Looks pretty nondescript doesn’t it? It’s not, though. It’s filled with wildflowers and birds, some familiar but many others unknown to me. But more than that, it has a prairie dog town beside one section of the path that rings the area.

What can I say? I’m sucker for prairie dogs. I know some people (unfairly, I think) consider them vermin, but I don’t. Each time my granddaughter, Lauren, her dad’s dog Lumpy, and I approach the outskirts of the town, the same prairie dog sounds the first alarm.

His call reminds me of a study of prairie dog communication, specifically how the animals used different calls to signal when the researcher came alone and when he came with his dog. Did this prairie dog, who Lauren calls Bill for reasons unknown, recognize Lumpy from his previous daily walks by with my son? Is the call I’m hearing the same call my son hears? Or do one of those barks I hear translate “older unknown human female with small female child approaching”?

I have no idea. What I do know is that the call is picked up by prairie dogs up the line, causing babies to scamper and dive into the nearest burrow only to pop up for a look-see a few seconds later.

So while they do recognize that we’re something worth paying attention to, they’ve also figured out some way to determine that we  pose no danger to them.

I like to think this is because Lumpy is indifferent to their presence and Lauren and I are enchanted by them. But maybe it’s just because they think we look funny.

Several months ago I brought a new computer that came with a Vista operating system. Since then I have discovered that Vista’s development apparently is the result of linear more-is-better thinking. What that means is that, if the program didn’t address a particular user need to start with, the chances of any upgrades or programs coming from that same manufacturer doing so are about nil. It hit me that a lot of programs related to companion animal health and behavior fall into that same category.

Read more here.

As soon as I got home, I buried her with a favorite toy and the tags from her collar, then planted the pulmonaria on top of her amid a cairn of large rocks to deter curious critters. I knew the body would decay and nourish the plants around her over time, and soon their botanical transpiration (i.e., respiration) would cause them to give off oxygen that I, the other pets, and all animal beings in our environment would inhale, making her immortal in a way as well as part of all of us.

But those metal tags and her skeleton would last a lot longer. And if at some point far in the future someone happened to dig in the area, I like to think they would look at her skeleton and those tags the same way today’s archeologists look at certain ancient canine or feline remains and say, “This wasn’t some stray or feral animal who died here. This animal belonged to someone who cared.”

As a veterinarian first in medical practice and now in a behavioral/bond one who also has shared her life with a lot of animals, I’ve done a lot of grieving in my life. But this time it’s different. Regardless what others may choose to believe, I didn’t put Bee down for just behavioral problems, if for no other reason than that such don’t exist.  I am completely aware of all the physiological and bond (both human and that with with members of other species) components of behavioral problems more than I’ve ever been in my life. Because of all of Bee’s hereditary and congenital problems, I had to know more about and be more aware of this interaction 24/7 day in and day out than with any other being of any species with whom I’ve ever lived.  Because of this, I knew professionally, scientifically, and intuitively what most people only know intuitively: that it was time to let her go.

Because of that, I’m free of the guilt and doubt—my own and that which others would try to impose on me—that’s accompanied other losses. I’m free to experience the loss of Bee as a loss of Bee, and not the the loss of a symbol of someone or something else I may not even consciously acknowledge as real. I don’t feel obligated to feel repulsed because the other animals are visibly more relaxed and playful, although sometimes as confused as I am by all the changes in our routine. Ollie still waits at the top of the stairs for me to pick up Bee and descend first, and I still stop to do just that. I make twice as many trips up and down the stairs as I need to, once to transport any books, cups of tea, cleaning supplies or other paraphernalia, and a second to transport a dog incapable of climbing stairs who’s no longer there.

Even though I intellectually and intuitively recognized the inextricable relationship between health, behavior, and the bond, Bee’s many problems never permitted me of the luxury of denying this as is often possible in other animals. Whether I wanted to or not, I had to be aware of it because her life depended on it. But in the process of doing this, I learned to communicate in a way I’d never experienced with an animal before.

Bee couldn’t hear, her vision was impaired in ways I could never define to my satisfaction, she responded defensively to all but a narrow range of touch, her sense of smell was incredible, but only sometimes. Sometimes she was quite solidly here, but other times she was somewhere else. In short, the kinds of sensory perception that form the foundation of normal human-companion animal communication  were unreliable or nonexistent. So we came up with something new. Not some special form I made up for my own convenience that I taught her using treats like I would have done years ago. This time I summoned the patience and dumped enough of my considerable human ego to let her teach me.

Now I look at the other dogs and know it’s time to play catch-up. Aside from the basic training I didn’t have time for—all I cared about was a reliable response to the come command—I want to rethink my ideas of quality interspecies communication with them as well as the cat. Because of Bee, I stopped being so verbal with them months ago and don’t rely nearly as much on visual cues either. But because they were so stable and reliably good, I never had to develop that—what? transcendent?—plane of communication with them that I did with Bee. I still don’t have to, but now and thanks to BeeBee, I want to.

Because the two of us were so much alike in many ways, I had to practice long and hard as a veterinary student not to let my emotions get the best of me, too. It still isn’t easy, but most of the time I manage to hold it together long enough in those really tough cases to objectively analyze what’s going on, how best to address it, and get the job done. Only after it’s over do I allow myself to break down.

It  hasn’t worked that way with Bee. When problems arose recently, I vowed I’d make a list of all of her existing and potential problems before I called a friend who’s a shelter director about finding a new home for her, and I did. But with each new addition, I realized that the probability of finding someone willing and able to do all I’ve done to give Bee the semblance of a normal life these past two years was about nil. That made me cry. The probability of finding someone who could detect, let alone correctly interpret her unique body language lexicon to pick up subtle signs of change was even less likely. That made me cry even more. Until I made the list, I  didn’t realize creating a semblance of a normal Beebee had required more than 35 years of veterinary and ethological knowledge and a semi-solitary lifestyle in an environment that was, for the most part, amazingly well-suited to the special needs of a deaf, brain damaged dog with multiple physical problems, any one of which could blow at any moment. The awareness that even that wasn’t enough made me cry harder still.

I knew that reaching adulthood would be Bee’s Rubicon. The fact that she apparently believed herself to be a 100% mentally and physically normal corgi had served us well when she was younger. It resulted in an indefatigable joie de vivre and can-do spirit worthy of a Marine recruiting poster. Although I don’t  think she realize it (or cared if she did), her mind was enabling her body to be much, much more than it should have been.

But when Bee reached 2, that same mind worked against her because it told her that 5-year-old Frica should cede rank to her. From the beginning the other animals have been aware of Bee’s limitations and learned to read her foreign body language and tolerate her rough play and the occasionally accidental, but none the less painful, encounter with the teeth in her grossly misshapen jaw. But Fric ceding her job to Bee would be like Hilary Clinton ceding hers to Helen Keller. To the normal canine mind, there was no reason to do this.

BeeBee couldn’t accept that. Her attempts to signal rank over Fric became more intense and unpredictable with that wonky jaw of hers being the ever-present potentially lethal wild card. This week she launched a sneak attack on Fric and attempted to grab her by the muzzle. This time one of her wayward fangs slammed into Fric’s lower jaw and bent her incisors sufficiently that they had to be removed. Given Bee’s intensity and that she weighs twice as much as Frica, it was a miracle that Fric’s jaw wasn’t broken.

At that point I knew that Bee had crossed the Rubricon, determined to assume what would have been her rightful place had her body been as normal as her mind. But it’s not and the result is taking its toll on all of us, a toll that can only get higher the longer it goes on. While the little dogs and the cat stay out of Bee’s way, she increasing alarm barks and charges at something none of the other animals acknowledge as real. The celebratory zoomies that use to have all three dogs racing around the house or yard playing tag have been replaced by intense, short charges back and forth as if  she’s not sure what she wants, to play or to attack. Because of her increasingly unusual signals, none of the animals want anything to do with her and that frustrates her even more.

By the time I finished the list, I knew that the only answer was euthanasia. I couldn’t bear the thought of someone with rescue-itis taking her, convinced that how good she looked couldn’t take that much time and effort for someone with a lot of love to give. I didn’t want her to go to some well-meaning but naive person like my dad, only to have her or someone else get hurt because they let their guard down for just a minute, or because they just couldn’t believe that such a sweet dog wouldn’t like their Aunt Harriet’s peek-a-poo.

No. Far better Bee and I should make that final journey together later this morning and that I somehow manage, once again, to hold it together long enough to see her on her way to what I hope is better place.

For all I observed and interacted with Bee during our relatively short but transforming time together, I never was able to grasp what her reality was no matter how hard I tried. At most, all I had were glimpses of it. She taught me that sometimes words are useless and that hand signals aren’t much better. And those special times when we connected on a level I’d never connected with an animal before, I realized she made me a lot more than I ever thought I’d be, too.

After I bury Bee, I’m planting a large pulmonaria from another part of the garden over her grave.  Maybe this fall, but definitely next spring it will produce flowers that are half blue and half pink, a fitting monument to a dog who tried so hard to live in two different worlds at once.

Bee last Christmas

Early this morning, I turned Bee’s collar on to flash mode and took the dogs out like I always do. As soon as we got outside, Fric and Ollie went off to  do their thing, but Bee stayed between my legs, a behavior she assumes (with any convenient human adult) when she feels unsure of herself. Because the other two went off with nary a second’s hesitation, I doubted there was a wild animal out there that had spooked her.

I wondered what this could be for a while, but soon became entranced by all the lightening bugs that decorated the trees and the sky like countless flashing Christmas lights. It was an otherwise pitch-black cloudy night, the perfect night for a female to transmit her amorous message to a male without interference from moon or stars. For a while I was so awe-struck by the spectacle that I didn’t realize that the corgi between my legs with the hem of my robe and nightgown draped over her head was watching the flashes, too.

So now I wonder. Was it just all those flashes that spooked her? Or did it have something to do with the fact that she flashes, too? Her collar flashes red which I know she, even with her visual problems, most likely sees as a shade of grey that would look whitish in the dark. Could she have thought that she was seeing tiny versions of herself? Has she attached some meaning to the flashes of her own collar that she then projected on those lightening bugs?

I don’t know. All I know is that nothing would induce her to leave her cave under me until I turned and opened the door. And then she turned and quickly scurried inside.

My request was pretty specific. I wanted a short-haired mackerel tabby male with enough presence to tolerate dogs and kids. I also wanted a barn kitten or one from roots that would suggest good hunting potential because the basement of this old house is more or less at one with the earth.

Shortly after I put the word out my son, Dan, called to tell me that some friends of his had a litter of kittens, all but one of whom was taken. The mother had been tossed out of a car in a parking lot along with a male cat and Dan’s friends took them both home, only to discover that the female was pregnant. Dan sent me a picture and

told me it was the kitten on the left and it was a female.

Hmmm. I looked at the picture and I’m thinking “This does not look like a farm cat at all!” but you know how it is when there’s a cat-vacuum in your life and home. It doesn’t take much of a cat to fill it.

So even though I wanted a big burly male I said, “Sure, I’ll take her” and she arrived about a week later. When she did, there were several things about her that surprised me. The first was that she was so incredibly small. She was all tail, legs, and ears. Toss in the triangular face and her chattiness and I had to wonder if there was some Siamese in her lineage somewhere.

The second was that she was fearless, into everything and anything she could get into. Hence the name Bamboo, after the plant that would take over my yard if I let it.

Bamboo on the left trying to nudge out the lilac bush on the right.

I set up what I thought was a tiny kitten escape-proof box

and she was out of it in minutes, although fortunately the dogs have yet to figure out how to get in. Now I’m thinking, “There’s something fishy going on here. This kitten has way too much energy and is way too cocky for one so small. You don’t suppose…”

Sure enough it turned out that she was a he. And after a harrowing 3 days waiting to hear if Dan had accidentally been given the wrong kitten and I’d have to give him back—during which time he learned to go up and down the stairs and trash my bed playing hide and seek with the little dogs–I  learned he was mine to keep.

Now it’s just a case of staying one step ahead of him.

…which might be challenging.

Years ago a friend, who is as knowledgeable in his field as I am in mine on my better days, and I were discussing books. Our conclusion was that, relative to any particular subject, there are two kinds of books. Those written from the outside in, and those written from the inside out. Michael Schaffer’s One Nation Under Dog is an outside in book.

Read more here.

Anyhow, somewhere along the line, we discovered that the alien was on the bed! I don’t remember who first noticed him–Does anyone remember why I think of the alien as a he? I don’t.– but none of us had any idea how he got there.  Below is a quasi-re-creation of this Great Event. I didn’t take this picture until the bed was back up in the office and Bee was determined to have her rear end in every shot, but you get the idea. It was pretty hard to miss him there.

Since then the alien also showed up on my yoga mat which I only unroll for the 45-minutes or so that I use it each morning.

You would think that, given the shortness of the interval and that I’m rarely off the mat during this time, I would know how he got there. But I don’t. Maybe he was attracted by the mat’s bright colors or sticky surface. Maybe he thinks he needs more exercise…

Currently he’s in the middle of the kitchen rug and I have no idea how he got there, either. When I went downstairs yesterday morning, he was there.

My Ms Clean Gene tells me I really ought to wash the little grub-ball  if he’s going to make appearances when when I have company. But then I remember something Maria Callas supposedly said to photographer Richard Avedon when he mentioned softening the wrinkles in his portrait of her. She told him not to because she’d earned every one of them. So it seems with the  alien’s layer of grubbiness. I don’t know where in his travels he earned it, but I’m sure he did.

Nonetheless I prevailed and we came home and celebrated with Whit’s new best friend: canned cat food. He ate it while I watched and grinned like an idiot.

I grinned because he was so obviously pleased with himself and also because I’d learned at the clinic that the mass on the half of his thyroid gland that was removed was benign. There’s an old saying that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, but sometimes knowing too much can be a drag too. The day of Whit’s surgery, my friend and the surgeon, Andrea Neiley, left a post-op message on my answering machine letting me know how things went.  It contained the usual vet-to-vet  verbal shorthand that communicates something without really saying it. The key terms that stuck in my mind included “large,” “lobulated,” “took longer to get out than I thought,” “saved it to send in for histopath if you want.” She didn’t say it and neither did I but we were both thinking the same thing: cancer.

After I requested the tissue be sent in, I tried to put it out of my mind but of course it was always there someplace.  Even more so than many people, I’ve been conditioned to give those medical test results a lot of power over me. But I’m also very much aware of the mind-body effect and how my feelings can affect my animals. So for those ten days, I deliberately and not without a certain amount of effort saw Whit as a cat I could visibly see improving every day in numerous ways.  Although the big C might have hovered somewhere in the depths of my subconscious thoughts, my conscious ones only acknowledged an increasingly healthy cat.

Which is exactly what he is. If there was any doubt in my mind, the speed and grace with which he flew off the exam table, disappeared under the counter, resisted being dragged out, then purred and ate his way through a dish of food removed it. 

“Oh, ye of little faith,” he might have said to me. “I knew I was fine.”

But he didn’t.

And for that, too, I am extremely grateful.

Having once again proven that, let me begin by saying that Whit had his surgery last week and did extremely well. Even though neither picture is that great, the pre-opt Whit on the left and the post-op Whit on the right pretty much sum up the improvement. He’s definitely more interested in what’s going on around him now.

Whit had the surgery Wednesday morning and I picked him up  about 24-hours later. If you couldn’t see his row of staples, you’d never know that anything was wrong with him. He’s also gaining weight. Whew!

Something I want to mention, in addition to the excellent surgical skills of veterinarian Andrea Neiley, that has meant a lot to Whit and me  is a gift from a client, Susan Sibulkin. She sent Whit a fleece covered pillow made by a friend of hers that he loves. The day it arrived, I put it on top of the folded rug he’d already claimed and he immediately claimed it, too. It’s become his favorite sleeping place and I’m sure it’s helping his recovery.

However, this is not any ordinary pet pillow. At each corner there’s a sturdy clip,

an ingenious addition that enables you to snap the pillow into a crate to form a hammock. I know that Whit would love this, too, but I haven’t tried it because I know the dogs would also think it was the best thing since sliced bread. His treasure’s current location enables him to easily fend off any potential pillow-swipers with a well-placed swat. But it would be much harder if not impossible for him to dislodge any dog who claimed his hammock in a crate.

Whit is  on no medication because only one lobe of his thyroid gland was involved and so far the other half seems to be functioning normally. The mass from the other has been sent in for analysis and the results will give us a better idea of what lies ahead for him. But for now, peace and recovery reign as fall descends, leaves turn, birds migrate, and I harvest the infamous squash and get ready for a seminar here next weekend.

The solution is simple enough: Relative to me, all the dogs are equal in my eyes and all rank below me. They’re free to work out their pack structure among themselves any way they want and change it any time they want because that’s normal canine behavior. What none of them can do is view me as the prize for whoever emerges at the top of their canine social structure. Until Bee matured, there seemed to be canine acceptance of this.

But now BeeBee is challenging this human-canine social structure and this has resulted in a behavioral-bond dilemma for me. She now resists when I put her in the belly-up position to check her over and massage her feet, a ritual she used to love as a pup. The once equally loved daily grooming sessions are now more apt to include periods of canine resistance. Because her upper jaw has continued to grow and her lower one is more crooked than ever, I could easily tell myself that this is occurring because these positions are physically uncomfortable for her. But I also know that these activities communicate my higher status and that she could very well be more behaviorally uncomfortable than physically so.

So what to do? Do I play behavioral-bond hardball and gently but firmly do what needs to be done no matter how long it takes? Or should I let her play the disability card and call the shots? My gut feeling about where the little scamp is coming from fights with my desire to practice interspecies political correctness. Plus there’s always the unknown with Bee. God only knows what’s physically going on in that wonky head of hers that could blow any minute.

Fortunately, I’m blessed with two other dogs and a cat whose perception is so much greater than mine that my reality is only a fraction of theirs. All of them, even BeeBee, could be poster animals to illustrate Henry Beston’s insightful  passage in The Outermost House because all of them are “gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, hearing voices we shall never hear.” Call it a cop-out, but for now I’m going to use Fric, Ollie, and Whit as a guide when it comes to  dealing with Bee’s “I am the queen.”  attitude.

When I started observing them all in this light, the first thing I noticed is that Fric, Ollie, Whit,  and Bee are much more interested in what BeeBee can do than what she can’t. They’ve also figured out that there is nothing mentally slow about Bee and that she can, in fact, be quite the crafty little demon so there’s no use feeling sorry for her because it will only get you cornered someplace where you’re probably not supposed to be where you could get caught by She With the Infernal Camera.

When this occurs, there is nothing at all wrong with one of you distracting Bee while the other makes a leap to freedom.

And disappears into the office, leaving Bee to wonder where you went

while the other dog relaxes.

As Beston also pointed, compared to us, animals are other nations who are caught up in the same world that we are. Just because they’re different doesn’t mean they’re lesser. Just because they’re different, doesn’t mean they’re wrong.  And in this particular case, just because Bee’s different doesn’t mean that I should allow her to assume a position relative to me that’s beyond her capacity just because I feel sorry for her.

However, once she and Ollie got into the chase mode, I had better luck

These pictures are typical of her running, which usually seems to involve one foot or none on the ground at the same time. Even though she can get up an amazing amount of speed, as you can see there’s nothing graceful about it. It’s as if she just puts her mind into high gear and expects her body to follow.

Below you can see the one-foot-on-the-ground position as she and Ollie play tag. In the photo on the right, notice how she throws her hind end to the right, I assume either  to somehow shift some of her weight from her left front leg or to help her make the turn.

Believe it or not, this next picture is one of her and Ollie engaged in normal dog, but she really looks demonic, doesn’t she? I don’t know if you can see it, but her left eye is rolled down to expose the white which really adds to the effect. Next up in the game, Ollie proves that the best way to slow down a racing dog is to grab her by the tail–even if she doesn’t have one!

If you compare the running Bee pictures above with this one of her walking you can see how deliberate her movement is when she walks, to the point she almost looks like she’s stalking. But if she slowed down that much, I suspect she’d fall over. When she’s walking slowly she sort of staggers and inside I can sometimes hear a back foot scuff the floor or rug when she has trouble lifting it up high enough to bring it forward to place it. In general, she seems to put a lot more mental effort into walking.

To me, the next photo looks like she’s airborne, but I find it interesting the way she tucks her back feet so close to her body. It doesn’t seem like she has the fine motor skills to get them down to propel her forward before she smashes into the ground, but some how she does.

And if you’re feeling sorry for poor Bee who always loses the race, don’t. She gives as good as she gets.

But play is only play, no matter how bad it looks.

But back to work for me. Nap-time for them.

As I prepare to post this, the two of them are sleeping together under my desk, and I can hear BeeBee snoring. She sounds like a very large cat purring.

So this morning I put Whit in Ollie’s crate (in which he’d become accustom to sleeping) with minimal resistance and off we went. Although he yowled pathetically for a while, he soon settled down. All things considered, he did very well and I was the only one who wound up with any wounds and that was only one little claw puncture. As soon as Susan (the vet) was able to open his mouth with me holding him and I could see that his teeth, gums, and color were in pretty good shape, hyperthyroidism moved up on the list of differentials. It also moved up because of the highly accelerated beat of his heart I could feel in my hand as I held him. It was so fast, it was as if I were holding my canary to clip his nails.

Although it took two of us to hold him, Whit donated enough blood from a back leg vein for routine screening and thyroid testing and we came home with medication to damp down his thyroid activity. When I called in later for the results, the hyperthyroidism was strongly confirmed and there was some indication of liver involvement.

So that’s where we are now. For the next 3 weeks I’ll be medicating him twice a day, which I hope he’ll eat in his food. If he won’t, then I’ll try to pill him. If that proves too stressful for both of us, I’ll get the medication in a transdermal form I can massage into his ears. At the end of the 3 weeks, the blood work will be repeated and if everything looks OK relative to his ability to handle surgery, it will be done that same day.

As I was driving to the appointment, I kept thinking that there was no way I could fit anything else into a schedule already crammed full. But that’s the way it always is, isn’t it? You think you can’t find the time or energy for one more thing, and then disaster or semi-disaster strikes and puts everything up for grabs, and somehow you do.

I stayed with Whit in the cool basement where the dogs can’t go until he calmed down, then I went back to work and somehow got everything done that I’d intended. Later I watched him as he lounged under the living room windows

until he got so tired of me staring and the camera, that he left.

For a while my mind was so full I couldn’t decide what to fix for dinner.

Then I settled on pizza.

And opened a bottle of wine, whether to celebrate that we’d made it this far or to forget how far we still had to go, I have no idea.

He also still leaves the rodent guts where they’re impossible not to see, usually in the middle of the walk up to the house. I’m not sure if that’s just coincidence or for my benefit–”Look what I caught!”–or the dogs’–”Here’s a little snack for you, Fuzzheads.” I do know that it’s amazing that someone my age can outrun 3 young dogs and snatch up such deposits, fueled only by the specter of said dogs eating said guts and vomiting them in her home, and maybe  even in her bed.

The last time my son, Dan, and his daughter were here, they brought me a book called Whittington written by Alan Armstrong. The cat on the cover looks just like Whit (except for the bent ear) and I can see why they thought of me and Whit when they saw it.  It’s a book for young teens and has  three interconnected threads. One is the story of the original Dick Whittington. The second is the story of a group of animals who live in a barn and the two kids who visit them. A cat named Whittington is one of the barn-dwellers and he tells the group the story of his famous namesake. The third is about the little boy who is having trouble learning to read and grappling with going into a remedial class because he doesn’t want the other kids to ostracize him even more than they do already.

Granted the book is written for kids, but I still enjoyed it. Part of that I’m sure is because, even though my Whit was never as macho as the Whittington in the story, they did share some elements that struck a cord.

Another change is that Whit materialized and lounged on the bench under the window in the living room when I had some friends over. For as long as I’ve had him, he’s been one of those cats who would instantly disappear when people arrived, even the same people who have visited his entire life. Did the smell of vegetarian pizza lure him? I doubt it, but it’s possible.

The more anthropomorphic side of my brain tries to convince me that this was his way of getting even with me for trying to look in his mouth. Naturally, I didn’t succeed and have the scratches to prove that he’s just as resistant to handling as he was in his prime. But perhaps he thought that the fact that I would even consider such foolhardy behavior should not go unnoticed. So, after hiding out all those years when he was such a handsome well-muscled devil, it would serve me right if he made an appearance when he looked so scrawny.

However, when Whit made his appearance, there was nothing accusing about his demeanor that communicated  “Look at what a pathetic wreck this woman has allowed me to become.” Instead, he carefully stretched out in a way that maximally exposed his sharp angles and let others judge for themselves. He reminded me of an emaciated model posing for the camera.

He looked like he was enjoying every minute of it.

It’s weird, isn’t it? You think the past is gone and then you make a subconscious typo and it all comes back.  Fortunately, I have a lot of great memories and other furballs to keep me from getting maudlin.

But I’m beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The player problem has been fixed and a podcast should be uploaded soon. I’ve learned from my web/blog master son, Jeremy, that I needn’t worry my graying little head about anything involved with the last blog upgrade, and I’m mastering the camera, with my latest uplifting discovery being a button that puts back everything into the default settings. This is a boon to anyone who has no idea what they’re doing or whose button-pushing gets interrupted by a cat or dog jumping up onto the photographer’s lap to see what’s going on.

To prove this, I am not going to (attempt to–how’s THAT for optimism?!) upload some of the pictures I recently took beginning with some of dear old Whit, beginning with one him of him looking up at me from his perch on the stairs with his usual, “Oh, damn. You have a camera” look again. And a second of him, I admit, sitting on the kitchen counter looking down at the dogs.

But just to prove that he and dogs get along, here’s one of him with Fric on that bedraggled chaise I elevate by calling The Dog Couch:

And here are updated portraits of Frica, who has rediscovered squeaky toys lately for some reason, Ollie whose hair changes color faster than Madonna’s, and Violet who was taking five after a romp with Dan’s golden puppy, Lumpy also pictured.

And finally, a picture taken in my garden, which used to a flower garden until I decided to also plant edibles in it this year. But because of all the rain, the melons (which were supposed to be softball size but which just keep getting bigger and bigger while showing no signs of ripening) have taken over along with parsnips, an odd combination if there ever was one.(Melon-parsnip pesto anyone?)  Periodically piercing the gardens’ thick canopy of melon leaves and parsnip fringe, a few intrepid zinnias and the butterfly bush form tufted colorful periscopes of color. Here are pictures of the garden and another that proves why butterfly bushes are called butterfly bushes.

If I can manage to upload this and get some must-do work done, I’ll update you on the Whit and Bee front. But as you can see, we’re all still here and then some, and that’s good.

Whit is also hunting more and once again comes to visit me in the bathroom every night I have to get up to use it. In fact, this is such a peaceful, albeit unorthodox, interlude for the two of us, I sometimes regret when I sleep through the night. Interestingly, Ollie has started sleeping downstairs with Whit. I’m not sure if this is because he doesn’t like the sound of the frequent pounding rains on the metal roof, he’s trying to figure out some way to get up on the counter where Whit’s food is without using the chair, or he just prefers the cat’s company at night. Whatever the reason, he does have a much gentler relationship with Whit than the other two dogs. It will not surprise me if they sleep together when the weather gets cooler.

BeeBee continues or provide irrefutable evidence that you can’t change physiology without changing behavior and the bond and vice versa. As if I needed it. When her infection forced me to have her spayed a few months earlier than I’d planned, I’d hope that the dog-gods would smile down on us and end all jaw growth. That has not been the case. Bee’s upper jaw has continued to grow, but her lower one has not. Now everything from her upper canine teeth (fangs) forward extends beyond her lower jaw instead of just her incisors.

Bee also makes more snorfling and snuffling noises and I’m not sure what’s going on there. It might be that her tongue continues to grow, too.  Because one side of it is paralyzed, it has always curved to one side and the tip of it  protrudes from  behind a lower canine when she’s resting. The tip is still in that same place and, if her tongue really is getting longer, the extra length could be blocking the back of her mouth and airway at times.

As her nose has gotten longer, the angle between it and the rest of her skull has also become more acute. This raises the possibility that any increased length in the roof of her mouth also could be creating a mechanical obstruction when she holds her head a certain way.

Additionally, I think that either Bee can’t see as well under certain circumstances or she’s unable to process sensory data the way she used to. I say this because, in the past week or so when I push the covers back on my bed toward where she sleeps at the bottom because I’ve become too hot, she acts as if these are a threat. She instantly jumps up and vigorously sniffs and digs into them as if they were something new. This behavior does appear to be waning in the past few days, although it’s still there and I have no idea what caused it. And, yes, I could get her off the bed. But if I did, I’d have to put her in her crate at night because I can’t risk her wandering around and hurting herself. If it gets worse, I will.

Bee’s new conformation has other behavioral as well as bond implications. At first when she had one of her snorfling spells, she became very distressed. The other dogs would pick up on this and hover around her, which only made matters worse. Fortunately, over time I assume she’s figured out that she’s not going to die. That’s enabled her to stay calmer which, in turn, ends the spasm sooner as well as calms the other dogs.

On the other hand, dogs communicate with their teeth and when Bee plays will Ollie, what would be a normal mouth hold in a safe place turns out to put the wrong teeth in the wrong place. Ollie had figured out where those teeth were before and positioned himself accordingly. But now some of those teeth aren’t in the same place any more. Worse, when Ollie yells, Bee can’t hear him and I doubt she can see him from close-up play distance, either, so she misses the signals that she’s hurting him that would cause her to let him go.

Do I think BeeBee would hurt Ollie or Frica or Whit? Not intentionally. But accidentally? I’m not so sure. One event this  past week did make me think that once again, she is aware of her limitations and is looking for more acceptable alternatives. She and Ollie were doing their usual rolling around on the floor game behind me while I was working, with each trying to pin the other. Suddenly Ollie let out a godawful shriek. I whipped around fully expecting the worst, such as one of Bee’s fangs embedded in Ollie’s eyeball or sticking into his heart. Instead, BeeBee had pinned Ollie to the floor by firmly planting her fat front feet on his floppy ears. As Ollie would surely be the first to admit, it was a very effective, if unconventional canine hold!

As far as the bond implications go, I try to strike a balance between my concerns about Bee and what lies ahead for her, and my obligation to keep the other pets safe. When I see her suddenly overreact to Whit, I become angry. No, frightened. Could I ever forgive myself if she hurt him? Could I ever forgive myself if she hurt Ollie or Fric? I don’t know. But when I hold her in my lap each evening and she closes her eyes in contentment as I brush her while the rest of the animals doze peacefully, at least for a while all is right in our world.

I find it interesting that my professional prejudice still sneaks through when I think or write about that “stuff” I view as manna from cat heaven when Whit eats it and doesn’t vomit or have diarrhea. Have I been brain-washed or am I just an ungrateful wretch?

Later when I went into the livingroom, I discovered a half-eaten vole on the floor and now everything is up for grabs again. Maybe Whit vomited because of his rodent meal, not the food. Why did I just toss the vomit instead of looking at it carefully? What kind of owner am I? But, wait, he’s feeling well enough to hunt successfully again! I cleaned up the remaining half of the vole and pacified the troops of probabilities pacing in my mind with the neutral: let’s see what happens when he’s back on the other food for a few days.

It’s been more than a day on the new diet and no more vomit, but some soft stool. Is that because of the food or the vole? Or something else? What else could it be?

Well, yesterday I hastily cut down some stalks of rudbeckia, a lovely, large plant with daisy-like flowers, a variety called Prairie Sun. The stalks were so heavy with flowers that they got pounded down by the severe storm last weekend. I brought the stalks into the house and quickly cut off some of the flowers to take to friend, leaving the rest of them on the kitchen counter. When I returned about 15 minutes later, one of the stalks was on the floor and there was chewed greenery and flower petals on the floor. The canine responsible for pulling the stalk off the counter– it had to be BeeBee–and her henchdogs didn’t even have the decency to spit out the evidence before I walked in. Instead, they cheerfully greeted me with slobbery petals and leaves hanging out of their mouths.

I cleaned everything up, but never thought to look in Ollie’s crate which sits besides Bee’s downstairs. Bee has always had a habit of taking treasured objects into her crate for further study, but to my knowledge Ollie never did.

Because of that, I don’t know who dragged the flower into Ollie’s crate. All I know is that somewhere along the line I started making sure Ollie’s crate door was open at night so that Whit could get in it if he wanted. My thinking was that, if I decided to take him in for a work-up or something else, he’d be more comfortable in it. When he started doing exactly that, I was pleased.

Until I noticed those petals in the back of it yesterday evening.

Did Whit get into those petals, too? Are they the cause of the soft stool?

I recently read a recipe for gin-soaked raisins, supposedly a good treatment for arthritis. It’s another gross, humid day with forecasts for rain today and tomorrow that could add up to 8″ in some areas before it’s all over. My knees aren’t really bugging me, but when all the damn questions about Whit attack me, the idea of gin-soaked raisin bran is not without its appeal.

Instead, I’m off to fix a cup of tea and sip it while looking at the stunning constellation of Prairie Suns on my kitchen table, hastily picked lest one of the coming storms batter them into the ground, too.

Whit sleeps in Ollie’s petal-free crate. He purrs. I ache for a magic wand. For all the animals. And for me.