Category Archives: Dogs

Dogs

Fencing them in

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Lughnasa                                 New (Blood) Moon

I’m in the middle here.  Ready to get started on the fence, but realize I don’t know where to run the wire.  Should I put it 3/4’s up the fence, in the middle, at the very top?  I’ve not seen the dogs clear the fence so I don’t know what will come in contact with them for sure.  Plus the contact has to come while the dog is still touching the ground, that’s how the shock gets administered.

Another problem occurred to me earlier.  The ground stakes are not supposed to be closer than 50 feet to a metal building and we have aluminum siding.  I called John at Fleet Farm.  He in turn called the fence manufacturer.  Seems that’s not a problem.

With my lack of experience on such matters problems occur to me only when I’m about to confront them, rather than earlier.  Makes projects a very steep learning curve.  Steep learning curves frustrate me if I can’t figure out how to the get the information I need.

Aging, Dogs, Great Work, Politics
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Lughnasa                                       Waning Harvest Moon

Yesterday and today were full of new information, new faces.  Both days challenged my capacity to sit in one place for a long time.  The 40+ Aeron chairs in the Minnesota Foundation’s board room made finding a good chair easy and did make the day more bearable than the plastic backed metal chairs in the Northstar Ballroom.  Both days were long and challenging mentally.  A good thing.  But tiring.

Tomorrow Kate and I go see our financial planners, I call it visiting our money.  We want to discuss how they will generate cash for our payouts and have them run them run our projections using a 4% drawdown rather than the 4.6/4.7% they used.  This will give us a new and hopefully longer time horizon before our money runs out, but it will also shrink the amount of money available each year.  This is a trade-off than another consultant, Ruth Hayden, says is necessary since we’re all living longer.

Unless you are very wealthy, living large and living longer are incompatible.  That’s not to say we will, in any wise, be hurting in retirement; it does mean the cruises, trips to Hawaii and expensive purchases will have to be truncated.  Bearable.  Our life does not revolve around luxury.

The solution to our fence jumpers, according to Junior Lehman, the breeder and caretaker for a large pack of hounds, is an electrified fence.  I thought this was most likely the cheapest and easiest solution, but until I heard from somebody with some experience I didn’t want to spend money on it.  Now it will be off to Fleet Farm and hopefully we can begin letting Rigel and Vega outside again to romp and play, develop as dogs.

Dogs, Family

Family

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Lughnasa                              Waning Harvest Moon

Alert:  more dog stuff below.

These dogs.  They have a sense of playfulness,  athleticism and a joy in each others company.  And we’re ruining that right now.  We have them on leads because they jump the fence.  They get tangled up in them and have no fun outside,  inside they’re uncertain what all this means and they act unhappy.  Inside, too, their energy, unreleased from vigorous play (and, it must be pointed out, fence jumping) gets expressed.  This is two 75 pound + animals baring their teeth and jumping on each other.

We love it that our dogs have the run of the woods.  They have a shed to hunt under and one to sleep under.  They have woodpiles filled with critters that interest them.  There is a plastic swimming pool they can jump in when its hot and water to drink when they’re thirsty.  They organize themselves into a pack and enjoy each others company.  Being on leads cramps all that.

Right now we’re sad because we can’t figure out how to give these big puppies the freedom they need while keeping them safe and us out of trouble with the law.  A conundrum.  This situation exceeds our doggy knowledge by a lot.  We need help and we’re seeking it from the dog’s breeder, our vet and others who have coon hound experience.

Dogs

De-fence

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Lughnasa                                   Waning Harvest Moon

OH, boy.   We let Vega and Rigel out this morning and Brad, the neighbor who returned Rigel yesterday, gave us a call about 15 minutes later, “I think they’re out again.”

Sure enough.  I drove over to Brad’s, got both of them in the red car and drove home.  They are not, it turns out, digging under the fence.  They jump over it!  This creates a really big problem.  We have an acre plus of fenced yard, most of it filled with trees.  We can’t watch our dogs on this sized property which is why we have de fence.

This could be a deal breaker for keeping Rigel and Vega.  We’re investigating several options, but the bottom line for us is that they have to have access to the whole backyard.  If not, they can’t be dogs in the way both they and we like, that is, free roaming, able to do what dogs do within the borders of our fence.  It’s a pretty generous space.

They are, however, coon hounds as well as irish wolfhounds.  Both have a strong prey instinct, but the coon hounds also have the instinct to follow and tree the prey.  Jumping tall buildings, or fences in this case, in pursuit of prey apparently comes with the breed.  We didn’t know this until now.  It just didn’t occur to us.  We focused on Wolfhoundness and neglected to consider the coon hound.  Our bad.

This saga is not over, but it is at a very frustrating impasse right now.

They are sweet, kind, lovable dogs just doing what comes naturally.  Not their fault.  If we keep them, we have to find a solution that lets them roam our yard and not the neighborhood.  Aaaarrrrgggghhhhh!

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Our Land and Home, permaculture, Politics

Still No Rigel

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Lughnasa                      Waning Harvest Moon

The second night with no Rigel.  I took fliers to filling stations, veterinary offices, grocery stores and the local humane society.  Tomorrow I plan to distribute a few more at baseball fields, the town rec center, those sorts of places.  After that, we call back to various places and wait.

The driveway has a nice fresh black coat on it; we have a woodland edge to balance our orchard and few trees planted out in the prairie grass.  My neighbor (not the suicidal one) came over and noted we’d planted a couple of hawthorns on his property.  He said he didn’t care and I said I didn’t either.  They’ll have the same affect there and at that point the properties run into each other on an open field.

Kate’s home.  She looks better, but still ragged.  We see the surgeon on Thursday morning.  Could be some big changes here after that.

The second in my series:  Liberalism in Our Time has gotten hold of me, it’s now the filter through which I read articles, think about politics and  our common life.  I just learned about a guy named Herbert Crowley today.  He was the architect (and an architect) of what some call the welfare state.  His thought has some interesting resonance for me, since I’m struggling in this series with my radical critique of liberal thought.  When I get to the Future of Liberalism, I’m going to have come down somewhere on that question, which I’ve  sort of neatly side-stepped so far.

Cooking, Dogs, permaculture

One of Those Days

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Lughnasa                       Waning Harvest Moon (visible in the western daytime sky)

Kate has begun the dreary process of checking with animal control, vets and the humane society.  At the same time she’s begun canning tomatoes, a task she finds soothing.  It’s a good thing since she has a cold and numerous pains throughout her body.  She prefers to keep going, get things done.  In the past I’ve tried to get her to relax, take it easy a bit, but just this year I realized this is part of her spirit, her who she is-ness.  Now I congratulate her.

Today is one of those days.  Rigel’s still missing.  The borderline asphalt company will show up sometime today to seal the driveway.  Paula and the Ecological gardens folks have begun installation of a woodland edge garden.  To put a nice bow on the day I have my semi-annual teeth cleaning at 11:00.  I moved the vehicles to the street, got the gate ready for Paula, then took off and bought 10 more bales of hay from Al Pearson.

Al’s a 70+ farmer who sells his bales right off highway 10.  He bales the hay and sells it retail.  We all win.  He’s a ramrod straight 6′ 1″ sturdy Scandinavian.  He told me, “We like our repeat customers.”

Dogs, Friends

Drama

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Lughnasa                                  Waning Harvest Moon

Rigel has not come home.  We don’t know where she is or how she is.  Her absence is palpable.  At night she sits on the couch with me, her head in my lap as I watch a few TV shows, wind down from the day.  She was not there tonight.

Our neighbor left in an ambulance again.  Another suicide attempt, this time with tylenol pm.  We cannot know the pain in another persons life, not even those close to us.  The barrier of flesh and mind holds us out, even when we try to overcome it.  This is the truth in solipsism.

There were two police cars, an ambulance and people going in and out of the house.  I watched for a while, behind a gauze curtain and felt like an Italian grandmother leaning out a window in a Boston neighborhood.  Drama, the kind that touches lives daily on every block in every city and town in the world, grabs us, makes us want to know how things come out.

Kate gave his wife a call and offered to be there for her.  She has a big heart and a generous spirit.

The longer Rigel is gone, the more a feeling of sadness creeps over me.  I don’t want to feel it.  It seems as if I do that I’ve given up on her and I haven’t, but now she’s gone at night.

Dogs, Great Wheel, Holidays

Waiting for Rigel to Come Home

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Lughnasa                       Waning Harvest Moon

Vega returned home.  Kona let all the dogs inside (her major outdoor trick) and Vega walked into our bedroom where I had laid down for a bit.  When I got up to see if Rigel had come home with her, she apparently got up on the bed because I found many burrs and stickers deposited on my side of the bed.

Rigel is still out there, somewhere.

Until she comes home or we decide to try and find her an alternate way, I won’t take Vega out to discover their escape hatch.  I want Rigel to use it to come home.  There’s probably a subtle psychological truth in that, but I’ll leave it to you to discern.

On another note, this is a holiday, a holiday of ending.  Labor Day, aside from its apparent purpose, has acquired a status, at least here in the northern US, as the end of summer.  This comes not only from the meteorological changes, September 1st is the end of meteorological summer, but also the return of kids to school.  Here in Minnesota people go up to their lake cabins to shut them up for the winter and the whole atmosphere becomes one of back to work, time to get serious again.

As a holiday, it has a certain numinosity, a feeling of difference, of quiet, of peaceful.  Today I have a sense of lassitude, a languor.  That’s partly from the intense work of the last week in researching and writing Roots of Liberalism and partly my body’s response to holidayness, perhaps you could call it its holiness, a time set apart, different from all other days.

Waiting for Rigel.

Dogs

On the Lam

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Lughnasa                         Waning Harvest Moon

Vega and Rigel are gone.  In a 45 minute period while I lined up framing for a painting to hang over our fireplace they escaped and were returned and escaped again.

When I got back from the framer, a message blinked on our answering machine.  Pam, the neighbor across the street, had called.  The people who live behind us to the south had caught Rigel and had her on a leash.  Vega slipped her collar.  They were kind enough to bring Rigel home and open the gate and let her in the back (fenced) yard.  Vega snuck back in via their escape route, a route I cannot identify.

I wandered the neighborhood calling their names, met several of the neighbor’s dogs, but neither heard nor saw anything of Rigel and Vega.  I feel helpless, especially since we do not, stupidly, have either a chip in them or tags on them.  If and when we get them back, a chip and tags are going on for sure.

My plan is to wait a while and see if they come on their own.  They like it here and we have lunch for them, so if they’re free, they will return home.  Later, I’ll call animal control, but I’d prefer not to right now since I don’t want to explain the lack of tags.  We keep our dogs fenced and I exert a good deal of energy to keep them contained, so we’ve operated on the (false) assumption that we don’t need to be too prompt with tags or chips.  Wrong.