Animal Insting

Piper said I should be the one to write about The Incident, since I was the most directly affected, and I was happy to agree to tell this horrifically compelling story.  The events I am going to describe for you happened on December 30, 2008.  Mom calls what happened "The Incident," but I call it "The Vicious Attack of a Poor, Innocent Basenji by Two Mean and Nasty Greyhounds."

But before I tell you about the attack itself, I have to give you a little background.  A greyhound, as you probably know, is a tall, skinny dog with a very pointy nose.  Greyhounds can run really fast, but only for short distances.  People like to race greyhounds and make bets to see who has the fastest dog.  This might be an okay thing to do except that the racing greyhounds are not always treated very well, and if they don't run fast, they are "disposed of."  This means that they are killed, even if they are still very young.  For this reason, greyhounds that are retired from racing need to be rescued and put into homes where somebody will love them even if they don't run so fast.

At Pooches' Paradise, the doggy daycare place, there are a bunch of these rescued greyhounds.  They go there to live until they have been spayed or neutered and have got their shots and their teeth cleaned and stuff like that.  Then they go live in foster homes until they get adopted.  So anyway, Mom started helping out with the greyhounds by walking them once a week.  She really liked the greyhounds, and she wanted to adopt one to come live with us, but she couldn't do that because we already have our Legal Limit of Dogs.

So Mom got this brilliant idea that maybe we could foster a greyhound.  She asked Aunt Cher, who's in charge of the rescue group, and then some ladies came to our house to see if it was a good place for a greyhound.  One of the ladies brought an actual greyhound with her, and I growled at it some, which is what I always do when there are strange dogs around.  Then Barry did his defending-the-house thing, and he bit one of the ladies on the hand, but he was fine with the greyhound.  In spite of all this, we got approved to be a foster family.

The first greyhound we had was named Dali, like the artist Salvadore Dali, who painted really weird things like melting clocks.  But Dali the dog was not weird.  He was just really, really tall, and he had some problems with diarrhea, so he had to go to the vet a lot.  Also he had "happy tail," which happens when you wag your tail so hard that you hit it on stuff and make it bleed.  Dali finally had to have the end of his tail cut off because it never would heal up.

Anyway, all of us dogs got along fine.  Dali let Barry be the alpha dog and me be the beta dog and there were no problems.  Except with Dali's diarrhea and his tail.  And then after three months, Dali got adopted, and Mom brought home another foster dog named Eden.

Eden was a very nice girl greyhound, and we all got along fine with her, too.  Eden did not have "happy tail," but she kept licking her leg and making sore places, so Mom got really good at bandaging dog legs.  We had Eden here for two months, and then she also got adopted.

Then what happened was that Mom brought home TWO greyhounds to foster.  Their names were Angela and Lear.  These two greyhounds had been living together for several years, and they had two dads, and then both their dads got sick and died, just a few months apart.  So the rescue people thought that Angela and Lear should stay together.  And that's why Mom brought both of them to our house.  Angela is the white one with brown spots, and Lear is the brindle one.

Well, we had these two foster dogs for about a month, and everyone got along, more or less.  But Angela was kind of bossy, and she got into a squabble with Barry, and Mom thought it meant that Angela was trying to be the alpha dog.  Which Mom also thought would be okay if we could all work out a new pack order without a lot of bloodshed.  And about the same time, Lear and I had a little "discussion" about some issues while we were out in the yard fence-fighting with Henry.  In fact, that "discussion" happened on the very morning of The Incident.

So on that morning, we were following our regular schedule, and so Mom took me and Piper out for a walk.  Then when we came back to the house and went in the front door, I growled at Lear and Angela, and then all of a sudden, everybody was attacking me.  I don't even know who started it.  I just know that we were in a terrible fight, and that the greyhounds were biting me on my neck and back, and even Barry joined in and started biting me!  Meanwhile, Mom was screaming at Lear and Angela to let go of me, and she was spraying us with Direct Stop, and she was kicking them, but they weren't letting go.  And Piper was screaming because she was trying to get away from the fight, but she couldn't because she was still attached to the double lead that Mom used to take us walking.

I'm not sure how long it lasted, but it seemed like a couple of hours.  And it hurt me a whole bunch, and I thought I was going to die, and Mom thought so, too.  Then after a while, I just gave up and stopped fighting and went kind of limp.  That's when Lear and Angela finally let go of me.  I was just lying around on the floor, kind of stunned, and Mom thought she would take my collar off, which was a bad idea because when she tried to do that, I bit her on the hand.

After that, I got up and managed to stagger up the stairs.  Mom could see that I didn't really need any stitches for my bite wounds, but something was all wrong with my insides, especially near my back legs.  There was a big bag of skin hanging down, all full of blood or something, and it was hard to walk, and it hurt a whole bunch.  Mom called Dr. Patricia's office, but Dr. Patricia was in the middle of doing surgery, so she couldn't stop doing that in order to take care of me.  She told Mom to take me to the emergency vet hospital, which Mom knew would be Very Expensive.

But Mom picked me up in a blanket and put me in the car and we drove over to Mission MedVet, which is what the clinic is called.  And Mom was crying all the way there because she thought I was dying, which it seemed to me like maybe I was, too.  But when we got there, the doctor examined me (after first putting a muzzle on me!) and said I would be okay, but I needed some Expensive Surgery to fix my muscles inside, which got all torn loose by the mean, nasty greyhounds.

So Mom left me there to have surgery, and she went and told Aunt Cher what had happened, and then she took Lear back to Pooches' Paradise, and she took Angela to the greyhound vet's office because Angela got her ear bitten in the fight.  I was happy to learn that at least I got a little bit of revenge!  But Mom was sad that we couldn't keep the greyhounds at our house any longer, because she really liked them, for some reason, especially Lear.

I had to stay at the clinic overnight, and Mom came to visit me there.  Then I finally got to go home on New Year's Eve, which made us all happy, except for having to pay the bill, which was about $3500.  I had to stay in a crate for a while until I got more healed up.  I'm going to include some pictures of how I looked after my surgery.  They shaved my hair off in a bunch of places, so Mom started calling me "Patchwork Quilt Dog."


Oh, and everyone kept telling Mom that she should go to the doctor about her hand where I bit her, but she didn't want me to have to be quarantined by Animal Control, so she ended up calling a doctor who is the husband of one of her friends from the Humane Society, and he prescribed some antibiotics for her.

And so that's the long and dramatic story about "The Incident."  Now you can understand why I don't like greyhounds much.  Or any other dogs I don't know, because all such dogs are clearly dangerous and likely to kill you if they get the chance.  That's why I live by the rule that the best defense is a good offense!