The Gratuitous Use of Adorable Puppy Updates To Make You Read Other Semi Important Things

It seems a little fucked up to chase an entry on the difficulty of placing Porsha due to her homeliness with a cute puppy entry. But I rest assured that yeah, you all know Porsha still needs a home. Badly. And some wonderful person in the States emailed me today and is raising money to defray the cost of shipping Porsha to the States if a home can be found for her there. So if you are at all interested in owning what might be the best dog in the world, please see my last entry. And email me. ASAP.

I generally dislike the word 'cute'. It's a banal word. But yes, the puppy is cute. No, the puppy is goddamn adorable. When you last saw him he was a little handful of black and white. Now he is an enormous speckled beast with a name: Sherman. Or first name Sherman, last name Tank.

We have no idea what could possibly have fathered Sherman. When he was just a wee little creepy crawly thing Boston Terrier, Pit Bull, Border Collie were all bandied about as potential parentage. After all Freda, his mother, is black and tan. And then he started to grow. And grow and grow and grow. And his fur went from flat black and white to speckled. So now all we can assume is that whatever Freda mated with was some sort of enormous speckled monster, a cattle dog on steroids, a dalmation large enough to devour a small city. We are clueless.

In America puppies start on their mothers milk and then are gradually weaned over. First you make a mush with some wet food and puppy food, then gradually you make it more solid, then you feed just puppy food until they graduate to dog food.

This is not the way these things work in Nicaragua. One day Sherman was nursing, the next day he bellied up to Freda's bowl, stuck his nose in and started eating dog food. He kept occasionally nursing off of her for a while but for the most part he just up and decided to eat dog food one morning. And now he does. He eats his weight in dog food every day. He's gotten so bad that Freda started hoarding food to keep him from eating everything so now they have to have seperate bowls. This would be easier if we had enough bowls. Instead he eats off a plate. Until he finishes his plate, then he tries to eat Freda's food. And if that doesn't work he takes off with the empty plate forcing me to chase him around the yard to retrieve it. For a five week old puppy that wobbles around like a drunk after happy hour the little bastard can move.

I would feed him in the bowl and give Freda the plate but Sherman is really big on up-ending things onto himself. Water buckets, dog food bowls, garbage cans, whatever. And he's a little too short for a real bowl yet.

This brings us to a non-puppy related interlude - and do not worry people, the puppy porn will continue after this brief non-puppy interlude: we are not an animal shelter. We are not set up to be an animal shelter. Casa Lupita, the clinic, is one room in a school house with some cages built into the wall outside. The original idea was for it to be used by visiting vets to do spays and neuters. Maybe hand out invermectin tablets to the street dogs with sarna when there was a vet tech or someone around to do it. The idea was never to accumulate a collection of these dogs, let alone have a dog give birth there.

With spaying the street dogs, it should be catch and fix and release. Or treat on the street and bring in to fix and release. But some of them just cannot just be caught and released.

First there was a dog so sick and tame it would not have survived treatment on the street. That was Scabby. I believe he was the first one though I could be wrong. He lived at the clinic last year when I was here while we treated him for mange, severe malnutrion and a bunch of other infections. But being there makes them too used to people to be effective street dogs. And most of them sucked at street life anyway which is how they wound up so critically ill. But living at the clinic they lose the instincts that keep them alive out there. Scabby - now BB - wound up being adopted by a wonderful woman, an ex-pat who treats him like a king. And he is a beautiful dog now.

Since then other similar cases have arisen. The criterion are always the same - the dog is very sick, incredibly tame and needs more critical care than can be given on the street. But we are not set up to do this. At most we can handle one or two of these dogs, daily care wise. Now we have five counting Sherman with one more boarding dog on the way. And this doesn't even take into account finding them homes in a country overrun with street dogs where anyone can find themselves a puppy.

But now back to our friend The Tank. Aside from his abrupt decision to eat dog food, he's also scorned any attempts to make him puppy-size water bowls. We made him one out of a cut off soda bottle and he up-ended it and then chewed it up. We gave him water in a smaller bowl and he stepped in it, played in it, and then up-ended that on himself as well. If the big dogs drink out of the big bucket, then Sherman will drink out of the bucket, too. Come hell or high water.

Very high water.

I have to check the bucket a few times a day to make sure the level is high enough that he can get his face far enough in to get water. Nicaragua is not a cold country - everything here needs extra water when the temperature climbs into the nineties. I also have to make sure that it's heavy enough that cannot upend it on himself which he has done numerous times. This is delightful to watch but not terribly good for keeping everyone else hydrated.

And sometimes because he is a puppy and hence an instrument of mass destruction he needs to try to eat the bucket. Just because. Luckily metal, unlike my toes, shoelaces, Porsha's ears, and the garbage, is completely immune to his pointy little puppy jaws.

There is an odd juxtaposition about having Sherman at the clinic. Yes, there have been other puppies there. Remember Tyson, the pup we pulled out of the ditch the first day I was here? Puppies have come through. But unlike the other puppies Sherman has never spent a day of his life on the streets. While the other dogs have had to forage for food, dodge taxis, avoid being poisoned, Sherman has always enjoyed the security of regular meals and a protected place to stay. I'm sure he'll grow up somewhat fucked up and in need of a doggy therapist - an only child raised by a horde of mange ridden and tick infested half dead street dogs in recovery - but he has lived a life of relative luxury and safety. He's sort of like a baby born in a drug rehab in a bad neighborhood. Maybe the other ones tell him stories - if dogs can do such things, which I doubt - but he doesn't know what it's like out there. And it's pretty unlikely that he ever will. Yes, he is already the size of a tractor but he is still a puppy. And a puppy under the guardianship of people who will insure that he winds up with a nice family.

Even if I do have to fish him out of the garbage sometimes.

But the other dogs, even cranky Ramon and timid Tessa, treat him like their own. Porsha lets him chew on her ears and pull her tail. Ramon will occasionally growl if he's being a little too mouthy but the other dogs look out for him, take care of him. And god forbid something does happen to him that elicits a whimper - I step on him, he gets his paw stuck somewhere - all four dogs come flying over to make sure no one is messing with their puppy.

Though Freda does sometimes kick his ass when he needs it. But she's his mom. These things are allowed. And it's kinda fun to watch. Particularly after he just finished chewing my toes to shreds.

***A quick note on rehoming these dogs: I can't stress enough what frickin' rock stars Nick, Toni, Kit, et al are. Because of them a bunch of these dogs that had no chances in hell before now have homes. Tyson and others have moved out to Laguna, to neighbors of Kit's. Toni and Nick have worked the hell out of their Peace Corps network to place others like Quixote and Tripod. I've said it before - I show up for a bit and do my thing, work, but I'm the one who has the time to write the stories. The real heroes are the ones that are here all the time.***



A brief non-animal related interlude: The Best Heckling Ever.

Like most Americans without a great grasp of Spanish I have a tendency to invent Spanglish when I don't know the world for something - tack an 'o' or an 'ina' on to the end of an English word and assume that people know what I'm talking about.

I always assumed that this particular form of Spanglish was only spoken by native English speakers. Today I am in the Mercado in Masaya buying a new bathing suit when I walk by a group of taxistas - cab drivers. I'm not wearing a damn bathing suit, just a sundress but it doesn't matter what you're wearing, heckling is going to occur. There are the usual whistles and hoots and hissing, a 'you are booteeful' and then one of them says 'Holy Crapp-o, las piernas." Piernas being legs, though I'm probably butchering the spelling on that.

But Holy Crapp-o. Crapp-o. I had a little Holden Caulfield moment right there and that just killed me. I started laughing which embarrassed the hell out of the poor guy.

Holy Crapp-o.