Slipping Away

My dog is now 14 years old and is part German Shepard and part Australian Shepard. He has been (once we came to an agreement) the best dog I have ever met, both intelligence wise and friend wise.
However, I found him and my wife found her dog the same day in 2000. However, her dog died (a jack russell Corgi Mix) when my daughter's babysitter forgot to bring the dogs in at night and Maggie got into it with a Raccoon in about 2004. So, now we have a pureblood Corgi that we rasied from a puppy). My dog is about 75 pounds and we are amazed he is still alive and walking. I'm not sure he hears anymore and I think if it had been up to me likely I would have put him to sleep because one of his legs pains him a lot and even though I give him a chewable aspirin in his food every night I can still see he is in pain with his leg and has trouble getting up. He is still very loving and friendly but he begs at the table in a way where I have to put him outside whereas before he knew his place. So, he is alive mostly because my wife is one of these persons who believe in old folks homes for dogs whereas to me a dog is a dog is a friend just like they have been for thousands of years already and to try to make them like your children isn't really useful in the long run to anyone or to society. So, my wife and I  disagree on this point. But I also respect that this is a family dog so everyone needs to participate in what happens to a family member that isn't human.

I have been taking a strong antibiotic for a few days and so I'm not supposed to do anything very physical because of some of the side effects of this particular antibiotic (in other words no driving cars or heavy equipment or piloting planes or motorcycles or riding bicycles). So, I really don't like being on something like this. So, when my son took the dogs for a walk in the forest I went outside in the sun and got into the Hot Tub Spa and took my laptop computer that I set on a small chair just outside the hot tub spa.

So, as I was sitting here reading and listening to things on my Macbook Pro I strated to get a really bad feeling. However, I logically traced this bad feeling directly back to a strong antibiotic rather than trusting me intuition like I usually would. So, my son finally comes out and said our Corgi has been attacked on the trail by two dogs. I could see the blood near her eye and he said they had bitten her all over her back but that there was no blood. So, then I realized fully why I was having this bad feeling that something was wrong. Only it wasn't me and my antibiotic like I thought it was something real.

So, now my wife is taking her and my daughter's corgi to the vet to make sure she is okay. Our Corgi has always been a very feisty thing and the dogs that attacked her likely knew that. They didn't attack my Shepard mix dog because he is big even though he is old. Also, he isn't afraid of big dogs or wolves which he gets along with famously. He is very much of a guy dog. But our Corgi has always been sweet, bitchy and makes a lot of noise sometimes. My dogs favorite thing is food and attention. Whereas the Corgi is more of a lap dog and thrives on love which my wife and daughter bestow upon her. I like a dog to be my friend not my baby if you know what I mean. So, I prefer not to be around little dogs even though a corgi is a little dog with a big dog personality since they are basically a dwarf breed of a big dog bred down for short legs with strength for herding sheep and catching mice and rats originally in Wales in England I believe. Even now she brings in a gopher or two every year from outside. So, I hope she is okay. When my daughter and wife first got her as a puppy they didn't really feed her or take care of her right. So, after my older daughter left for school I had to take care of her because they weren't willing to do the hard stuff. She also liked to chew corners of walls as a puppy so you would wake up in the morning and the whole corner of the sheet rocked wall would be chewed off in the kitchen  where we penned her up at night when she was just a puppy. I really found this kind of behavior to be a pain to deal with ongoing. But after the first year of painful experiences ongoing by the second year I started to feel like I didn't just want to tie her to a tree in the forest somewhere and tell my wife she ran away. So, here we are about 8 years later with her getting bit up in the forest. But the only blood I saw was near her eye so maybe the injuries are just bruises that will easily heal up.
Time will tell.

A couple of hours later: Good News! The Vet says that he thinks our corgi will be okay. He said her eyelid was scratched a little but the eye and cornea are okay and all the bites all over her back and hind quarters didn't draw blood as far as he could tell. So, he gave her some good pain killers and she should be fine in a week or two of resting and limping. It's great to have a good vet around when you need one!