Naughty Puppy Weekends...

It seems that, no matter how long the weekend, the weekend is never long enough.

I had big plans for this weekend. I left work a little early on Friday so I could hit the road with the puppies and The Interloper to head back to my parents before the traffic got too bad.

Apparently everyone else had the same idea. By the time we arrived, it was only a little sooner than we normally would have if I'd stayed at work all afternoon.

Nevertheless, it was still nice to get there. My parents are still in the UK so I was not only returning the Odious One to his home but also doing a spot of house sitting for the weekend. Since my parents don't get back until Tuesday, my sister is going to take care of Odie until they get back.

I had big plans for house sitting. I planned on having lunch with a friend on Saturday and then my sister and I were going to check out the very first 'fine dining' restaurant in my parent's town. It just opened. Given that my sister is now obsessed with Top Chef and I'm obsessed with food, we had decided to go see how really fine this dining was. It's a new restaurant, owned and operated by someone with whom my sister went to school. He trained in New York and is operating a 'big city restaurant with a small town feel' or something like that. His concept is farm to table which is very popular in big city restaurants. I think that's a fine concept...

...it's just, well, my parents live in Northern Indiana. In January when the ground is a frozen tundra, farm to table might be a wee bit of a hard concept to execute without having access to a big city selection of fresh produce suppliers. I salute the concept but am curious to see how it's executed.

It turned out that our dining plans were in vain, anyway. Even though the restaurant boasts "Walk In's welcome," we were turned away because there was a large party being hosted there and they were "full." Since it's only been open about two weeks and it was a Saturday night before 6 p.m. in a town who isn't used to "fine dining," we were a little perturbed. In addition, unlike most big city restaurants, this one does not politely post a menu on the window or outside so potential diners can, at least, see if it's worth making a reservation for the future or trying to 'walk in' on another night. Also, the website for a restaurant is not up and running. Perhaps I've watched too many Restaurant Wars on Top Chef but so far, this restaurant is not exactly winning me over. Since we weren't the only rejectees, we didn't feel so bad.

My sister and I ended up at a bar and grill type place in town. It was a nice evening in the end. It's rare when my sister and I get to hang out and we had a nice time grousing about being rejected from the other place.

Of course, no day is without stress. This weekend turned out to be quite stressful with the puppies.

Prior to my lunch on Saturday, I had gone to figure out where to put the puppies' crate for when I went out. I happened to glance out the window and saw little Rory running around in the farmer's field next to my parent's house. Given that my parents have a very large, very fenced-in portion of the yard set aside for the dogs and given that the farmer's field was not part of this area, I was a little alarmed. My parents live on a main highway. I think I've mentioned I've seen more than one dog get hit on that road. Needless to say, I flew into overprotective pet-parent mode and managed to coax Rory towards me by running out to her and bringing her inside to inspect for escape routes.

I thought I found it. Turns out, I had found one of them. There was another one I missed. Two more escapes later and I finally succeeded in stopping Rory from going AWOL again. I don't think she wanted to run away. I think she was just tracking the scent of all the wildlife that finds its way onto my parents' rural property.

Even though I got the fence fixed, it was still a bit of a worry for a while as to whether I really had managed to secure the fence.

It turned out I had. By Sunday morning, I stopped worrying.

I spent Sunday outside in the beautiful autumn-like day, writing on my little netbook. It was lovely. I took a break in the afternoon and went for a walk around my parent's large yard. I returned to the dogs' area and I heard the girls playing with a squeaky toy. "Funny," I thought. "I don't remember them bringing a squeaky toy that looked like that."

Turns out, it wasn't a squeaky toy. It was a very newborn baby bunny. They had found a nest. I managed to rescue the poor thing from the mouth of Sookie. I found somewhere out of the puppies' reach and I made a quick makeshift nest while I went to deal with the dogs. I hadn't thought about there being more.

There were more. Six more to be exact. Each time I rescued one, there was another waiting to be hunted by the puppies. I don't think they actually meant to kill them. Only one baby was bleeding and it was clear that it wasn't going to make it. The others were just carried gently in the puppies mouths as they showed each other their prize. I managed to rescue six of the seven.

I made their makeshift burrow cosy but I had a dreaded feeling they weren't going to make it. I made my brother, when he visited, come and look with me a few hours later. Miraculously, they were all alive.

In the end, my sister decided she would try to take them home and feed them with a dropper in hopes that they lived. However, I did some reading on the internet and discovered that while the intentions to save them were good, it was very unlikely, given their really young age, that they'd make it more than a day.

We decided to try to relocate them to a spot close to their old warren but out of the reach of the puppies. The best hope was that their mother would find them and adapt to the new location. The internet said that the scent of humans wouldn't bother them and the best hope to keep them alive was for their mother to keep taking care of them.

As of this afternoon, they were still alive. There were small signs that, perhaps, the mother came back last night. I'm hoping she's found them and will be ok with their new home. They were so tiny.

I was mad at the puppies for a while. It was hard seeing them hunt such tiny creatures. I know that's what they do; it's the dachshund nature. Yet it was still difficult to carry those tiny, pathetic, newborn creatures in the palm of my hand and not know if they would make it.

I'm hoping that they do. My sister is going to check on them. I'm hoping for the best.

Today, fortunately, the only puppy problems I had was Rory discovering the frogs in my parent's pond and trying to jump in the pond after them. She got her tummy wet but, fortunately, refrained from diving all the way in.

All in all, the weekend was not nearly the relaxing retreat I had in mind. Still, I got a lot of writing done, I rescued some baby bunnies (I hope) and I got to have some good company. I'd say, overall, that wasn't a bad way to spend three days.

Although next time, I think I'd rather it remained bunny-free.

Happy Tuesday!

An Odd Dog Day

Today was a weird day. It began by me waking up rather early in the wee, wee hours of the morn' and having trouble getting back to sleep. Thereafter, when I finally did get back to sleep, I had the type of dreams that are not only perplexing, they're also exhausting because when you wake up, you feel like you were doing everything you were in the dream. In my case, it was outrunning a tornado which wasn't successful, by the way. You can't outrun a tornado, at least in a dream. Also, I suspect in reality.

Anyway, the morning at work was one of those where everyone is deadly silent and then suddenly one of the loudest people in the office starts to chit chat with someone outside in the hall. Normally, when there's been some noise, it's not as irritating but when it's been virtually silent with only the sound of keyboards being tapped or mouses (mice?) being clicked, it's rather grating.

It was also a day in which our company president, in one of his more jovial moods, decided to try to entice everyone in our area to join him in planning a skydiving excursion. I used to think skydiving would be fun. These days, my common sense kicks in and duct-tapes the mouth of fun so that it can't speak up. I wouldn't say I'd never do it. It's more that if I do plan on jumping out of a plane, I'd rather prefer it wasn't in the company of, say, our president and my coworkers. Also, I'd rather jump somewhere fun like, say, Hawaii.

I turned down the invitation to join him for lunch to plan the skydive. So did 95% of the people in our area. The other two were just there for the lunch, I'm sure of it.

By the time I did leave for lunch, I was rather looking forward to the comfort and cuddles of the puppies.

Well, it turned out that even that wasn't such an easy thing today. I let them out and I follow, intending to check to see if I have any more zucchini's starting to grow. I hear a strange, high pitched squealing. I turn to look at Rory and I notice she has this wriggling, squirmy, furry grey creature in her mouth and she's shaking it like she does her chew toys.

Horror sunk in as my brain caught up to my eyes and I realized she'd found a baby rabbit. I didn't even know there were any baby rabbits around- I've only ever seen the grown ones. I sprang into action and forced her to drop it. The bunny stupidly did not break for freedom but, rather, headed to the zucchini patch. The dachshunds followed.

No matter how much I tried to shoo them away from the petrified creature, Sookie and Rory were too fast. Sookie was triumphant. This time it was she who had the bunny and was shaking it like a chew toy. The bunny squealed, I shrieked, in anger, fear and just plain shock. I got Sookie to drop it long enough for me to see that the bunny was now injured; its leg was gashed and it was, as the bunnies of Watership Down, might say, tharn. I didn't think. Instead, I swooped in and grabbed it by the scruff of its little neck before Sookie could try again. I paused for a minute, trying to figure out the safest place to release it. I opted for dropping it gently over the fence into Possibly-Joe the plumber's garden. He's the only one around us without any dogs.

The bunny froze. I had a minor meltdown. I might joke about killing bunnies and squirrels and such but, seriously, I'm a huge softy. I can't see an animal hurt. It just upsets me. So I did the sensible thing; I called my dad.

My father is very rational. This is why he's good in situations like this. First of all, he thought the bunny might be hurt so badly it was dying. He told me to kill it. This elicited another wave of horror. I could not kill a bunny. Not a baby one, at least. When I told him the bunny appeared to be moving, he told me to watch it.

Well, the daft creature was only trying to hop back into our garden, wasn't it? Injured leg and all! Sookie and Rory were going balistic, trying to get at it. They had lost all sense of puppyness and were suddenly dedicated, devoted hunters.

I finally managed to scoop up each dog and shut them inside for a while so I could give the bunny a chance to get away.

In the end, I think it did get away but you better believe I'm keeping an eye on Sookie and Rory.

I think the worst part of the whole ordeal is that while I know that my dogs are, well, dogs, I tend to commit the bad flaw that the real Dog Whisperer would chastise- I tend to assign them human characteristics and forget that they're really just dogs. So, when I saw them with the bunny in their mouths, I was more horrified than I ought to have been. My sweet girls who never get meaner than to give me a playful nip when they're scrapping with each other and that's never vicious, more that I'm in the way....here they were, acting like predators.

I was reviled. I was angry with them. How could they be so cruel?

Then I began to think about it a little more logically which was much easier when the bunny had limped away. Dachshunds were bred to hunt small creatures such as rabbits and moles. It's their nature to hunt that which they can catch. This is why Sookie will spend hours stalking and capturing cicadas in the grass, flattening them with her paw, just watching. She's a hunter. Rory, too, will stalk birds, trying to creep up and then getting sulky when they fly away and she doesn't catch them.

Even though, to me, they had hunted an innocent baby rabbit, to them, they had captured a prize. They didn't know it was wrong to do that. It's just what they do. It's in their nature. You can't stop the natural order of things. Just like there is larger prey that would happily capture my puppies- I'm thinking of a rather large mountain lion because that's safe for me to imagine since there aren't any mountains and, thus, mountain lions around here- my puppies hunted that which they could.

It took a while but afterwards, I felt bad for being so angry with them. If I just shifted my perception, I realized that a few centuries ago, they would have only been doing the job that their humans expected. Just because we humans have evolved into big softies who often shudder at the thought of hunting 'innocent creatures', doesn't mean that the dachshund has. In actual fact, I should really have rewarded them for their first 'kill' even though, I hope, they didn't actually killed.

By the time I went back to work, I felt slightly traumatized but better about it. I wasn't angry with them anymore- just a little sad that I have two dogs rather than two cute little teddy-bears who happen to look like dogs.

The rest of the day was only slightly odd. Aside from being rather frustrated at a couple of coworkers, things were pretty much ok. I also learned that my good friend, Ms. P. from Texas, had her own dog trauma today as one of her dogs captured and killed a neighbour's chicken.

It seemed to be an odd-dog day all around.

In the end, I decided after talking to some coworkers and learning that they all had dog vs. baby bunny stories, it wasn't quite so awful. I felt even worse for being angry at my girls so I stopped at Pet Smart on the way home and got them a squeaky monkey to play with. It's about the same size as the baby bunny. I'm hoping it will entice them to play with that rather than hunt the bunny but I'm pretty sure it won't. They are what they are, bunny hunters and all.

And just like with kids, even when they do bad things, you can't help but love them.

Happy Thursday!

I stopped at Pet Smart on the way home