For Buck, there’s no better baby sitter than a dog. When my youngest brother was working out that crawling thing, my mother would put him on a blanket on the floor and without being asked Raggs, the dog of the day, would take up watch. If said brother wiggled to the edge of the blanket, Raggs would put a paw across his diapered backside anchoring him within the blanket boundaries. It usually had the effect of making the baby change direction and the paw would be removed until he reached another edge. Raggs kept this up until a human retrieved the baby.

Difficult as that last visit to the vet is, I wouldn’t trade all the years of companionship to escape it.

Not looking to making that trip again, but it is the price you pay for the unconditional love they give you on the journey.

Glad it turned out ok and best of luck when you and the family do have to make that trip.

The Second Mrs. Pennington turned 40 and found out she was pregnant with our first and only the same week. The day after her big announcement I came home from work at the usual hour, put the car in the garage, and walked in the house to silence…which is to say without the usual rambunctious greetings from our 16 year old border collie/lab cross (which we raised from a pup) and the indeterminate-aged rat terrier, who we adopted after finding her as a stray ten years earlier.

“Where’s the dogs?” sez I.

“I put them down,” sez she.

There are more than a few things I’ll never forgive that woman for, and this one is near the TOP of the list. She never asked, and didn’t tell me…she just did it. That night was pretty danged frosty and it remained frosty for a few days following. Her rationale? “I can’t have old dogs and a baby in the same house.”

I never understood that.

We always had so many animals around when I was a kid. I don’t remember the end for most, I don’t remember having the tremendous attachment that sneaked up on me when we got a dog “to help our son.” She’s been amazing, part terrier, part beagle, all heart and very little sense. She socialized the boy in ways that all the therapists in the world, with all their degrees, could not. Believe it or not, one cat helped a great deal, too (while the other hid.)

But my greatest loss to date was a wonderful 7/8 Arab horse, Murphy’s Mistake, who gave me nearly all of his 20 years of life. His sole fault (besides being hard to capture in the pasture, and is that a fault or just a horse?) was trying to roll over on the saddle, when young. Cured him of that rapidly…..and from then, he was nearly all that was good of the world. Smart, and such a smooth mover–and one of the most beautiful of his kind who ever lived, especially before he grew out of the dapples. He knew it, too, and would spend hours on his tiptoes, prancing around the pasture admiring his shadow, tail a-flag and neck arched just so.

In his age, he got a bit too close to a rattler, and didn’t let us know for about three days. The venom dissolved the cartilage in his fetlock….
The vet college (long hours away with a horse trailer) said, there would be enormous expense and he’d never leave his stall again, or he’d have excruiciating pain as his shoulder turned in a way it couldn’t, until he lay down and died. We brought him home and one morning my dad took him to his final resting place and said goodbye alone. I wish he’d let me be there, but he didn’t tell me until after. I still have a lock of his mane.
I comforted myself with the idea that he was old, and that at least, it wasn’t one of my children, but I’ve never let myself get close to a horse again. And shortly after, because God was listening, the long slide into impenetrable autism for my beloved only son.

And in the long hard months when my boy couldn’t bear our presence, couldn’t show us any affection of any kind, couldn’t speak anymore, and the “experts” told us to just forget him…and the seizures came, and we thought he’d not survive, even…

The things the animals taught me, helped me through, helped me cope, helped me show love in other ways, different ways, needed ways. I will always be grateful.
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