It never gets any easier….

I have had the privilege to be a dog owner for over 30 years. I don’t see myself really as their master but their friend. Dogs give unconditional love! They just like the attention, for the most part, sometimes they tolerate us when we hug and squeeze them even tho they hate it when you do that. To show they like you the dog will lean up against you, if it is a very big dog and you are a small person you could end up getting knocked over. Those of us that never had any children see our dogs as our children. We call them Fur Babies.

The fur babies we have had are Sheba, Duchess, Duke, Princess, Jasmine, Sugar(we adopted her from my mother in law), Maggie (a rescue from the deer woods who contracted Distemper), Misty, and today Yippy Ki Yay, I just called him Yipster. His name like his sister KIPPY sounds so much alike that we didn’t want him running to us if we were calling his sister, it didn’t always work but we tried. When we lost Maggie after only 3 weeks I was so crushed I wasn’t sure I wanted any more fur babies to look after. A lady on Facebook who more or less ran a shelter from her home in Mayflower, Arkansas had just rescued 6 puppies from a storm drain after a tornado had ravaged Mayflower a week prior to that. I was thinking I wanted another black dog. No one ever wants the Black dogs for whatever reason. When I went to visit this lady in Mayflower I found out that the puppies were going to take a while to get over being so traumatized so I was back to square one or was I? At one time this lady had 18 horses, about that many dogs, a couple of goats, several cats, and a pigeon. Out visiting her the second time to see about the puppies I noticed these other dogs just running around underneath these horses that were really spazing out. I kept hoping they would get out away from the horses and not get stepped on. About this time a small figure of a dog ran under a horse and over to me. I was trying to pay attention to the horse so I didn’t get run over but the dog took it all in stride. She came over like she knew who I was and what I was there for. She walked up to me putting her left foot on top of my left foot, leaned into me, and looked me in the eye. I was done for before I got out of the barn I had already thought about adopting this little dog. She was a Husky/Mountain Cur mix, a beautiful little furry dog. I talked to my wife about it and then she was ours. I brought her home and she and Misty sniffed each other not knowing what to make of each other till KIPPY wanted to play. Misty had always wanted to play but Jasmine wasn’t into that much, content on sitting on my lap watching the world go by. I thought they were fighting at first until Misty rolled over on her back, KIPPY stopped and licked her face and then laid down beside her. All was well in puppy land for the time being.

In August 2016 we lost Misty to cancer, she was 12 years old. Now KIPPY didn’t have a playmate anymore. The same lady we had gotten KIPPY from before thought she might have a solution to our problem. Seems she had seen this dog on a rescue page that she thought was in Arkansas but turned out to be Louisiana. The dog was on the very short list about to be put to sleep the very next day. She contacted the folks in Louisiana about the dog and they brought the dog up to her in Arkansas. The dog was emaciated, had fleas and ticks all over him and he was heartworm positive. She nursed him back to health and got him to put some weight back on. She tried the slow kill method for getting rid of Heart Worms as she said he had a terrible racking cough. At one time he had been one of her dogs, Yippy Ki Yay that had been adopted by a girl who moved to Lousiana to go to school and Yippy got out and ran off. He was gone for over a year. She had told me I have a playmate for KIPPY. I was hesitant about putting a male dog in the yard with a female dog as I had run into a problem with that in years past. I told her that I would have to come see the dog for myself to feel him out to see how he acted around other dogs and people. I walked through the gate and this great big dog stood up in front of me and put his paws on my shoulders. I was a little intimidated by this at first but I realized that he was just an overgrown lap dog. He laid on the porch the whole time letting me pet him and not making a sound. That is when I found out that this was KIPPY’s littermate. When I brought him home my wife said KIIPPY was getting really excited at the fence and worried that they would get into a fight. I told her I don’t think that will happen and she said, Why not? I told her because that is KIPPY’s brother. They got along as soon as he came into the yard, it was like they had never been separated. We ended up taking Yipster as I called him to the vet twice for one of his toes had a messed up nail on it and he kept licking it. The second time the vet ended up removing part of the toe as it was passed saving. He got to stay at the vet for the whole week so his toe wouldn’t get reinfected and when he came home that is when we found out that he could bark and he wasn’t much for taking orders when it came time for him to quit barking and go lay down or go to bed.

My wife had noticed that he didn’t seem to be feeling too well as he wasn’t eating his food. He didn’t even want the high dollar ID wet food. So off to the vet I took him and then I came back home, took a shower, and went to bed as I work nights. Seems his tummy was a little upset but the vet said that he should be ok in a few days. Well, the next thing I hear is he has a blockage in his colon and they need to operate. My wife took him down to the vet and they worked on him for several hours this past Friday. Seems he had a Floating Colon (whatever that is) and his poop had more or less turned into concrete in his bowls. They cut his intestines open and his colon and cleaned him out really well to get the bacteria out of his stomach. They sewed him back up and he seemed to be recovering really well. We were glad as he was only 6 years old and we figured he had a lot more years ahead of him since he had beaten Heart Worms and had just gotten his teeth cleaned about a month ago. He was outside marking his territory at the vet the next day and eating a little and pooping a little so we figured he was getting better. Today we got the news that every pet owner dreads hearing. Your dog isn’t doing too well so you might want to come see them before it’s too late. The vet said we could have taken him to Little Rock to an Emergency Vet down there but he was already in pain and we didn’t figure he would survive the trip down there much less the surgery. The vet didn’t give us much hope that another surgery would keep him alive so we had to go say goodbye. I had just been down there this morning to take his medicine to the vet for him and usually, I would get a chance to see him at the vet. With Covid going on that screwed me out of a chance to see him before he got so doped up on drugs he probably wasn’t even aware we were there. He was a good watchdog for what it's worth. He would bark at people 3/4’s of a way down the road, more or less telling them this was his road. He had his second chance at life, I hope and pray we did the right thing by him of having him put to sleep. You always feel so guilty when your furry friends are gone, you question whether something else could have been done for them. As tears roll down my face once again, Thank You Yipster for making me laugh at the silly things you did, the funny faces you made at me, and for being my friend.