Animal Insting

I was going to write about some cute little African foxes today, but Mom said that since it is Valentine's Day, I should write about something with Love in it.  So then I thought I would write an entry to say how much I love food, but I've already done that before.  So I thought some more, and I decided I could write about my brothers.  And luckily, the weather was really nice yesterday, so Mom took a bunch of new photos for me to use.

Anyway, I guess I should start by saying that I'm not even sure what "love" means, if you are talking about a bunch of dogs.  If it means that we snuggle up together at night, then we probably don't love each other, because we're not very snuggly.  Gabe and I use to snuggle, but he is gone now.  So sometimes I try to snuggle with Nicky, and that sort of works out okay.  At least he doesn't growl at me or anything.  The main problem is that he just takes up so much space on the dog bed that there's not much room left for me.

So maybe you could say that dogs love each other if they don't fight much.  Sometimes my brothers and I have our little squabbles, but Mom says they are mostly "sibling rivalry."  Like for instance, if one dog pukes, and all the other dogs want to eat the puke, some of us might get bitten.  And by "some of us," I mean ME!  Mom says I should learn to stay away from Barry and Nicky when they are both trying to eat something yummy off the floor, but I just can't make myself do that because I really, really want to get my share of it, too.


Nicky had to go see Dr. Patricia on Friday because he did this weird snorting thing in the middle of the night.  See, what happened was that he started making funny noises, and then he rushed downstairs, and all of us dogs ran downstairs after him because we could hear him puking.  But Mom didn't want to get out of bed because it was like 3:30 in the morning, and she was all snuggled up in bed with Chloe, the cat, and anyway, Mom had already got up once at 1:30 to let the dogs go outside and potty.  Except that I didn't go outside at 1:30 because I didn't need to pee then.

So after Nicky puked at 3:30, Mom finally got out of bed and went downstairs to see what was going on, and there was not much puke left because we had cleaned it all up really nicely.  But Mom did find some spots on the floor that looked a little like thinned-out blood, and also she found a little puke left, so that's how she knew that Nicky had even done it, because mostly he was just doing that snorting thing.

Well, we all went back to bed finally, and Nicky was still snorting for a while, so we think maybe he got some puke up his nose or something like that.  And then Mom was petting Barry, and he yelped when she touched his ear, and when she looked at it, she found out he had a little chunk of his ear missing, and there was dried blood on it.  So she didn't know how that happened, but she thought maybe it happened when we were all fence-fighting with Henry earlier in the evening, and maybe Nicky bit Barry on the ear.  And if you look at Barry's left ear in this photo, you can see that there is a little piece of it missing.


One thing that Nicky does that drives Mom nuts is he goes out in the yard to hunt squirrels, and then he won't come back inside again, no matter how many times Mom calls him and shakes the treat bag.  And then if she goes outside to get him he runs away from her in a big circle around the edge of the yard.  One day when it was only 9 degrees outside, Nicky stayed out in the snow for 45 minutes, looking up in the trees for squirrels.  But finally his feet got cold, and he came in the house.

And on Saturday, when it was warmer, like in the 20s, Nicky stayed out for two whole hours.  And the only way Mom finally got him to come in was by going out and picking up poop in the yard until he came over to her, and she gave him treats and talked him into coming inside.

Also Nicky is a bad boy when Mom goes away, and he pees in the living room, which Mom does not like him to do.  We think he does this because of separation anxiety, even though we have all told him that he is not alone because the rest of us dogs are there, and also that Mom will come home again.


So that's kind of how things are in our little doggy family.  We all like howling together, and that is a good way for a dog pack to bond.  Which probably means that we love each other, or at least that we all feel like we are part of the same family.

Oh, and we all love our mom, so I guess that's the most important thing of all.  Well, I mean except for our love of dog food!