Black and White Sundays

Keeping It Real

Bast is a charming creature. Most people who meet him remark on how beautiful he is, how sweet and gentle he acts in public, how calm and relaxed he seems most of the time. At least once a day, I get playful offers to take him off my hands or jokes about kidnapping him.

Yeah, he is pretty awesome.

Look at that happy oaf. You want him, right? Wrong.

But let me you the truth about Bastas. He is nasty. Most wolfdogs are, in one way or another, it seems. Corpses are perfume, turds are chew toys and/or snacks, and I cannot begin to tell you how hard it is to potty train them sometimes. Even meals can get pretty gnarly.

Barf.

Why does he always go for their brains first?

Mm, yeah, brains.

The thing about Bast's nastiness is it's always so unexpected. You'd think you can anticipate potential sources of gross, and you can usually, but never 100%.

When picking out a new house, one of my non-negotiable requirements was NO CARPET. I did the whole "raw feeding in a carpeted household" and not even a direct command from Jesus himself would make me repeat that.

I look at this and wonder about my life choices.

Not having carpets has simplified my life immeasurably. Messes that previously required hours of scrubbing and soaking are now swept into a neat pile and sucked up with my all-surface vacuum. Bast, of course, still finds ways to make more work for me, though.

Bast suffers from bad allergies that make his nose run a lot. Because he's basically a toddler, he just eats his own snot all day no matter how close an eye I try to keep on it - Moms, you know what I'm talking about. Anyway, his boogie snacks upset his stomach sometimes. No big deal, if he yaks on the floor, I just spritz some vinegar on it and clean it all up.

Except tonight.

Bast lay in the entryway, idly chewing off the bony ends of his chicken quarter, when he abruptly lurched to his feet. He stalked off across the hardwood, padded through the stone tile of the kitchen, trotted down into the painted concrete in the living room, popped up onto the couch beside me...

And barfed snot and raw chicken all across my thigh and down in between the couch cushions.

A whole house of smooth surfaces and he goes out of his way to ralph on me and the couch.

Bast is a charming creature.

Black and White Sundays

Bath Blues

I got several requests for more pictures, so this post is pretty image heavy. I could take and stare at pictures of Bast all day because I think he's an outrageously handsome dog, so here you go.


I don't really like to bathe my dogs a whole lot. For one, I'm lazy and it's a trial. Two, I don't like to dry their skin out with excessive washing. My older dog, Grendel, rarely needs to be washed. She's a clean little critter and can go months and months before she develops a dog funk.

You can imagine my dismay, then, when I got a wolfdog and learned all about the fun world of scent rolling. Now, lots of dogs scent roll, too - it's a pretty standard dog trope to roll on horrible things. With wolfdogs, it's almost compulsive. They all MUST roll on terrible, terrible things.

And they looked totally blissed out while they do it.

We hadn't had Bast for 2 months before his scent rolling behavior became outrageous. While I was overseas, my best friend kept Bast for me and took him for regular walks in a woody area near her house. Bast managed to find a rotted black pig corpse and scent roll in inside the cavernous remains of its chest, like some messed up Star Wars tribute. The smell took weeks to get out of his fur - when I came back from France several weeks later, it was still lingering around behind his ears.

So while I would love to not bathe Bast very often, he also likes to sleep in bed with me, and I'm not keen on sharing my linens with whatever cologne he found - Eau de Cat Turds doesn't really float my boat, you know?

His stankiness not withstanding, Bast also has flea and tick bite hypersensitivity, which requires us to be very proactive about making sure he doesn't get fleas or ticks. To help him out with this, he gets a regular flea bath every few weeks.

I used to have to bathe Bast in the tub, which was frankly exhausting for both of us. Bast's fur is very water-resistant, and there's only so much damage a pitcher can do.

Plus, he gets pissed.

Like, mega pissed.

I slept lightly that night.

.

And the indignity of being tortured for my amusement can be too much to bear.

I'm kind of a jackass.

Now, with a yard, I can hose him off outside, which is a lot easier but still comes with its own set of challenges. As you can probably guess from the murderous stares in the pictures above, Bast doesn't exactly like getting a bath and would rather avoid it. To keep him close by, I just go ahead and leash him and then just spray the hell out out of him while he paces around me, looking every bit a savage, soggy hellbeast.

He unsuccessfully tried the door.

Look how not-murderous he looks here! So proud.

Oops, back to vaguely menacing.

Michael Bay would be proud of my lens flair.

Almost done.

He prefers to do this when I'm right up close and soak me.

I always end these episodes fatigued and covered in wet dog hair, but at least he's clean for a few hours...

Birthday Boy!

Today is a very special day for us - Bastas turns two today!

We think, anyway. With a rescue, it's always sort of hard to know, and the guy who bred Bast isn't exactly a mark-your-calendars sort of guy (or a regularly-change-your-underwear sort of guy), but this is the day we celebrate it as, anyway.

Unfortunately, since I didn't get Bast until he was 9 months old, I don't have the wealth of puppy pics that I would like to have - that's another problem of getting a rescue dog. I do have a few that have been gathered by some of my friends involved with Bast's rescue, though.

Teeny tiny trouble.

Anyway, we try to celebrate his birthday by having special meals. Last year he got chicken feet, his very favorite treat:

And some liver, which he was less thrilled about: 

Here was the whole birthday array. I don't think Chef Ramsay will be knocking at my door anytime soon, but Bast liked it.

Anyway, this year we went with a heartier, meaty array of ground beef, chicken gizzards and sweetmeats, which I thought were beef cheeks but turns out is the thymus gland. The smell was unreal and Bast only wanted to play with it:

Om nom nom, meats.

And one last pic of the grody:

Happy, happy birthday, baby boy! I hope we have many more to come.

Black and White Sundays

Black and White Time

I'm going to experiment with trying smaller, newsreel type updates to help me get in the habit of posting more.

Here's a lovely picture of Bastas where I was playing with the shading. I'm crap at taking pictures and even worse at editing them, so I keep most of my edits to myself. This looked all right, though :)

Terrible Twos

Let's skip the part of this entry where I mourn my sporadic posting and give semi-empty promises to do better (although I do intend to do better...)

It's been a quiet summer here in Bastland. With secure containment, my life simplified immensely; I can now toss Bast outside for 20 minutes so I can run errands as I think of them like a normal person. This is a vast improvement over having to keep a list of things I need to do, drop him off at daycare, and then race around to get everything I need for that week done in one afternoon while he's properly supervised.

Although things have calmed down in the "unexpected chaos" department, that's not to say that Bast isn't still being Bast.With summer here, Bast's very bestest human friend is back to fostering kittens for the local Humane Society and Bast has been enjoying the role of doggy ambassador for socialization.

The kittens, as you can imagine, are less thrilled about this than Bast is, but it looks much better on their adoption papers if we can honestly say "Good With Dogs." Given that Bast loves cats, he's a perfect companion to help get the kittens ready for canine encounters before they're put up for adoption.

In a few weeks, Bast will be 2 years old. For those who aren't familiar with wolfdogs, around this age is the time that many wolfdogs find themselves being rehomed or dumped at rescues, if they're lucky. Others simply get turned out in the countryside, and despite many peoples' mistaken beliefs that wolfdogs are wild animals, they are not capable of fending for themselves in the wild and can easily starve. Sadly, I've seen examples of exactly that situation happening, and I'm sure those heavily involved in rescue have seen many more.

Behold the face of a natural hunter with his kill.

Anyway. Around 2 is when most wolfdogs will hit maturity. In the wild, pure wolves are born in the spring and are not sexually active by the time the first mating season comes around that winter. This is true of higher content wolfdogs as well, and usually trickles down in lesser amounts to lower content wolfdogs. As they move into their second year, the hormonal mojo starts flowing and they change from pups to adults.

When first getting Bastas and trying to absorb all of this information, I was told that around 2 years old, his behavior would start to change, At the time, I had no idea what these people were trying to say. What do you mean, his behavior will change? Is he going to turn on me? I got this impression from people that my dog was a character in a fairy tale with a horrible curse:

Once upon a time, in a far away desert, there lived lived a peaceful, friendly dog who loved to play with kittens and dig holes in the yard. Long long ago, a witch placed a powerful curse on all dogs of his line, that at the stroke of midnight on the eve of their second name day, they would be overcome by the blood of their ancestors and go totally apeshit and eat everyone.

OH MY GOD, HE'S EATING MANFLESH - Oh wait. That's a watermelon.

As can be expected, I was way off. No, Bast is not in danger of "turning on me." There's not some magical switch inside a wolfdog's head that makes them lose their minds and become a wild animal as soon as they hit 2, so if you were hoping with this story ending with me being eaten, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed.

Sorry.

What has happened is a gradual increase in the intensity of his behaviors. Minor behaviors that he had as a puppy have intensified - it's like someone found the knobs in his noggin that control his reactions to things and cranked them up a few notches.

It's hard to explain. He's always been a whimsical creature - if you've read through some of my other entries, you're probably familiar with his habit of spooking and disappearing in the blink of an eye. Over the past few months, he's become even more prone to fits of odd behavior. Some of it is not as funny; as a puppy, Bast was always very friendly and outgoing. He never met a stranger and would walk up to anyone he met to demand petting. Gradually, so slightly that I didn't notice at first, he started losing some of his social attitude, until now he's much more guarded, especially around strangers.

I don't mean that he's antisocial - not really. He is still happy to meet most strangers, but he is much more easily overwhelmed in situations now than he was as a puppy. Being crowded around by too many people, especially adult men, makes him start shutting down and give off those doggy warning signs that he's being pushed too far - ears back, eyes wide, panting quickly with his tail low and slowly wagging in agitation. Being approached by someone who can't read these signs causes him to spook and bolt under my legs for reassurance, and I have to gently tell the well-meaning but oblivious stranger that he needs some space to be okay again.

My favorite sullen grouch.

This shutting-down happens a lot more frequently than it used to, a part of his maturity that makes me sad to see.

It's not all gloom and doom, though. Some of it, although irritating, has been entertaining - like his sudden switch to being nocturnal and wanting to be outside all of the time. This past week has been a combination of us both having to adjust to his new behaviors. As soon as it cools off here, Bast wants to be outside - all of the time. He pants and paces in the house until I let him out, and then won't come inside for hours. Nothing will persuade him to come back in before he's ready - not treats, not toys, not threatening to close the door - nothing.

Since his ever-present separation anxiety is an integral part of his personality, I still have to be accessible to him, though, or he busts down the back door in a panic. Our compromise, then, is for me to leave the back door cracked open. This allows him to peek his head in occasionally to reassure himself that I haven't disappeared into the ether, so now while tapping away at my computer, from time to time I see a small black flicker at the corner of my eye. He sticks one eye in, makes sure I haven't abandoned him, and then flits off like a sprite before I can get up to wrangle him inside.

As of writing this, it is now 12:39 AM. I tried to enforce a midnight curfew, but Bast's frantic stomping, punching, and whining to be let out wore me down and I let him go answer the call of the wild. My best friend Cait informs me that there is a super moon in 2 nights, and so I can only hope Bast's wolfy sickness waxes afterwards as well...