This is an electronic but nonetheless heartfelt thanks to everyone who sent support and sympathy in many different forms following BeeBee’s death. During that difficult time, I had two advantages that sustained me. One was the rock-solid belief that I made the right decision, and the other was having such wonderful and caring friends.
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I didn’t manage the tear-control I’d hoped for when I participated in BeeBee’s euthanasia yesterday, but I survived.
Read more →I was thinking about my dad when I was digging BeeBee’s grave. He was a great nature lover, but he was the last person you’d want around if you found a chipmunk mangled by a cat or a bird with a broken wing. He’d get so overwhelmed by emotion that the animal would pass from critical condition to beyond hope before the objective part of his brain started to work again. 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
Read more →Bee’s been having a rough time lately as she comes into full maturity. She thinks she should be in charge, but she can’t pull it off because of her multiple physical problems.
Read more →o much as been going on that I haven’t had much time to write about BeeBee, although a day doesn’t go by that I don’t think about her because she’s definitely made the shift to adulthood.
Read more →This week, changes in BeeBee’s physiology and behavior and pondering the answer to the question, “Would she hurt one of the other dogs or the cat?”
Read more →By the time I went downstairs after I’d written and posted my last message, Whit had eaten all the food in his dish. But then the next morning when I went down to the basement to clean his litterbox, I discovered that he’d vomited what looked like all he’d eaten. Because the food he’d vomited was the first I’d offered him that contained actual chunks of fish or meat (which I thought was a step up), I then made an emergency run to the store to pick up some more of the less expensive, store brand pudding stuff. I
Read more →This has been a week of ups and downs. Until noon today, I could have reported that Whit was doing well, showing sufficient enthusiasm for life that I felt encouraged. But then today he showed no interest in his lunch. It’s a miserable hot and humid day here and, had he skipped a meal when he was younger–or if any of the dogs skipped one now–it wouldn’t bother me. But now he’s OLD, and that changes everything. Part of me wants to race down to the basement and dig out the empty cat food cans from the recycling bucket
Read more →One of the wonderful things about working with companion animals is that I get an intimate view of how behaviors change as the animals mature. The puppy and kitten toddlers we get at 8-12 weeks give way to adolescents, young then mature adults, and then senior citizens, with each life stage adding its own unique spin to the basic canine or feline behavioral repertoire. It’s unfortunate that as our society has become more remote from animals as animals, we no longer recognize these changes as normal. Quite the contrary, when these occur, and sometimes they may occur as suddenly
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