thx brent for being so good at heat control for our barn guys yesterday..i apologise for dumping so much stuff on you all at once but thx! it made such a difference in temp. last night for the mini's, Crosby/jingles and the big dog room guys...yay!!!
and also big thx to everyone who sweated thru this past very hot and long weekend here, great job everyone!
shelagh picked up a beautiful windchime for shep so his is now hanging in the garden where it should be..i think we are pretty much all up to date now.
looks like it is shaping up to a big deluge of new in-coming. some may be coming up from LA.
up until a couple of years ago, we brought up a few hopeless seniors from LA each year. with the cute little highly adoptable young dogs and puppies getting nuked by the hundreds, the seniors just didn't stand a chance down there. the 5 or 6 we brought up each year, never made one bit of difference to what was happening down there, but it made me feel better that at least a few seniors made it out because someone like us cared.
anyway, we stopped doing it a couple of years ago...with so many importers bringing up dogs to sell, customs started getting really difficult. they just could not wrap their heads around that not all dogs coming into Canada were not for profit in some way. the last time I stood at the border for hours with an officer not only grilling me and trying to make me admit that I would profit from those dogs in some way, but he was threatening to turn the dogs back which scared the crap out of me cuz I just couldn't let them be sent back to that!
very few of the American dogs were ever lucky enough to get adopted..lola did and Nicole took shrek, Fiona, and taz. but mostly they either lived out their lives here or in permanent foster care where we paid their extensive ongoing medical bills. fer chrissakes..they were saints which meant they were old, sick, expensive and wrecked.
anyway..that last time totally stressed me out..i was stressed over what may have happened to the dogs I was now responsible for and personally I was stressed by that man making me feel like I was somehow a profiteering slime ball trying to slip my greedy exploiting sleaziness past his eagle eye.
so I said fuck it..sorry old wrecked American dead dogs but we ain't doing it ever again and we didn't.
but it hurt. every time I look at hilda..I think that she could have been an old discarded lifeless body in one of their overflowing barrels. she is so alive here...she is so happy despite her freaking time bomb hernia and her cardio-pulmonary disease. hilda is lucky..she is not only very happy but she is still alive!
long stories can't always be made short.
when we brought up dogs from LA, we worked with a great rescue down there called ace of hearts. they list the "in danger" dogs on their website of all of the local shelters. Nicole was recently surfing around on their site and fell in love with an old wrecked in danger dog named bart. so she and meghann made a road trip to LA and came home with bart and meghann came home with a sad little chi and added them to their existing families.
ah shit, ace of hearts suddenly remembered saints and the dogs we had helped them help in the past. the communication door was opened again between desperate LA rescuers to save dogs from death and a nice place up in Canada that likes wrecked, ancient and unadoptable animals the best.
last week the first email came...4 senior chi's now in real danger and up for euth if they don't get pulled out of the kill shelters, the shelters were out of room...the email came with pictures attached. I just so hate that!
anyway the long and the short of it is ace of hearts will deal with the border stuff and make sure they have all of their ducks in a row to get them safely here to our gates. I am not just going to help a couple of cute senior chi's tho, I would feel shitty about that cuz they are like the size of an egg.. so i told them to pick up a couple of old, wrecked, desperate real dogs too who don't stand a chance. 4or 6 in the long run what's the difference?
oh yeah..2 more get to live.
there is also boomer coming down from up north somewhere..pretty sad tale attached to this dog so I said we would take him here.
I am thinking the chi's may get adopted or at least find permanent foster homes..folks up here seem to like chi's even if they are freaking old. boomer and the other 2 yet unknowns? don't really know. but sure as shit for all of them...here is far, far better then where they are coming from so I think they will be ok with the change.
but I better re-close the LA flood gates cuz we can't be overwhelmed by all of the so very sad and helpless seniors on deathrow down there....we would need a hundred places like saints.
Hey the good news is, she is off all the meds now. She has turned into a loving sweet dog. When she is frightened she hides behind Angus in his man cave under the desk. I don't think she would accept another small dog around unless he or she was as sweet as Angus. He is so kind, you were right about him.