and that reminds me...

new dog in...sam is a 15 yr old lab whose family were moving to a place that had a 20 pound size limit for pets...sam is much bigger than that!
she is a very sweet dog who is not sure what just happened to her predictable world..she does not recognise this new reality she finds herself in.
However, she is lab enough to share my dinner without any hesitation, one must keep up one's strength when the going gets tough. hopefully she will settle in here soon and feel at home with her new slightly weird family. welcome sam..we promise to love you.

maurice goes in tomorrow for his dental...he too will have a pretty tough day. but he should feel much better sooner than later..that's the game plan anyway.

chewy chewbacca has a sore leg today..if it is not better by tomorrow, we will have the vets out to check him out.

we are expecting our imported rabbit vaccines within the next couple of weeks. getting the rabbits vaccinated will reduce a lot of the stress around here.

stella has been getting stressed recently and i have to say that it is our fault. she is anxious under the best of circumstances and we are not paying attention to her escalating stress signals. so i am putting my thinking cap on how to decrease her stress which revolves around people invading her space. since she is in the entranceway space invasions are hard to eradicate.

and this leads me to my thought for today...

as a rule..humans suck at listening to what animals have to say. and the reason for this is...9 times out of 10 we decide what animals are saying. we write the script, we direct the play..we barge thru their voices doing what we think they ought to like doing, which is pretty much whatever we the human feels like doing whenever the mood strikes us.
it is that whole damn fairy tale thinking that humans so love. we write the scripts for them so we feel good about ourselves.

let me give you an example...
lets take an old dog who has lived here for the past 2 years. he is well settled here, this place is familiar, the other animals and people are familiar and he is content. and in the past 2 years no one was interested in fostering or adopting him until his death became imminent. when we discover he is very near to the end..just a couple of days or a week left, the offers come in...offering him a "real" home with someone to love him for the last few days. wow..that sounds so great..finally he will have a real home to end his life in. it brings all of those wonderful warm and fuzzy human feelings literally oozing out our skin. we can awww ourselves to sleep knowing we gave him the very best of everything in his last week.

really? we don't consider that moving someone who is dying to an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar sights, sounds, scents, routines, people might make an old dying dog feel even more vulnerable? we don't consider that he has relationships, that he feels loved, that he is with those he has already learned to trust?

maybe at some point in life..i would really love to go to paris and stay in a 5 star grand hotel...but in the last 3 days of my life? would anyone? probably not...the time for fairy tale grand hotel dreaming has long gone away.i would want to be near my family, comfortable in my own slightly beat up home..able to say goodbye to those i loved from a place where i really knew i was loved.

respecting an animal is not using them to fill ourselves up. when we committed to their care, we promised that we would meet their needs not our own. and that means actually listening to them when they are speaking to us. animals are not silent..they do have a voice and their voices are strong...they may not have human mouths and vocal cords to form actual words but they do know how to communicate with us if we were willing to hear.

i challenge everyone who truly respects and values animals to toss out the fairy tales...kick to the curb the warm and fuzzies...open our eyes and listen to what they have to say without our own voices drowning them out. animals live in silence because they can't shout loud enough to be heard on our human centered stage.
i have to say that their willingness to forgive us, their patience in dealing with our self imposed deafness..it truly is miraculous in so many ways.

and that old dying dog was just a made up example...hopefully no dogs are dying here in the next many, many days!