Category Archives: Dogs

Dogs

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It’s mostly quiet on the dog front, except for the mock growls when Sam and Zeke want to play, which is every time I take the dogs out.

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Lucy doesn’t join in their doggie games. She just tries to keep out of their way.

It’s like this from early in the morning. Sam usually wakes up before us and comes into the bedroom to see whether we’re up. We can hear his nails clicking on the floor. Then I see his nose at the edge of the mattress. I usually reach over to scratch his ears a little bit.

Zeke comes in after we get up; he likes to sleep late, just like us. And then Sam starts chewing on Zeke’s cheek. They will continue a little mini-play-fight until I break it up.

I keep them apart on our walks until we reach the turnaround. Then I let them go at it for a while. The longer they play, the rougher and more excited they get. It’s usually Sam diving in to nip at Zeke, but occasionally Zeke runs after him with his jaws wide and teeth bared. I would not like to see that coming at me.

I have mentioned before that I think a dog’s world is different from ours. They have the additional dimension provided by a sense of smell much more sensitive than ours. It’s a minor struggle to keep them moving on our walk when they really want to stop and smell the roses, or whatever it is that attracts their attention.

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The only real dog news is that Lucy scared us with an eye problem Tuesday. Right after lunch Leah noticed that one of Lucy’s eyes was cloudy.

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It was odd because we were almost certain it was not that way Monday. I was pretty sure it wasn’t that way earlier on Tuesday. I took her to the vet Tuesday afternoon. The vet diagnosed it as an eye irritation, either from sticking something into her eye or possibly from dust, pollen or some other foreign object. She said two weeks of multiple daily applications of an eye ointment should do the trick.

Not rolling downhill

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I came across this on my Friday morning dog walk down the mountain.

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It’s a dung beetle, deltochilum gibbosum, the humpback dung beetle, if my identification is correct. I might have noticed the beetle by itself, but what caught my attention from a distance was a moving ball of what appears to be dog poop. It’s possible, in fact probable, that I know the source. The ball was probably slightly more than an inch in diameter.

The beetle had made it about a quarter of the way across Fouche Gap Road. I usually help living things cross the road (turtles, crawfish, snakes), but in this case I felt I just had to let the beetle take its chances. I didn’t see any sign of it when we came back up the mountain, so maybe it was lucky.

I had never seen a dung beetle at work before this, although Walter Reeves, a gardening expert in Georgia, says they are probably in back yards here in Georgia. This link leads to a question that someone submitted to Reeves about using dung beetles to clean up dog droppings in his yard.

I handle that problem by trying to make sure the dogs leave their droppings in the weeds in unpopulated areas along the road. That way they join the rest of the droppings left by the mammal population around here. I think it’s reasonably acceptable in the ecological sense, although I suggest that you watch your step if you walk in the weeds along Fouche Gap Road.

Zeke and Sam are good about not messing up their own territory. Lucy, on the other hand, doesn’t give a …

Big cat on the mountain?

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About two weeks ago Leah saw a shaggy dog on Fouche Gap Road. It was gone when I drove down to look, but it soon showed up at our house.

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I thought it looked like an Old English Sheepdog, and a friend who used to have one agreed. We contacted a local animal rescue group who said there should be no trouble getting it to the right place to find it a home. All I had to do was get the dog to a veterinary clinic down in town.

I needed to take our dogs for a walk before I could do that. Unfortunately, Shaggy followed us, and when Zeke saw him, he jerked the leash from my hand and chased the dog down Fouche Gap Road. I was able to call Zeke back (Zeke is getting old), but Shaggy trotted away down towards Texas Valley.

Once I got the dogs back home I drove down to see if I could find him (or her). He was at the bottom of the mountain, trotting purposefully into the valley. I gave him a dog biscuit, which he seemed to enjoy, but he showed no interest in coming back with me. So I left him, hoping he would come back or find a rescuer further down in the valley.

Last Wednesday, the dogs and I came upon a woman parked on Fouche Gap Road, trying to get Shaggy up into the back of her car. We talked at a distance dictated by Zeke’s barkful excitement. She was trying to rescue Shaggy. After some conversation and a call to the rescue group, we arranged for her to transport Shaggy to the vet’s office. She drove away, but came back a short time later. In the meantime, she had called a neighbor, who turned out to be the owner. The owner stopped us on a walk a few days later and told me that Shaggy liked to roam, so not to worry about “rescuing” him.

But wait. What does this have to do with a big cat? Well, as the woman who rescued Shaggy and I were talking, another car stopped. After the rescuer left, the driver pulled over and showed me a picture he said a county police officer texted him, saying that he took it on Fouche Gap.

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It’s a mountain lion.

Early in July there were several reports of mountain lion sightings in the area around Layfayette, which is a little north of us. Despite the fact that the reports came from what a local newspaper called reliable sources, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources (DNE) remains skeptical. According to the DNR, there have been only three credible lion sightings in Georgia in the last 25 years, all related to the Florida panther. (The “mountain lion” is known in the East by several names, including panther, catamount, puma and painter.) The last sighting was in 2008, by a hunter who illegally shot the cat.

The recent cat reports included some people who claimed to have been awakened by a sound like a woman screaming, which some people think is what a mountain lion sounds like. The DNR says that mountain lions make little noise in the woods and when they do, it’s more like a person whistling or a bird chirping. The DNR conveniently included a link to mountain lion sounds in their statement on the local mountain lion sightings.

The DNR says that most sightings are mistaken identification of things like bobcats, which we definitely have here, or dogs, domestic cats or even bears, which we also have here.

But the picture! It sure looks like Fouche Gap Road. Or does it?

I was thrilled and only a little disturbed by the possibility that we had a mountain lion in the neighborhood, but I was a little skeptical, too. When I looked more carefully at the image, I realized that there were several problems with it. For one, the picture was taken from the driver’s side window of a vehicle that was completely off the downhill side of the road. There are only three (four if you stretch it) places on Fouche Gap Road where you can pull off the road on the uphill side, and this one doesn’t look like any of them. The second problem is that the outside rearview mirror doesn’t look like those on cars the county police use. It could, of course, have been taken in an officer’s personal car (actually, a pickup truck).

When the dogs and I got back home, I called the DNR and asked if they had any reports of mountain lion sightings in the Fouche Gap area. They said no, and wanted me to send them the picture, which I did.

Later when Leah and I went down to Los Portales for our usual Wednesday huevos rancheros, I showed the picture to a county officer who happened to be eating lunch there. He was not familiar with it.

During lunch I got an email from the local DNR game management office. One of their people had been emailed an image that looked very much like the one I had.

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So, it was a hoax. Not a big surprise. I’m only slightly disappointed, because I didn’t really expect it to be true. I’m also not surprised that the man who originally showed it to me believed it to be true. Just about everyone ends up believing what they want to believe, so almost no one analyzes things like this critically. That’s what makes these internet hoaxes so effective.

As I emailed back to the DNR, I won’t worry about checking over my shoulder for a mountain lion as I walk the dogs.

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However, I will keep an eye out for Bigfoot.

 

Ticks for the memories

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It’s tick season in Georgia. We give the dogs and cats flea and tick treatments, but they still get them. Here’s one on Zeke’s inner leg. I think this is an American dog tick, which is common in the eastern US and in much of California.

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This one is sleeping in the septic tank right now.

I have picked several off Zeke in the last month or so and two or three off myself. Leah has found some on herself, too. The flea and tick treatment is supposed to kill them after they bite, but so far I have found only live ticks. One night a few weeks ago I felt a little tickle on my back after I went to bed. I jumped up (memories of lying on a scorpion) and threw the covers back, but I didn’t see anything. I was pretty sure it was a tick, though. I went back to bed and waited. After a few minutes I felt a tickle (a tickle is not necessarily a small tick, although in this case it was) again, and this time I grabbed it.

When I was a graduate student in Atlanta I lived near Northside Drive, which at some points in the city is highway 41 (rolling down which I was not born in the back seat of a Greyhound bus). Almost every afternoon when I came home from school, I would take my dog Jesse a couple of blocks away to a vacant, weed-covered area where she chased rabbits and imaginary creatures for about an hour. In the summer, when we came back home I would fill a glass with hot water with a little detergent, and we would sit in the driveway while I picked ticks off of her. I would put them into the water, where they would sink slowly to the bottom of the glass and die. Detergent is a surfactant, or wetting agent, which prevents the ticks from floating on the surface.

From what I have read, this is not supposed to be a particularly bad tick season, but one tick is too many.

Nail and tail

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Friday evening I walked the dogs up to the new house to make sure the air conditioning was working (it was). On the way back down the drive, Zeke saw a fox cross Lavender Trail. He lunged, and I slipped on the loose gravel. Rather than fall, I let him go, so he tore off across the road and into the woods, dragging his orange leash behind.

As usual, he stayed gone for a while. I found him an hour or so later laid out on his side on our neighbor’s grass. When I leaned down to pet him, I noticed that the dewclaw on his left leg looked odd. I checked closer; it was twisted 180 degrees from normal.

I grabbed this blurred shot of his claw Saturday morning before I took him to the vet.

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The claw is supposed to curl backwards, towards his belly. It’s now curved forwards, towards his chin. I was afraid he had wrenched the dewclaw completely around.

The vet we use now doesn’t make appointments, so I just took him in as close to 8 am as I could manage. The waiting area was full. As we stood there, the nail came off his thumb, leaving a little bloody stub of quick. So his dewclaw was not dislocated; he had just torn the nail away from the quick. You can actually see the quick in the photo above if you know what to look for. I shudder to think of how that would feel to a human.

The vet was not too concerned. She stanched the slow dripping of blood and wrapped his foot. The bandage can come off Sunday.

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The dewclaw is high enough on Zeke’s leg that it doesn’t actually touch the ground when he walks, but he’s still limping. That may be partly because of how tightly the bandage is wrapped around his toes. We’re giving him pain medication. We’re sure it’s painful. He did almost the same thing a few months ago. Unfortunatley, I don’t think he will learn anything from this.

He has been acting just slightly lethargic and needy lately. He plays fairly actively with Sam, although he usually spends a significant amount of play time lying on his back pushing Sam around with his legs. A pet owner waiting with us at the vet’s asked if Zeke had a few years on him. He does – we’ve had him for 10 years and he was at least a year old when we got him. I was a little surprised that his age was that obvious. It doesn’t seem that way to us. I suppose part of Zeke’s somewhat different behavior could be at least partly due to age.

And now, a Sylvester report. I told the vet about Sylvester’s drooping tail. She said it might be just a sprain (a sprained tail?). She said to give it a month, and if it doesn’t get better to bring him in.

The worst-case scenario is a dead tail. In that case, she might have to amputate. We have been considering renaming him if that happens. My suggestion is Bobtail Catthwait.