At almost 77 years of age I can state that the human race doesn't impress me by it's conduct on many, many fronts. But if I concentrate only on how we handle animals then my own species really makes me wanna puke. "Made in God's image" you say? We really are one huge FUBAR instead, and if that rattles your faith or just mops the floor with it as it does for me then I'm sorry. But maybe so heraldic a distinction can be earned instead of being a birthright, and it is in that spirit that I jot down this story to help dog-lovers make early diagnosis of Congestive Heart Failure in their four-legged friends, while also tossing a few stink-bombs in the direction of those who to this day bring shame on humanity by their conduct, a conduct that has more to do with the brain-stem Satan in us than with being human.

Ozzie our dog (God spelled backwards) came to us in May 2012 as a 7 or 8 year old Tibetan terrier already called by that name, so we kept his name with him. 

       
Initially he was an immaculate city-boy

We have the know-how and the technology to preventively cure such ailments for dogs but we don't even do it for 7 of the 8 billion people on earth and the animals unlucky enough never to become our pets we treat like commodities at best or as sacrifices in barbaric religious snuff rituals to produce more edible meat. The first spiritual goons of our race were pretty slick: they convinced us that they knew something we didn't, that we should bring animals to the altar of fire and even cook them to please the gods before going home to atone for our sins. I wonder how many of the first faithful came back the next day to ask who the fuck ate all the meat? Today a five-year old kid would call their fraud yet they persist in one form or another perpetually blessing some of our worst habits. If I were an extra-terrestrial looking down on our own conduct I would say "there we have an infectious sore on the face of the planet that needs to be hosed off it". 

    
But he soon corrected that handicap, or looked like a million bucks

Sleeping in blissful peace behind my back while I'm having a nap

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2

Congestive Heart Failure

As purpose-bred or shall I say biological monstrosities created for profit,  many pets are cross-bred to produce unnatural but very marketable traits. The earth is lousy with painted bimbos who will pay thousands for a dog that has been turned into a designer fur-ball matching a similarly priced purse with so much hair between its fingers that it cannot walk on an incline any more without slipping. Their teeth may be crooked, chronic cases of gingivitis torture them, and that's even before we start making them eat 'industrially produced' dog food which almost all of them frown upon given a chance to instead eat left overs from the human table. The poor beings are often given a bad start right off the bat by being turned into genetic traffic-jams. Men are no different as they try to project some fucked in the head macho image at the expense of a naturally kind and social animal that hasn't become man's best friend without reason. I could never put into words the level of my total disdain for all such barbarians and/or their values or religions approving such conduct via the cop-out license they seem to grant themselves to consider living things as property, the effect of their satanic outlook often spilling over even onto their fellow human beings.

The exploding-heart of Congestive-Heart-Failure

Diuretic medication makes for thirst

• In the first traumatic incident about a week earlier he was following me to go upstairs and I could not see the entire sequence of events, I just heard a sort of thump and turning around saw him collapsed, crying a little and very disoriented, unable to get up. I thought he had slipped on the first steps of the stair and had just fallen back and did not suspect anything else. The reason was that a month earlier, before his last hair cut, I saw him slip on the stairs because of hair under his fingers so I assumed that something similar may have tripped him up even though this time he was in neat trim and looking like a million dollars.
  
• Then a day or two later I was in my study, where he kept me company most evenings while I learned some guitar or just listened to music with him. He had two nests in my study to choose from, one of them right behind me off to my left. I heard him rustle and get up, probably preparing to ask to be let out, that was usually the way we worked it out. But then I heard him collapse AND begin that blood-curling cry that dogs in severe pain put out in a desperate modulated scream for help. It's that sound they make when hit by a car or when they get shot without instant death, and I've seen both situations in real life. I jumped to my feet to go help him up and saw him writhing on the floor in a trace of urine. My wife had also heard him and was up there in an instant as we both slowly got him up and on his feet again. Again, he was totally disoriented and we were both totally demolished.But we still had not seen an actual collapse though, so we did not know if he was crying out because he had hurt himself in the collapse.
  
• But the next day or so I did get to see a complete sequence when he was walking just in front of me into the house. He simply keeled over, just like that!  This time it went silently, again I helped him up and he was very, very disoriented. All the while his breathing was becoming more labored every day.
  
• At 2 am on the 12th I heard him rustling out of his nest beside my bed. I had learned to sleep with an ear open and pretty well knew from experience that he would soon be asking to be let out (one of the side-effects of diuretic medication is more frequent urination). I was going to take him downstairs and then outside in my arms even before he would ask for it, seeing that by now he was very weak all of the time. As I was just rolling out of bed I again heard that thump and I knew exactly that he had just collapsed, this time again without making any other sound but now really in a pool of urine, soaked and motionless. I helped him up but he was just like a rag doll, unable to stand and visibly not knowing where he was, or what had just happened. This last one was a truly demoralizing event for me, it must have been so much worse for him, I felt very sad for the poor animal seeing that this once bright and agile being had become totally without mental or physical resources.
  

I haven't been able to get too many details but some of the cases result from genetics so cross-breading must surely be a possible cause. So is the environment and I don't mean just the food we give them. There was a DC-9 captain decades ago who got the exploding-heart disease from breathing-in epoxy paint fumes, it soon killed him (the catalyst used with such glues/paints is a deadly DNA modifying agent, google it up if you have time). When the weed-killing chemicals were the big fad and all dogs were rolling in and licking treated grass their cancer-rate exploded, and on, and on, and on, and on!

Just trying to be clean to the end

When we watch our dogs (or cats) grooming themselves with  nothing but a tongue to do the job in the front or in the rear just to keep clean and presentable in a house they know to be safe, clean, and theirs too is quite a revelation. And when the tongue cannot do they lick their paws and wipe their face with it. After that, as a last resort, they will wipe their unwieldy mustache on hanging towels or whatever they can find. I've watched this many times and believe that we are nobodies to look down on them in this respect. I'd like to see how humans would do with just a tongue, especially in the case of some of the aforementioned fur-coated, bejeweled land-yacht cows cruising central park with their designer trophy pooches tethered to them for a delusion of respectability.

• Why Worry - Dire Straits
  
• Deora Ar Mo Chroi - Enya
• The Gift - Medwyn Goodall
  

Humanity is living in a TRUST & CREDIBILITY MELTDOWN and for good reason, profit or crooked interest drives everything. When I buy a bag of pet food I will not for a moment believe that every imaginable junk that adds weight and mass didn't go into it in addition to dead bodies some harvest from vets, kennels, or even humane pounds. I don't even believe the pope anymore, and for a first-class example of what scum without scruples has done just look at the SARS-Cov2 virus experience, long gone are the days when there were people who if they said something you could bank on what you heard from them. Every manner of values-perversion is being rammed down society's throat to turn it into an identity-less biomass best suited for optimized consumption of whatever produces profit. We are all caught up in this mess but our little friends, in fact all animals, are already paying the price before us and not just of recent date either.

Video LINK: rapid labored breathing

There was a navy-seal some time ago with a little dog that three punks decided and managed to kidnap. If I remember correctly he spent months or years tracking them down, and found them too. I have very few doubts about what condition I would have left them in.

After many trips, of even thousands of kilometers...

As far as I'm concerned we will sooner or later have to interdict the commercial production of pets and even make it illegal to sell them at all. We should let responsible and loving pet owners let some of them reproduce from time to time thus providing new and free gifts to those really wanting one. Entrusted-to-care should replace ownership. As a minimum, having children or pets should impose prerequisite education, values-upgrading, and written as well as practical tests; you flunk, you come back in a year! The entire custom of treating them as property must be beaten to its knees! Orientals eat their dogs while we eat their sacred cows so the spectrum is wider than it seems. It would be unrealistic to expect humanity to throw away its carnivorous though relatively recent heritage but maybe we should take some first steps. How many people would devour animals if they had to hunt them themselves? I tried a veggie burger the other day, it was by far the best burger I ever ate!

Old gray-hair, exhausted from just a minute of sitting

His once soot-black hair was still as silky as ever (these dogs don't lose their hair and touching it is pure joy) but now there was a lot of silver in there for the aging little monsieur. Being no spring chicken myself, I got to have a lot of respect for him just from following the process over the years.

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9
Trust Betrayed

Arriving at the vet, on the table

Once he was on the table he was just a bit nervous, after all he had been there many times before, but by helping him to sit down I relieved the tremor from his hind legs and helped to relax him. The vet injected the best tranquilizing cocktail that money can buy today into his butt region and he never felt a thing, never even turned his head to look there as he had done at times before so I knew that it went completely unnoticed. As he was sitting there his head started becoming heavy, ever so gradually, and I eased him down on his side as he continued drifting off into dreamland, I hope into the arms of the Maker.

First, stripped of pain, into peace and blissful sleep

This first sleeper shot or tranquilizer takes 5-10 minutes, maybe only 5 for smaller critters, to be fully effective. By then of course he was totally asleep, in very deep sleep. I took soothing comfort in knowing that sometime in the first minute he went there in my hands, in our hands I should say, not knowing why he was there but feeling freed from the chocking, the gasping for air, the pain, and the almost permanent irritating cough-reflex and all the suffering.

"We're ready", the vet whispered.. "go ahead", I replied

We were four people in there, my wife and I, the vet and her assistant. Throughout the entire procedure, as much as possible given the things we had to do, hands were continuously caressing and calming him. No, we were NOT trying to hold him down as it may seem, we all had tears in our eyes. Dogs do not BTW like being patted on the head, that's domination, but stroking the cheeks is to them a sign of acceptance and faithful loyal commitment, increasingly rare attributes among humans lately.

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10
Judgment

After the second or terminating shot (above and better called a diffusion really into an easy vein in a hind leg) I watched his breathing very gradually slow down and become shallower. Everything told me that it was nothing even remotely resembling any kind of abrupt or violent process. It took maybe a minute for his breathing to gradually and gently slow to a stop, I had not seen him breath so fluidly in a long time, not even in his sleep! The stethoscope next verified that his tired heart had given up also. He was then pronounced, it's really hard to fathom just how easily life can slip from a broken and frail little body. There was no turning back now.

Gone.

We deny them their natural existence and force them to depend on us for everything. Having no choice they do place all their trust in us gods, until one day we betray them. I felt like a piece of shit.

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11
Home

       
The car that took me, brought me HOME     Back to the house that was mine    ..and the family that was mine     

Just in case the above might seem like a bit of overkill, I was out digging for 40 minutes while the above pictures were taken inside following arrival so I did not get to spend that time with him and so I just had to compensate this way, by including them.

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12
Adieu

Sundown and the cold closing in

Blizzards usually come with relatively mild air around here but during the 2-3 days in their wake temperatures take a nosedive into the deep minuses. I had expected this much and knew that breaking the surface of the ground with the digging boom might be not so easy, that a day later and until spring it certainly would become impossible. And yes, I had asked myself if this had influenced our decision. It had not. I did have alternate plans.

Animals see the world around them just like we do but do not necessarily draw the same conclusions. This is illustrated in the story of the puppy telling other dogs encountered in the park that all he has to do is whine, maybe lift a leg, and his master will  run to him, attach himself with a lanyard, after which master can  safely be taken for a walk while puppy reads the morning paper sprayed on every bush or fire-hydrant along the way. When I get on my riding lawn-mower I mount some kind of animal, Ozzie has to come along! When we get into a car or tractor, then it is a strange looking/smelling beast that eats us and takes us away. With time they may accept that the beasts don't really eat us, only carry us like 'roos do their young, while during parked inactivity they just sleep there, frozen motionless, with tires to piss on. Every time I went working with my tractor, and this included snow-clearing ops lasting several hours, Ozzie had a nest made in the cabin for him. From that perch behind glass he could supervise extending strange arms and a constant growl of sorts, he'd let a bark go when the gestures seemed more aggressive than approved.  Finally, with the heater keeping us warm he'd usually just doze off in the audio-lap of the deep diesel heartbeat.

The last two or so years he had gotten progressively more tired just from old age although in his case it was probably already a little more than just old-age. Since he could never really jump into my pickup truck cabin or into a tractor anyway I had begun to carry him to such missions. He always wanted to over-see things. When he got tired he'd just slumber off for a snooze to the sound of that weird animal's deep diesel heartbeat. Did this maybe a thousand times, every time we went anywhere, sometimes even inside the house. I know beyond any doubt that he just loved looking down on the world from my shoulder, his neck always erect as he would never stop looking around, almost like a fighter pilot.

As soon as we got home I went at it and dug the grave, made his bed as it were with his favorite things and then came the hardest part which, in retrospect, I would just as soon have let pass because it's one thing to witness a burial and quite another to lay a body in the ground with your own hands, something I'd done twice before in my life. On this day, when everything was ready I went into the house and picked up his body for the last yards to his final resting place. But that body was limp now, totally limp, and still warm. As I kind of threw him almost over my shoulder as can be seen the earlier pictures, his completely relaxed neck fell into a curve around mine. After a few steps I realized that he was just telling me for a last time how much he loved me. I slowed my pace not really knowing why, if it was to give myself more time or to tell him that what had never stopped between us now never will.

        
In his old lookout box between his comfies

          
  ... and then still a little more

It somehow seems so natural to want to bury a loved one as if the tomb would serve eternally, not really thinking of where the entire galaxy will be in a fraction of what cannot even be called a form of time. 

Con Te Partirò
Link may or may not work

I had planted about 220 pines last summer with him overseeing operations most of the time. The spot I chose for Ozzie is between four pines planted a few years earlier, someday these pines will have grown tall, may they stand guard over his rest.

KF

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