Pets, in sickness and in health
February 27th 2009 11:29
I have had some bad luck with dogs.
Murphy the German shepherd, a big, arrogant, obstinate dog who was incredibly handsome and knew it, had sensitive skin. All his life we tried to find out what caused him to lose hair, scratch constantly and suffer regular ear infections, but our money bought little except the knowledge that there are two general categories of skin allergies: food and environment.
If your pet has the first, you have some hope of discovering, by a process of elimination, what it is they are allergic to. If it is the second, it could be anything from your perfume to the fibres in your sofa, and pins in haystacks will be easy to find by comparison.
Murphy, of course, had the second.
Gentle Jumbo
The story of Jumbo, another German shepherd, was told in an earlier Zoomies post (link). Jumbo was even bigger than Murphy but he was a gentle giant. He had lived all his life outdoors as a guard dog, but it was probably a good thing he was never called upon to protect his patch of property from an intruder because I doubt he would have known what to do.
Jumbo was dumped by his owner when he got too old to even look like a guard dog, and I adopted him, aged 13.
Gentle Jumbo got to see the inside of a home, along with its warmth and comfortable sleeping places, for the first time. And promptly developed severe skin allergies to something in the environment in my flat.
Scratchy
Scratchy is a greyhound of aristocratic breeding. Well, any greyhound bred from a famous Australian racing mother and a famous Irish racing father, with the semen from the latter introduced to the former after being frozen and flown, probably first class, between the two countries, surely qualifies as aristocratic.
Scratchy (yes, he has a sister named Itchy, for those who watch The Simpsons) was one of a litter of eight and he was both larger than average and slower than average. Scratchy was retired early and came to live with us and, I am pleased to report, two years later, there is no sign of a skin allergy.
Instead, he has epilepsy, and watching the violence of his periodic seizures is every bit as distressing as watching first Murphy and then Jumbo try to deal with permanent skin irritations.
So, you see, I have had some bad luck with dogs.
But nothing is perfect and taking responsibility for a pet means exactly that, in sickness and in health.
It might have been cheaper, and it might have been easier, living with Murphy and Jumbo and Scratchy if they had been perfectly healthy dogs, but it wouldn't have been better. It was (is, in Scratchy's case) a privilege living with these beautiful animals, and I would do it again in a heartbeat.
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We just got back from an early morning walk with the dogs. Met people and other dogs; talked to a group setting up a farmer's market; Scratchy and Daisy had a zoomie in a secluded spot near a disused railway track.
Everyone had a great time and, for a while, allergies and epilepsy seemed irrelevant