Dancer Doo

We rescue dogs.
Well, Miss Donna rescues, I just feed and brush and pet and play with and clean up after and try to give away dogs. That's mostly why we moved to the country. So that we could make a mess of a nice new home without finding neighbors with torches and pitchforks at our door.

Sometimes rescue is wonderful and lots of times, as you can imagine, it sucks.

Thirteen or fourteen years ago Ms Donna found a beautiful Siberian Husky standing in the road on our street. She was clearly alone and distressed. Donna went to her and led her home and soon took her to the vet where they rewired her ACLS joint and took out her swollen eye and replaced it with nothing. They sewed up her eyelids so it would look more acceptable and I really doubt if Dancer (Ms Donna named her - not me) ever noticed that she only had that one beautiful blue eye.

There was a period of a few years where Pepper - who lost an eye to cancer - and Dancer - who came to us without an eye - would have trouble on our walk together because each was missing the opposite eye and sometimes they'd run into each other. People would ask "Aww, what happened to these doggies eyes". I would usually say "I't's an old family recipe".
That would stop the questions.

Dancer would hide in the backyard and ambush Bob the chow dog. She loved to play with him and B.B. and Pepper. She'd sit on the porch until Bob walked by and she would leap on him. He acted like he hated it but he didn't.

Dancer was our killer dog. She killed a cat that made the mistake of being in our backyard. She would catch birds that landed on the fence and she'd make sure they were finished moving before discarding them. She and B.B. fought a lot. But when Dancer got older she mellowed out a lot. Then she just became a bitch. Nag, nag, neeaghh eeeyah rarr er, like huskies do. We called her our Japanese dog because she often sounded like a Ninja getting ready to strike.

Huskies rarely bark. They rrrooorrr when loving and ooorooohhhoooorarraarrr, like wolves when feeling feral. If she ever did bark it was a short terse yip that made you come running to see what was up. There was usually something very serious going on if she barked.

When she was young it was important to catch her fast if she got free of the fence. A husky doesn't really run fast but when they get into that lope, they can go smoothly for hours. I'm guessing they can probably travel a hundred miles in a day.

A huskie's hair is soft and luxurious and packed so tightly that when she shedded, all you had to do was grab at a tuft of fur as she walked by and you would have an explosion of doggy snow all over the living room. Her fur was so thick and so tightly packed on her that she could be totally comfortable in freezing or blazing hot weather. She used to sun herself on hundred degree days.

Last spring we noticed that she was limping. Ms Donna thought it was due to fighting ( we have an active pack of dogs ) or maybe she stepped on one of a million hickory nuts we have all over the lawn. Well it didn't go away. Kept getting worse.
I'm not going to dwell on it or try to make this a tearful thing.
Just had to talk about it.
Dancer was finally in such pain yesterday that she asked us to help her stop the struggle.

That's the third dogling that we've had to put down this year due to cancer.
Sometimes rescue is wonderful and lots of times, as you can imagine, it sucks.

Something I've had trouble understanding is the difference we place on dogs versus humans in this situation. We kept close watch over our dear little husky to ensure that we didn't force her to live any longer than she needed. We were keen to the changes in her condition making sure that she didn't suffer any longer than she had to. Once we realized that she was hurting a lot, we took her in to see the vet for the last time. Had we put it off another day we would have felt very guilty. Others may have judged us harshly if they'd known that we put it off longer than we should have.
That was for our dog.
Now let's consider Grandma.
How would people judge us if we had done Grandma the same way?
How would people judge us if we treat our dying dog the same way as we treat our dying Grandma?
How did it get this way?