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.
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".
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 |
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possible to alleviate some symptoms, only for a time. There is NO cure, see your role as someone providing palliative care. |
|
sneezing |
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low fever |
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fainting
in later stages |
|
loss
of bladder control |
|
over time, the tongue
slowly turns from pinkish to bluish due to lack of oxygen |
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 last white male rhino died in 2014, leaving a mother and daughter pair of the species as final survivors. The male was born and died in captivity, the only way they could evade poachers hunting them for their horns to cater to 'oriental' and 'afro' so called cultural markets.
The other day I was watching a youtube video like 'primitive man saves family of cats form snake'. Everyone has seen such videos, but then I thought it weird that it would so happen that a camera would have been just waiting there for the scene, with the cats obviously stressing out in hole in the side of a clay wall. It smelled phony from A to Z. So I went looking and came upon hundreds of similar videos almost all of them revolving around a (hand carved) hole in the side of a clay wall and almost all of them with a title like 'primitive man saves...' It seems to me like these really primitive apes are actually setting scenes up and stressing poor animals to death in the process for a moment of web glory. I keep asking myself why they should not be exterminated but cannot come up with an answer.
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!
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.Our company-animals usually live MUCH shorter lives than we do so we often say how old they are in human years. For Tibetan terriers this is a statistical 12-15 years or about 7:1. We don't realize how quickly they get old on us. At 15-1/2 years Ozzie was pushing a 110. The Sunday evening above was his last one with us. As I said he liked to spend the hours before bed-time with me in my study. So much so that the last couple of years, come 8 o'clock he would lead the migration upstairs on his own! He liked listening more to music than to my guitar practice so this evening I played his favorite pieces over and over again and watched the soothing music's effects on his difficult breathing, periodically still breaking into a cough. These were his top 3 songs (the link may or may nor work):
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.
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.
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!
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.