on an empty country road. At the other university where i worked, i lived in the country outside of town, and happened to live on a road which was a popular dumping site for unwanted dogs. It broke my heart, because i could not, of course, save them. Feral dogs were a real problem there, and i knew a man who used to shoot them. He wasn't being cruel--if anything, he was being humane. If he could lure them, he'd get them in the truck, and then actively try to find a home for them. If he couldn't, he'd take them out back, give them a bowl of beer, and when they went to sleep, he'd shoot them and bury them. Other of the feral dogs had "gone bad," and he'd just shoot them where they stood, and then notify the highway department which picked up road kill (it was in deep woods country, and there was lots of other road kill, usually deer--the boys who picked up road kill were very busy).
I'm always saddened and angered by this. Dogs have kept faith with humanity for literally thousands of years, saving people, and sometimes laying down their lives for us. This is how we repay them.
