Stinkers….

You can see that they shaved his bum to do surgery on his leg, and look at how huge that cast is!

Completely unrelated to the previous post, but since I posted a picture of the dog I thought I’d give a puppy update. Back in January I posted some pictures of some really cute puppies (sorry I don’t have my old blog quite in shape to link to it). They’ve grown a lot since then and some names have stuck. I call them both “stinker” 😉 Because puppies really are… they’re always looking for mischief and wreaking havoc. But you can’t hate them because they’re just so cute. Anyways, their real names are Indy (the yellow lab) and Bo (or Bobo as he’s generally called). If you ask Steven, Bo’s full name is “Boris Maximus”, but I doubt Boris or Max or Maximus will ever stick because we’ve just called him Bo and Bobo for the last 4 months.

Anyways, I wanted to post these pictures back when they were taken, but obviously I didn’t have my blog up and running. Being the stinker that he is, Bo think’s he owns the joint and hops all over the furniture. One day early in April his leg slipped between the arm rest and the seat of a reclining chair as he tried to jump off of it and he started yapping like crazy. Of course Indy’s response to this was “attack Bo!”, so we had to shut Indy up in another room. Bo’s reaction was kinda scary– you could tell something was wrong with his leg, though from what I’d seen I didn’t think it could be that bad. I figured maybe he’d dislocated it or something. Well we took him to the vet and he had broken his leg.

He’s back to his old self now, but we had to keep his movement restriced for weeks, which meant most of the time he sat in his cage, since we couldn’t let him wander free. At the time I felt sorry for him– a young energetic puppy restricted to his cage all the time. But looking back, I bet it was not just unhappy but perhaps psychologically damaging.

There’s a stark contrast between Indy’s personality and Bo’s. Indy, though not needy, is lovable and he’ll snuggle up to anyone (he sometimes thinks he’s a lap dog though he’s far too big.) He’s generally a happy dog.

Bo, on the other hand, acts really paranoid and distrusting. I don’t think he understood why he was relegated to his cage all the time. For example, on Sunday we made a demonstration of his personality. A few members of the family were sitting in the living room at home, Mom in her usual spot, me across the room, and Dan on the couch between us. I tried calling Bo to me, in response to which he just retreated to Mom’s side. Dan tried calling to him as well, in response to which Bo gave us a more worried look and pressed up against Mom’s leg and put his paw on her ottoman. You’d have thought we were threatening him, the way he reacted. It makes me sad to think that he’s messed up like that.

I tried to build up a little trust after that, but then I’d snap at him for being a stinker (we can give Indy and Bo identical chew treats, and Bo will just drop his and try to take Indy’s from him. Without fail. Bo wants whatever Indy has… maybe that’s just a puppy thing. Of course, Gus isn’t a puppy but he’ll still try to drag their toys away when they’re not looking and bury them somewhere, hehehe. He’s just a senile old geezer.)

In any case, Bo has issues like I’ve never seen in a dog. Fortunately he does trust Mom and perhaps Kato… doesn’t change the fact that he’s a stinker though 😉