Boogiewoofs

It took 3 months, but we finally got the girls healthy - no more skinny-baninny bones sticking out, no more parvo or UTIs, just fat, sleek sneak thieves.

Being right in the trenches, it's hard for me to see the results of my literal blood, sweat, and tears, but the changes are incredible...

Mighty Midna

Zelda the Thieving Turd

Although the physical changes are easy to measure, their behavioral changes are a little more difficult to get a handle on. The girls are much more confident with me, but their socialization is... difficult. They hate strangers, especially men, and won't have anything to do with any of my social experiments, so we're changing tactics to work on their personal confidence first before moving up to meeting new people.

Spooky Midna wants no part of strangers... even if they offer her a Cheeto.

The Twins are endlessly curious. I think if you were to sequence their DNA, you'd find they're made of equal parts burning nosiness and skittishness. Their initial reaction to anything is fear - everything new is scary, and we must retreat and chuff at it from a safe distance. This includes: moving any piece of furniture in the house, mysterious piles of laundry that appear while being sorted, setting the groceries down in the kitchen floor, or random objects moving in a breeze.

One thing that we do to help the girls overcome fear of everyday things is to include them in household chores. They're comfortable enough with me to follow me around the house and investigate what I do, and only occasionally do they get spooked and tear off, leaving nothing but the sound of skittering toenails and the sporadic puddle of urine behind them.

Last night, the Twins helped me load up the dishwasher. This sounds pretty blasé, but realize this means I have multiple, unknown objects in my hand at any given time and stack them up in a big, cavernous box that opened up in a previously solid cabinet. Add in a fear of forks, and you understand why this is a big step for us.

I admit, I'm not a dog trainer. I don't know all of those fancy terms like R+ and R- (I made have made those up, in fact, I'm not sure), I just sort of muck about to find out what works and what doesn't work for my specific dogs. For Bast, who had a lot of confidence, it was a matter of getting him to remember he's a big boy and most of the world isn't out out to get him.

The girls have required me to reassess my strategies, because they've never had any confidence, and up to this point, the whole world HAS been out to get them. Getting them to understand I'm not going to hurt them and nothing in my house will intentionally hurt them, either, is taking some time.

I didn't realize it, but subconsciously, I must have reverted back to my meager experience handling horses growing up, because we've adopted a pattern of showing the girls various items, letting them approach it on their own terms, and then running the item across their bodies to let them see it doesn't hurt them, much like introducing young foals to leads and halters.

It makes sense now that I actually analyze it - the girls are more akin to unbroken horses than puppies, what with their intense curiosity and their tendency to flight before fight. Also, they leave giant prairie pies in the backyard, so they must be at least part pony.

Anyway, we did this song and dance while loading up the dishwasher, and although many of you out there will cringe thinking of me running my silverware across the back of a grody wolfdog, let me tell you, my standards for what is "gross" are nowhere near as high as they were before owning a wolfdog. Like first-time parents initially balking at changing a diaper, you just get over that.

Each item, I held out in front of me as an offering, and the skittering little phantoms came close, low and slinking, to cautiously put their noses against it and investigate. When they seemed sufficiently at ease, I let the object move from their noses to their faces, around the top and under their chins, until I could lift and remove it from their heads and they didn't flinch away. Then I put it away in the dishwasher, safe and innocuous, and we moved on to the next item.

As the girls learned that kitchen objects aren't as scary as they thought, I also learned which ones are much scarier than I thought. From my observations, I compiled Zelda and Midna's List of Scary-Ass Kitchen Utensils:

Forks - Kinda spooky at first, but then we remember they usually have food stuck on them. Pass.
Spoons - Ditto on the food particulates. Pass.
Knives - Dunno. Not allowed to lick these for some reason, but not overtly spooky. Pass.
Spatulas - Vague unease. Why are they so big? It doesn't have food on it. Why do you want this? Pass.
Whisk - Jesus wept, what the fuck IS THAT? WHY DOES IT HAVE SO MANY PARTS? IT'S... Oh, okay... It's got some sort of egg smell on it, that's pretty rad. Okay. We can deal.
Pie Server - No. Just no. There is no amount of delicious pecan pie stuck to that thing that will ever make it okay. Put it away. We won't come back until you do.

Our experiments in relative object spookiness will continue...

Black and White Sunday

Black and White, Learning by Doing

A brief, terrifying story for you all.

In our mousecapades, Bastas accidentally killed a few by fox-pouncing on them. I say accidentally because afterwards, just like a toddler who doesn't understand cause and effect, he mopes around the house for hours when his toy stops moving.

Monday morning, as we prepared to take the girls in for their spay, we startled a mouse that Bast delightedly stomped out in the livingroom, in full view of the Twins and my traumatized mother, who had graciously come over to help me wrangle the girls for their surgery. My mom, unused to the casual sociopathy of my animals, described Bast river dancing on the mouse as, "Like one of those little stress balls. I could see its eyes bulge out every time he pounced."

I took this last year and never saw the signs of incipient, stomping psycho.

He's sort of a psychopath.

Unfortunately for me, the Twins are exceptionally clever at watch-and-learn. Zelda, after watching how I opened the microwave and produced food, learned how to use her abnormally huge schnoz to press the buttons and open the door on her own. The morning she figured that little parlor trick out, I bet I had to get up and shut that god forsaken microwave a dozen times before I ran out of patience and banished her outside to find a new game. Go chew up the hose or something, just do it quietly.

After seeing Bast sail through the air and snuff the life out of a living creature, the Twins became eager to practice their own mouse-mashing techniques, and in the absence of any mice (so far), demonstrate their pouncing prowess on other household items, such as: piles of clothes, grocery bags, newspaper circulars, my midsection, unsuspecting toys, leaves in the wind.

The other day, Midna sashayed in the living room after punching the back door open and popped onto the couch to favor me with a kiss. Her friendly duties thus attended, she dug furiously into the couch cushions, using her enormous, paddle-like feet to uproot a section of pillow and throw it on the floor. She hopped off the couch, reared up like a pony, and vigorously stomped the cushion into flat submission before flicking her tail and trotting off out the door without a backwards glance.

I sat and eyeballed the flattened, lumpy corpse of the cushion, and couldn't help but wonder if that will be my internal organs some day when they get bored of stomping pillows.

Black and White Sunday

The Teaches of Meeses

Okay, back to our regularly scheduled sillies. Get hype.

Over the past few months, a lot of small furry creatures took up residence in my home. The Twins, we wanted.

Well, sometimes.

I was in the bathroom for 2 minutes, you little buttholes.

Other small furries, not so much. With the approaching winter, a small mouse started appearing in the living room in the evenings. It skittered across the floor, picking up random crumbs dropped by my conures (bird owners, you know that crumbs are a part of life with flockers around), and usually disappeared in a flash.

Being sort of a softie, I let it be. What was it hurting, stealing a crumb here and there? No big deal.

I can hear the faint laughter of seasoned rural dwellers even as I type this.

As mice are wont to do, one mouse became two mice. And shortly thereafter, two mice became six mice, and I had a problem.

I thought that living in a household with several agile, prey-driven half-breeds would sort of take care of my mouse problem on its own, but I hadn't accounted for Bast's goofiness. Although Bast dearly enjoys chasing the mice, he prefers to take them alive.

And then bring them to me, still alive.

This is adorable, except that occasionally in the evenings, Bast will come to me with his cheeks bulging and barf a very much alive, slobbery mouse into my lap. One memorable day, he did this 3 times.

Since I'm still a wiener, I didn't want to just kill the mice... They were young, and inexperienced, so I put them in a box and did what I do for all small things that cross my path - feed them.

Come on. They're so cute. How can I just kill them?

Unfortunately, my soft heart won over my good sense, and the mice I spared from a grim death escaped, and the Twins started to notice them.

As you can probably guess, having spent most of their lives in a state of starvation gave the Twins some... issues... when it comes to food. They will snack on anything that even smells like food, so I have to watch my food wrappers lest they disappear in the the gullets of the ravenous sneak thieves. With mice already smelling like food, and adding in the excitement of the chase, the Twins don't have any of Bast's reservations about eating their catches, and their hunts are more... rigorous.

The other night, I spotted a mouse panhandling under the parrot cage, and I called Bast to come help me catch it. Only, Bast didn't answer me. Zelda did, and before I knew it, the mouse disappeared into her mouth. I crouched down and called softly to Zelda, saying to her, "Baby, can I have that? Can I have the mouse? Baby, it's grody, can I have that?"

Zelda met my gaze with a level stare for several seconds. Without breaking eye contact, her mouth clamped, and a single, fat drop of blood beaded out of her mouth and fell to the floor with an audible splat.

Nevermind. You can have that one, Princess.

B&W Sunday and Apologies

Hi all! I know most of you are here for the pics, so let's get that down :)

I hope that you guys will forgive my lack of posts recently... To say it's been a tough month would be an understatement. As the girls age and come into their own, they've begun testing limits and boundaries, and I end every day exhausted. I promise to write more about their silliness - we have some hilarious stories involving mice - but my muse has been lacking recently (if you couldn't tell by the cringe-inducing amount of passive voice I've used in this short paragraph already. Somewhere, my thesis advisor is feeling an inexplicable wave of disappointment.)

Aside from the woofers, my personal life experienced an upheaval as well, as my mother was recently diagnosed with lupus-related encephalitis, which causes her brain to swell and press against her skull. As if the sound of that weren't enough to give you the willies just from reading it, it unfortunately caused some very... intense... personality changes, causing my normally loving mother to change into someone we didn't recognize. It's scary for her and scary for us, and it's left me emotionally drained when it comes to expressing myself.

I know that most people come here to read about my silly dogs, and see pictures, and I will get back to that as soon as I can. I just wanted to explain why it's been sort of quiet here and hope that you guys will bear with me for a bit.

Much love,

The Wolf Crazies