MORE ABOUT MOLLY AND DOGS

                                   

I have said several times, “I never met a dog I didn’t like.” I have spent all of my life attached at the hip, to some kind of a dog. As I write this, Molly my Lab, lies curled up on my feet under my desk. Dogs, like humans are emotional wrecks. They crave attention and they love to please you but like humans, they have their whims. No matter what they have in mind to do one minute, the appearance of a squirrel or rabbit in the yard, trumps all of it. They live in the moment and that’s something I wish I did better. We get to wound up sometimes in stuff that isn’t that important.

 Mollie loves to help no matter what the project. Last spring after the ice went out I was putting in the dock and was in the lake with my waders on. I was at the limit for depth with the water about an inch from the top of them, tightening up the dock bolts. Molly was swimming around supervising the whole project when I think she got tired. She swam up behind me intending to rest her paws on my shoulders. Instead she pulled the back of my waders down and in came about forty gallons of ice cold water. I think only dogs could hear, the scream I let out

Last winter I was asleep one night when Molly woke me up whining beside the bed. She usually sleeps out in the other room and I rarely hear from her until morning, I was irritated with her for waking me up and told her to go lie down. But she was insistent and won’t go away. So thinking she had to go outside I got up to open the door. Then I heard this noise in the lower level. Investigating I found my C.O. detector off in the furnace room, behind a closed door.  In my bedroom I was not able to hear it but Molly heard it and she knew something was wrong.

When I was on the fire department we had a house fire in the middle of the night. The fire started in an enclosed back porch, from a space heater that the owner had left to provide some heat for a dog and her newborn puppies. He wasn’t home when the fire stated. After the fire was out the distraught owner wanted us to find the bodies of the dogs so he could take care of them. There were no dogs there, so we expanded our search. Curled in a dry sump basket in the basement we found the dog and her six pups. She had somehow pushed opened two doors and carried her pups to the lowest spot she could find in the house. She was singed from the heat but otherwise they were all okay.

Not a week goes by that I don’t read of some child being abused or worse. I have never to my knowledge known a dog that abused hers or some other dog’s pups. Yet we as humans, have instances of abuse of our children, on a regular basis. Most animals would fight to the death to protect their young. A lot of the child abuse happens when children are left to be cared for by bad people. There is nothing more precious then your own helpless child. Animals know this, why can’t we figure it out? Mark Twain said, “Of all the animals, man, is the only one who inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.” He also said, “Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, we would stay out and our dogs would go in.”