On the Avondale bulletin board a woman was looking for a home for a stray black lab puppy she had picked up in December. She has taken great care of the dog, taking it to the vet, getting him fixed, microchipped, and boarding him because she can’t keep a dog in her apartment. I offered to foster care for him while she looks for a home because I know boarding isn’t cheap, and I just don’t like the idea of any dog being boarded for so long, especially that young.
She brought him over yesterday. He is incredibly skinny, but he has a ridiculous appetite so I know he will pick up weight. I can’t even feed my two dogs with him around because he just dives right into their food. They don’t know if they are allowed to put him in his place, so they just let him do it. He hops right up onto the sofa and stays right beside me, loves to fetch and likes to chew on a nylabone, or really chew on anything he can get to. One of the first things he did was stick his head in a waste basket with junk mail in it and had 3 or 4 pieces of unopened mail in his month, walking away like it was some kind of prize or like he should go deliver it. It was pretty funny.
Katie and Austin are tolerating him, but Austin is kind of freaked out and doesn’t even like staying in the same room with him. That’s terrible because Austin likes being next to me so much but this dog (his rescuer has named him Moses) just wedges in like other dogs aren’t even there.
I’ll post some pictures this weekend. He looks pretty much identical to Austin except smaller and skinnier.
I only worked 6 hours today, but that still meant I was away for over 8 hours and he didn’t have any accidents or destroy anything (well, one dog toy was disemboweled).
He is estimated to be eight months old and is smaller than Austin or Katie and much thinner than either one. He probably only weighs 30 pounds, if that.
I wonder if you will end up keeping him? 3 dogs. Oh, my gosh.
Well, he has worms. That explains why he is so skinny. I called the woman who found him to ask where she had taken him to the vet, thinking I would take him this morning. But she came over and picked him up. Then he was back in less than an hour (my dogs enjoyed taking a walk and getting to eat without interference while he was gone). Worms are pretty common in puppies and he has already been treated twice before. He got two pills, one that I gave him right away, and another that he takes in 3 weeks to get rid of any worms that are just eggs right now.
I took a couple of pictures this morning. He looks full grown in these, but he is still a puppy. He is very smart and has learned to sit in order to get treats. In fact, he just sits and won’t move hoping to get more treats.
So, the lady took him to the vet and got the 2 pills? Poor doggie. At least there are people who will take care of him. You are right. He does look like Austin.
The travails continue. Even after being dewormed he still had diarrhea and his rescuer said the other dog she found tested for having giardia, a one-cell parasite. It is bad news and people can catch it from their pets. So I took a stool sample into the vet yesterday and, while it was clear on giardia, it was positive for coccidia, another protozoan parasite that isn’t quite as bad as giardia. So now he is taking some pills for that. He eats so fast, that I can just throw the pills in with his food and he doesn’t know the difference. Katie would never fall for that.
He isn’t 100% clear on the giardia, because Wikipedia says sometimes the fecal exam comes up okay when the parasites aren’t producing cysts (eggs) at that time. I think he caught these things while being boarded and running around with other dogs, so if I can get him healthy, I think he will stay healthy. I will also have to have Katie and Austin tested in a couple of weeks to make sure they didn’t catch any of this, though adult dogs are more resistant than puppies, and they are due for their annual checkups anyway.
Today the puppy was supposed to go for a visit to some prospective owners, but they canceled at the last minute and said they weren’t ready for a puppy. But his health problems seem all cleared up.
One new development is he can easily climb my 4-foot chain link fence. Tonight the dog next door (who looks just like the puppy, but older) was barking at us, so the puppy runs over to the fence and before I could do anything he was over. It was about 8 PM so it was too dark to tell where he ran, but obviously he was going to run towards the deck where the neighbor’s dog was. I climbed over the fence to go get him. Then the neighbor opened the door, but I don’t think she saw me. I went looking for the puppy but the other dog was still barking at me from the deck. A minute later the neighbor opens the door again and I turned on my flashlight so she could see me. I said my dog climbed the fence and I was looking for him. She said “Oh, then I think I let the wrong dog in.” She had let the puppy in, thinking it was her dog (he’s quick), and then she came back out because it sounded like her dog was still barking.
Sunday I took the puppy door-to-door and gave out flyers looking for a home and asking people to spread the word. When I took him to my next-door neighbors, the man who lives there was laughing about meeting Moses in his house when his wife accidentally let him in. He said he noticed right away that this wasn’t their dog and wondered why it was in their house, though it seemed to enjoy being there.
I’ve gotten a couple of nibbles of interest as a result of that walk and will take him to another street this weekend if he hasn’t found a home yet.
I missed something. Moses? Are you known as Moses in your neighborhood?
The puppy’s official name is Moses, as mentioned in the main entry, though I’m not crazy about the name:
“his rescuer has named him Moses”
Despite a couple of phone calls this week, I never got any serious interest, so i will take him around some more tomorrow. He didn’t have any accidents in the house all week until this afternoon while I was in the same room with him and we had gotten back from a walk not much earlier. He got punished for that one.
Ah… I see the parenthetical reference to Moses from 30 days prior and then not used again until the neighbor brought it up in an oddly sequenced description where the neighbor is naming the dog but then saying he does not recognize the dog. (I was confused not understanding the neighbor’s reaction.)
When I watch movies, I often forget names of characters because they are used once or twice at the beginning and then not again. So I just think “Will Smith is dragging the alien across the desert by its dreadlocks.”
Today, Moses found a new home. I had decided to keep him two weeks ago and name him Waggy. But one of the people on my street saw me still walking him and sent out another notice at her work. Some people in the neighborhood saw the e-mail and wanted to come meet him, which they did yesterday. It is a family with two girls around Fiona’s age and they both liked him. The father asked if he could keep him today since he was off from work to see if he could be trained and get a better idea of his temperament. I guess he passed because they want to keep him. The only thing that could make it fall through is if he just can’t get along with their two cats. They think they will name him Shadow. Because he loves people, I think he will do better in a house where four people can love him back instead of just one person dividing attention among 3 dogs. So Moses/Waggy/Shadow will get 12 times as much attention.
Got a visit today from Shadow. A man dropped him off after finding him and seeing Clio’s old dog tag that I had put on his collar after he got out before. He had actually only gone across the street from his new home, where a gate was accidentally left open. I don’t know what the dogs thought about seeing him again, but he was on his way back home in no time.