My Family of Dogs

I have been on the computer for the last 16 years, coinciding with how long I’ve had dogs as children.
The dogs don’t understand why Mummy stares at a screen and fiddles with the keyboards for several hours a day.
From time to time, they get spooked when sounds come from the computer where mummy is at.
Especially when they are napping.

I used to spend 12-16 hours a day on the computer, writing for and maintaining my website until it became clear to me my life was unbalanced.
I was sharing everything I learned and was learning and I was writing about my experience with dogs.
At some point I realized I was not spending enough time living the life with the dogs.
So I quit the website after 8 years and started to blog thinking a blog required less time to maintain.
Then I found if I wanted to spend more time with the dogs, even blogging was time consuming so I had to keep the blogging to an absolute minimum.
Hence you see a minimum number of postings here spread out over several years.

I now run the DogsRpeople2 (DRP2) Face Book community page.
I justify the time I spend there by telling myself it’s for a worthwhile cause.
My dogs weave in and out of my legs and ask for attention when I am on the computer.
Sometimes they give me a woeful look as if to question why I prefer the company of the computer to them.
Oftentimes, my sessions on DRP2 are interrupted in the middle of a comment when my dogs need me.
This is not easy for me as I realize dogs have a short life span and every moment with them counts.

Before Charity passed on September 5th this year, he would create tension whenever he went under the pc table and get entangled with the wires.
I would be cross with him and he would get an earful from me.
Now that he has passed, of course, as it is always the case, I wish I had spent less time on the computer and more time with him.

Charity was an extra special case.
My foster dad thought it was a good idea to match the first “Sharpei”, the Pit Bull-Sharpei cross with a pure bred Boxer and Charity was the result of that breeding.
(This Sharpei 1 is not to be confused with the present Sharpei you see in the profile picture of the DRP2 page. That is Sharpei 2.)

Charity’s Boxer mom had a litter of 10.
The Boxer’s owner took 6 of the pups and we took 4.
In those days we were new to the dog realities and we thought we could easily find good homes for the extra puppies.
Not so.
We found out there are very few real animal/dog lovers in our country.
Most of the people here will put up with a dog or two only for practical reasons.
If the dogs are pure breeds/pedigrees, they would be valued as status symbols and would be given better care than if they are mongrels.
Most dogs are fed once a day and ignored the rest of the time in exchange for guard duty.
When they are cute puppies, the family would have them around as playthings for their small children and when the dogs become adults, they would be neglected and encouraged to wander off on their own.
Some allow the dogs to come and go as they please and others lock their gates so the dogs would not be allowed in, hence they become street dogs, subjected to the dangers of the streets.

When our family realized the reality of the situation here in our country, we had to assume the responsibility of our poor decision to “create” the puppies in the first place.
We already had Boy, Plenty, Lady and Sharpei.
Now we had to take care of Charity, Harmony, Energy and Tiger.
All four were taken from their nursing mother when their eyes were still closed because she had problems nursing all 10.
So we bottle fed them, burped them, and spoon fed them human baby food until they were able to feed on their own.
Tiger was crushed earlier on when he was competing for his mother’s milk and he didn’t make it to the next phase.

So the situation at our house at the time was like this.
My foster dad (wrongly) believed Plenty and Lady were too young to be spayed so Boy and Sharpei created four “accident” puppies with Plenty.
So there was Boy, Plenty, Lady, Sharpei, Plenty’s 4 pups and Sharpei’s 4 pups.
We gave away Plenty’s puppies but we needed more time with Sharpei’s 3 surviving pups.
When they turned one year old, the situation became untenable.

Charity was fostered by a neighbor in exchange for guard duty and he remained there until he was 4 years old.
He was favored over Harmony and Energy because he didn’t bite shoes and stuff.
Mony and Energy lived with friends until Dad went dog crazy and started to rescue dogs and bringing them to friends’ houses and renting extra houses to shelter the rescues.
At this point, my dad became by definition, a hoarder.

When Sharpei died at 5 years plus from heart failure, a space was created and we brought Charity home as he was getting depressed living the life of a guard dog.
Charity was 4 years old.
Life is not what it should be, could be, for a dog when your family has too many dogs to care for.
Up until just over a year ago, Charity had to compete for attention with Boy, Plenty, Lady, Sharpei 1, Sharpei 2, Mony, Energy and the other rescues.

When Boy and Plenty died last year at 14 and a half years old, Charity was already 13 years old.
Having outlived most of the dogs in our care for the past 16 years, Charity had only to compete with Sharpei 2 and Whitey for our love and attention until Bubu joined the family.
I tried to give Charity the love and attention he craved for the past year and a half.
It was not easy as I was allergic to his fur.
Every time I hugged him or when he brushed himself against my legs, I would break out in hives and rashes.
When the household dust got to me, I would be in a sneezing spasm and would have to take antihistamines that would make me drowsy.
The doctor said I could technically die from an anaphylactic shock.
I didn’t care.
I wasn’t afraid to die from giving Charity or the other dogs the love they craved for.

I have many regrets in life.
Yet, if I could live my life all over again, I would still choose to love the dogs that have been mine to love.
But I would do everything better since I now know better.
I desperately needed to be a dog whisperer but I was not.
As Caesar Milan says, a dog lover is not necessarily a dog whisperer.
Hence most of the dogs had to be kept away from each other or they would fight and injure themselves.
This created a lot of tension, conflicts and unhappiness.

I regret I couldn’t get a wheelchair for Plenty, Boy and Charity in time to serve them.
Had they been given the gift of a wheelchair when their old legs could not support them for daily purpose, I’m sure they would have had more quality time with us.

Now I’m waiting for the prototype to be delivered to me.
The craftsman friend, who is a kind dog lover and animal advocate as well, is working on it and the only part he now needs to complete the prototype is an axle for the wheels.
When the prototype is completed, I will share it with everyone on the DRP2 page.
It will cost less than US$30.00 to make.
The ones currently for sale on the internet cost upward of US$250.00 plus shipping.
If I have to pay US$8.00 shipping for a cd, I shudder to think what the shipping cost would be for a wheelchair?
Anyone and everyone will have access to the specifications when we are ready to share it on the internet.
I believe my friend will be able to see this project through as we both share this desire to alleviate the suffering of senior and handicapped dogs as well as their care-takers.

Animal lovers and compassionate people in general tend to be highly emotional.
Indeed, being emotional is the primary prerequisite of a rescuer/do gooder.
When the news is bad enough, we either get depressed or we get angry.
Depression causes us to feel fatigued and lethargic.
Anger motivates us to ACT.
Activists act out of anger.
If they don’t do something positive and proactive with their emotions, the anger will consume them and they will find themselves doing something negative and counter-productive.
Activists act out of despair believing, feeling, knowing, living the truism that action is the antidote to despair.

I've always loved dogs.
From the time of my childhood when my mother would let me keep a puppy until it was about a year old and then give the dog away and break my heart.
My mother did this to me about three times.

The first dog I had was from a litter of pups whose mama bit me when I went to play at my friends' house.
The mama dog that bit me was a pure bred Alsatian.
The owner of the dog took me to the hospital for stitches and felt sorry and gifted me with Ringo.
I called him Ringo after the Beatles drummer, Ringo Starr.
He was a cross breed and had a mop of a hair do.
Ringo and I had each other until he was about one year old and my mom gave him to a friend who lived in a bungalow, telling me Ringo was better off there where he could be properly housed.
I was about 6 years old, and I would walk a mile a day to catch a glimpse of Ringo Boy in his bungalow house.
In those days, children actually survived such excursions!
I saw Ringo leashed to his dog kennel, sitting all very proper and well behaved like he had been trained.
Even at that age, I knew I should not call out to him to confuse him.
I understood he now had a new home, a new family, a new life and he should be left to get on with it.

My birth family didn't have a fenced in house and our dogs would be allowed to come and go until it got to be too much trouble and then it was adios.
One time when I was about 7 or 8, one of the dogs somehow managed to locate me at the bus stop opposite my grade school.
As the bus conductor wouldn't let me into the bus with the dog, I didn't board any buses until it was later in the afternoon when my mom was frantic with worry and came looking for me and found me at the bus stop with my dog.
She called the new owner, they came in a car to fetch Jolly Boy away and my mom and I took a bus home.

Some would say my mom was insensitive and as a child, I did suffer from her ability to disconnect herself from my emotions.
But as an adult, I came to understand my mom was what she was as a result of her own upbringing and experience as an adult.
People who were not shown love as children have a hard time connecting with others emotionally.
They become emotionally distant.
Both my birth parents were like that.

In my adult years, I was never settled long enough in one place to have dogs.
Then about 16 years ago, when I planned to "settle down", I rescued 3 puppies from a neighborhood secondary forest and resolved to make up for my childhood loss.
These were MY pups and they were mine to love and care for till death do us part.
One of them (Lady) died 8 years ago and the other two (Boy and Plenty) died last year at a ripe 14 plus years.

Like my mom before me and her mom before her, I grew up emotionally disconnected.
It didn't help that my adult relationships were mostly with others who were equally emotionally disconnected.
Till today, (I am about 50), I find it easier to connect emotionally with animals than with humans.