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 where all the meat had gone to? 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

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.

Congestive Heart Failure

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.

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

On November 3 in 1957 at 5:30 in the morning a dog named Laika had her respiratory rate triple in panic as the Soviet Sputnik's rocket fired. Her pulse rate doubled as she panicked while not a single face from those humans she had trusted and who hours earlier had strapped her into the capsule was present to reassure her. By the second orbit capsule temperature was rising through 40 degrees C. She lost consciousness after a few hours and died shortly after. Her remains burned up during reentry 162 days later. From the outset she had at no time been expected to survive her 'mission', her last day. I became aware of this story and decided to look further into it this date 2021-11-03 not knowing that it was exactly the 64th anniversary of her demise.

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.

In the 2021 Documentary "Seaspiracy" Ali Tabrizi addresses the topic of over fishing by food industry giants (i.e. their shareholders), they have also made other documentaries about our relationship to other animals. Almost everything we do on this planet seems to cater to a single directive, the profit motive. Being 8 billion we are now stripping off our planet everything that grows, walks, swims or flies, yet the topic of population control never surfaces except in discussions about unacceptable eugenics as if there were no other ways to reduce the menace that our existence poses to everything else. What if everyone with two or more children were to be sterilized? Better yet, why not fix a target population, say like 1 billion which was last seen circa 1800, targeting the demography of that period and initiating a painless reduction program first in those countries that have drifted the farthest above those values before a general reduction program? Such topics don't get the limelight because parasites want to see more hosting victims and not less.

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.

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.

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

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.

... 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 (in the spring I had to move him to the tree line just behind the young pine on the right).

Another documentary "Cowspiracy" addresses the environmental and agricultural costs of meat eating. We are raising animals to kill them but we are destroying also both our own health and the planet's capacity to feed us. Exceptionally in THIS documentary (produced before "Seaspiracy") human overpopulation IS addressed and more than once but no solution is offered. I could only notice how in later documentaries the topic actually vanished.

I was barely 2-1/2 years old when the US conducted nuclear bomb tests on Bikini atoll in the summer of 1946. Part of the experiments were animals tied to assorted artifacts and just left there, sometimes their agonizing deaths to be filmed for research.

It's probably acceptable or at least pardonable to kill and eat animals for survival but I've ALWAYS found this kind of barbarism rather depressing. We humans, made in the image of some God, are capable of no more than this? Somehow I feel ashamed of belonging to such a race. Other forms of animal sacrifice begun in the early days of shithole abrahamism multiplied after the war, we got to the point where we sacrificed monkeys to see how much detergent in soap it would take to go blind, to name just a milder form of misconduct by samples of such divine ancestry as we presume to be.

Dairy cows are repeatedly impregnated by artificial insemination and have their newborns taken away at birth. Female calves are confined to individual pens and have their horn buds destroyed when they are about eight weeks old. The males are not so lucky. Soon after birth, they are trucked off to veal farms or cattle ranches where they end up as hamburger meat.
The typical dairy cow in the United States will spend its entire life inside a concrete-floored enclosure, and although they can live 20 years, most are sent to slaughter after four or five years when their milk production wanes. New York Times

Congestive Heart Failure	Kennel cough
an often similar cough in both cases NB. There are also a few other sicknesses like collapsed trachea, cancer, parasites, etc. with similar symptoms. You absolutely MUST consult your vet for X-ray, ECG and other modern test data interpretation if you really love your pet.
fatal in about a year on the outside
	often self resolving in 2-3 weeks
	contagious
	treatable
possible to alleviate some symptoms, only for a time. There is NO cure, see your role as someone providing palliative care.
	sneezing
	low fever
fainting in later stages
loss of bladder control
over time, the tongue slowly turns from pinkish to bluish due to lack of oxygen