Black Doggerel

Mum's gained enough strength from the electrolyte drip to start being irritating. That has to be good news, doesn't it?

She woke me up this morning phoning from the hospital. She wanted me to spend the afternoon at Grimmauld Place waiting for the NTL people to come and take away the cable/broadband box. If I'd had a bit more than half an hour's notice (Mum was quite sure she'd told me, but she was wrong there) and if it hadn't been brutally hot* I might have agreed to do it. As it is - sod them. I already have to go shopping for her and bring her more things and feed the cat, but I can do all that this evening. I felt guilty even as I was saying it, but fuck them. They'll just have to turn up some other time.

Took the dogs for their morning walk and ran into Spike's girlfriend Ella and her mum out in their front garden. She's tried to register at LJ but hasn't yet found a username she likes that someone doesn't already have - I hope she does, it'd be way cool to have a dog person here that I see in Real Life. Her evil cat, beautiful yellow-eyed Rio, teased my dogs by popping in and out of the bushes at the side of the house**, and he and the dogs caught me at a bad moment and pulled me over... I didn't let go of the leashes (I never do) but I have a lovely bleeding scrape all down my left arm. We told dog-related injury stories and bitched about flexi-leads and yucca plants. I love Ella, she and Spike are two of a kind and I can't wait to show pictures.

( cut for family and cat rambling. )

*anyone who tells me I don't know what hot is and it's much hotter where they are will be slapped with a wet fish and possibly defriended. I'm REALLY not in the mood.


**yes, they are indoor/outdoor cats. I don't believe that necessarily makes someone a stupid pet owner, depending on the cat and where you live - and she lives at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac where the cats are on a first-name basis with all the dogs and people who live there and the only road nearby is a dead end where nothing goes faster than 5mph. Would I let my cat out if I lived there? I don't know. I do know that she generally knows where they all are. It's another argument I'm not prepared to have in my journal today, in any case.

Just spent twenty minutes chatting with one of my dog walking acquaintances. She's a sweet elderly lady with an even sweeter elderly Cocker Spaniel called Daisy. Daisy's owner is one of my favourite local dog owners. She's never without poo bags, she's ready to slap down anyone she sees failing to use them, she identified Squish's breed accurately at first sight, and I once heard her comment on a revolting squelchy heap of dog turd some mannerless barbarian had left - "If my dog produced something looking like that she'd be at the vet's." I love this lady and her immaculately cared-for rescue dog.

Today I learned something about Daisy's history prior to her rescue:

• She's been debarked.


• She's had surgery to remove the loose skin round her jowls and it's left her with difficuties drinking. This was done to prevent her then owners having to clean her food off her face as one has to do sometimes with jowly long haired dogs.
  


• One of her hind legs is distorted and twisted from spending six years of her life tethered by it.


• When her owner adopted her she didn't know what grass was.
  

Yep, Daisy spent her first six years as a puppy farm brood bitch.  I know that with my own friends list I'm mostly preaching to the converted, but not all of you are dog people.  Not all of you know the whole story behind cute puppies in pet shops. I knew it in theory, myself, but this was the first time I've actually seen one of the victims, because the creatures responsible tend to go to a lot of trouble to prevent them being seen or heard.



Read about it: http://www.bordercollierescue.org/puppyfarm/introduction.html

P.S. if you saw this in the first fifteen minutes after posting, please excuse delete/edit rich text b0rkage. My bad. I should know Rich Text Mode is evil, I was just too lazy to learn how to make bullet points in HTML.