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My Poor, Stoned Dog

August 29, 2022

For my last post, I wrote yet again about our dog Dori. We’d taken her to our preferred vet because her ribs were sticking out, and she was getting progressively thinner. After ruling out poisoning and a thyroid condition, Dr. Barajas said she needed surgery because she had a bullet or lead pellet in her liver; but more importantly, because her intestines were invisible on two x-rays. They just couldn’t be seen properly. Her operation, scheduled for Saturday, was postponed, but my friend Lucero, who initially rescued Dori, has a challenging timetable, and pushed for having the surgery today. It was just as well that she did.

Dori looking pensive before her surgery.

(Trigger warning: If reading about the contents of dog intestines causes you embarrassment, reactivated trauma from infant toilet-training, or absolute boredom, read no further).

When he opened her up, the vet soon determined that her lower intestines were alarmingly swollen, and the colour of what should have been red (from natural bloodflow) was dark to the point of being nearly black.

He assumed at first that she had swallowed pebbles, because there were hard objects in her lower bowel. But an enema did nothing to move them. Perplexed, he decided to open her up, and discovered nine or ten dried and hardened plumstones. He showed them to us after, semi-mummified and of course dramatically stinky.

I detest the plum trees on our property, and always have. Hog-plums produce a lot of fruit, the stones of which litter the ground throughout the year. And I find them sour and unleasant. Our other large dog Rem likes to eat them, then charmingly vomits them up for me overnight. Many mornings, I start the day bent double with power towels in my hand. Dori copied Rem, except that she’s been swallowing the stones instead of regurgitating them. The result was today’s surgery.

Dogs absorb fats and other nutrients from the lower bowel, said Dr. Barajas, as well as extracting water. Dori has been on a high fat diet the past couple of weeks, which boosted her weight by two kilograms (around 4-½ lb), but she was unable to expel the plumstones. How they passed through two intestinal sphincters to reach her lower bowel, he couldn’t explain. But he was sure she must have hurt like hell.

She always goes crazy at feeding time, and sometimes attacks Rem right after eating. This is as her intestinal tract starts peristaltic contractions, with consequent cramping pain. The pain triggered the aggression, while her clogged bowel was minimising her nourishment. And her internal writhings to remove the blockages led to her intestines bunching up close to her chest cavity, hence their near-invisibility on the x-rays.

Poor, crazy dog.

The good doctor thinks his handiwork today will fix the problem, but we won’t be sure for a week or so. Cutting open a bowel is a dicey business, and the dog is now obviously on antibiotics. We were warned the next few days could be critical, with no guarantees. She has to be kept away from solid food for that time; and of course, we’re frantically scheming about how to limit the windfalls from the seven large plum trees on this property. Tomorrow, I’m buying a new, large saw.

The lead pellet, by contrast to the gut issue, was deemed harmless, and as Dr. Barajas had no wish to start cutting into another internal organ, it was left in place. He did, though, appreciate having a fascinating surgical case to handle. He was quietly smiling when he told us she’d likely have died in the next week if he hadn’t operated today.

I’m going to have a talk with Rem, and ask him to just keep vomiting if he must eat hog-plums. It’s unpleasant, but it’s a sign of the correct canine response to hard objects in the stomach. And paper towels are a heck of a lot cheaper than abdominal surgery.

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Dog Day Afternoon

June 19, 2022

The rains came early this afternoon, so I let the dogs in from the corral before they were soaked. Dori had found a piece of pig bone that she sat with and proceeded to reduce to fragments, Scarlett the pug decided to take yet another extended nap, and the others just chilled, waiting for the rain to let up.

Breaking news – Scarlett the pug naps yet again.

Dori’s teeth rather preoccupy right now. She is still, after months living here, semi-feral in her ways, and often sets on one of the other dogs right after eating. My theory is that eating triggers some primal hunting instinct, and she can’t simply gulp her food like the others, then chill while she digests it. Friday evening, she set on Rem as they finished their food – he is nearest to her in size – and I tried to separate them.

Bad move.

Fortunately, Dori didn’t bite through my forefinger. But it still hurts, two days later. And until the rain hit that night, there were drops of my blood all over the patio outside the kitchen. I even found some on the kitchen wall. And yes, I did get mad and I whacked her. She didn’t seem impressed.

Dori reducing a pig bone to fragments. I prefer her doing this to chomping on my fingers.

Her first owners were careless, and left her to roam the streets much of the time. This isn’t abnormal in Mexico, but the consequences are obvious. A dog learns what it must, and if it has to survive in a rough environment, it learns to be rough itself. When we acquired her, she needed chemotherapy for an infectious genital cancer, and she has various scars on her from previous violent encounters. She is also very domineering towards the others, and can’t relate to my efforts to reduce this.

By contrast, Vicki, her ailing and aging kennel-mate, who was brought here as a puppy, just doesn’t have that aggressive streak. She bit me once years ago, when I and my friends moved to the two houses on this site, but solely from fear over what was happening to her. I once had to separate her from a rival dog who had attacked her, felt her teeth on my arm, and saw her move them away fast – in the middle of the fight.

The individuality of different dogs is still astonishing to me. The actual limits of dog powers of reasoning and the personalities they develop are always fascinating. Rem is the most intellectual, and has learned to avoid Dori much of the time. He was a total pain for his first six months here, but he and I finally worked out a modus vivendi, and he goes along with that. He’s four or five years old now, the age of wisdom for a dog I think, and realises it’s cleverer to manipulate me than to defy me non-stop.

Rem is, for some reason, camera-shy, and I can never capture his goofily cheerful doggie-smile.

It’s also more entertaining for me, something he has possibly figured out. Do dogs know what a smile means? I’m not sure, but at times I look sardonically at him when he has outwitted me, and I often think he is looking sardonically at me. It’s a weird relationship, perhaps, but a treasured one.

Do I spend that much time trying to figure them out, these unruly quadrupeds? Maybe not. I let them in out of the rain, and I started this piece because my internet connection went down in the storm and a thought-train started. With the rainstorm preventing other activities for a while, I can’t help but wonder what actually goes through those doggie brains as they wait for me to quit playing with this laptop, and get them their dinner.

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La Santa

August 25, 2021

No, my title isn’t a reference to Christmas. It’s the feminine form of El Santo, the Saint (1917-1984), Mexico’s most famous and popular wrestler/actor from a few decades past.

El Santo in his prime. The silver mask was never publicly removed until a week before he died

I wrote recently about Dorada, the rescued street dog who came to live here two months ago. Three weeks back, I noticed a strange growth on her rear quarters, and two different vets confirmed she had a case of canine transmissible venereal tumour. (Careful – the pictures are gross). It starts small, but it easily spreads, both inside the dog that has it and to others with which she has contact. Dogs sniff and lick each other all the time, so it has an easy means of spreading. And it’s quite prevalent in Mexico.

Before she was rescued, and spayed, she had at least two litters of puppies fathered by other street dogs, so there was no mystery about how she acquired the condition. Thankfully, the treatment, a form of chemotherapy, is highly effective.

But Dori is an amazingly strong dog, as I mentioned in my first post. I’ve wrangled large dogs before, but I’ve never encountered one with the strength of a small horse, like this one. She would give the original El Santo a run for his pumped-up biceps. If I didn’t know this before, I discovered the reality on Tuesday.

For her first chemotherapy session, her rescuer Lucero took her, with me, to the vet, and we jointly managed the dog. For her session this week, she couldn’t drive me, so we arranged with Gabino, the next door neighbour, to use his taxi-cab to get there.

He meticulously insisted on a clean blanket for the back seat to catch the dog-hairs, and on the journey there, she was mostly well behaved. So far, I thought, so more-or-less good. He dropped us off, agreeing to come back in a short while.

The vet’s office was not yet open, so I had to wait for five minutes while Dori tried to escape my firm grip on the leash. I soon had red welts on my hand and wrist from the pressure her lunges applied to the chain wrapped around them.

But the fun began inside. The vet, a woman, asked me to control here while she put in a needle, and Dori was having none of it. She had disliked the procedure the week before, and ‘Cooperation’ is definitely not her other name. I was leaning on top of her, trying to keep her from moving, while she demonstrated that she really was El Santo’s female canine equivalent, La Santa. She had no mask, but with my face pressed to her head, my anti-Covid N-95 rode up over my eyes so I couldn’t see. And the dog kicked and writhed and kicked some more.

The vet finally gave up and asked her daughter, who is …. well, not small, to come and force the dog’s hind quarters to be still while I managed the front end. Finally, the jab was administered, the vet confirmed that the chemo had already started to reduce the tumour, and I paid and went outside to wait for Gabino.

Dori was now truly upset, and not willing to be patient. I had to move away from the vet’s doorway, because she wanted to lunge at any animal that was brought to it. She particularly wanted to kill and eat a cat or two, it seemed, since she howls at cats anyway, and three came for treatment while we waited. Gabino was five minutes late, then ten, then fifteen, and by this point we had moved in spasmodic jerks a hundred yards up the street and back again. My shoulders were beginning to ache from the effort, and my hands were raw in places from the tightened chain of the leash. I didn’t topple as she dashed around my legs, but I had to skip a light fandango at times to prevent it.

Gabino got us back safely to his house, but a truck was blocking the lane in front of us. No worries, I thought, it’s only thirty yards. Thanks, and see ya later, amigo.

And at this point, Gabino’s own dogs dashed out, and Dorada went nuts. With me yelling her name at her, and her waiting for the moment I shifted my grip on the leash to make a fresh lunge, we staggered yard by yard to the gate, where I tried to remain still as I put the key in the lock, the dog blanket draped over my arm and beginning to drag on the ground if I didn’t hold my arm high.

This was her big chance, she realised. With one almighty leap, she almost got away from me, only the leash being wrapped round my left fist preventing her. But I went crashing down onto my left hip and shoulder, the friction tore some skin off my finger, and it was arguable whether her barking dogfully or me barking her name was the louder contribution to the pandemonium. I finally dragged her to the gate, got her inside, and let her run off with the leash still attached while I caught my breath, and watched blood ooze over my left hand.

She let me retrieve the leash once she was re-quarantined in the corral where she has to stay for another week. And yes, I’m fine, apart from a bruise or three, and a missing piece of skin.

But while I’m used to dogs being cantankerous, this one is the strongest and most single-minded mutt I’ve ever tried to manage.

Dogs are wonderful companions, and they can be rays of sunshine on a grey day. But they never show anything I can recognise as gratitude. This one has also cost a pretty peso in vet bills and in cinderblocks to close her exit-points for escaping. I won’t say I felt homicidal towards her as I limped up the stairs to put iodine and a bandage on my finger, but let’s say she has been testing my affections to the Nth degree.