NEW YEARS EVE DAY

HAPPY

NEW

YEAR

 

FROM ALL OF US TO YOU

THE NEIGHBOR

 

The top three are me with his dog, Prince.

The horse is his horse, Queen.

He lived next door to me when I was growing up and he taught

me about dogs and horses and art and authors and played tricks on me but never in a mean way.

My parents taught me those things, too, but differently.

 

He died tonight at 10:13

I hope he and Prince are together.

TRAINING DAY

Doc is fine at home but not so good outside the yard. He is getting better but while my knee and then my toe were healing, he decided to be afraid of everything except us and Basset Hounds.

 

You can almost see the doubt in those pretty brown eyes and that nervous lick.

 

But he is doomed because he is a show dog and I plan to get him back into the ring. The problem is I have re-socialize him a bit and get him relaxed so we have been going to training and trying to get him to remember how much fun showing was.

 

Here's the REAL problem.

Doc has a handler who is barely trainable.

Doc has a handler who gets so nervous in the rings that it runs and vibrates right down the leash to Doc who immediately reads that message and begins looking around for the danger. He has decided that the dogs behind him must be the problem and so he looks over his shoulder and tucks his tail, just in case.

 

This began one time when the dog behind him was a Briard, a huge hairy thing he had never seen before, gaining on him, or so he thought.

 

The 12 week old Havanese puppy behind him at training did not bother him.

He was so friggin cute.

 

He looked....wait a minute...he looked a lot like...

 

NO DOC! It is a puppy, not a Squirrel. Stop turning around. How many times can one say "watch me" in a row without being ridiculous?

Finally, he decides it isn't a squirrel at all that it is just a puppy and he got back to work.

So I figure as long as we don't have a Briard or a squirrel behind us, we might be able to get around the ring without mishap.

                                    He's done it before.

 

SNOOD WEATHER & OTHER THINGS

My Van won't start. It goes " Clickclicklclickclicksnickyclick." and the gauges all go berserk. The day before we jumped it and it started and ran fine but yesterday I went out to do an errand and it repeated the clicky routine.
If we can jump it again I will run it up to the service station but otherwise I will have to call the tow truck. Phhhffft.
Also I have the cold I have been fighting so hard not to get. It is pretty cold. I got the snoods out, that's how cold it is.

This was taken after I sent Llewis and Conley out without their snoods and they came in shaking like mad.So I covered them up  nd Conley stuck his nose under the blanket, too.

 

Conley is the one who gets the coldest the fastest.

Doc doesn't seem to get cold except for his feet. It might have something to do with shaving between his pads when I groom him and do his feet.

I don't shave my feet but they are one of the first things to get cold on me, too.

 

AND

The pretty red tow truck just towed my truck away. Van. Whenever I say "truck" John says "It's a VAN".

 

I woke up this morning thinking of a line from THE ELECTRIC HORSEMAN. So I fed the dogs and sat here at 5 in the morning and watched beautiful Robert Redford and listened to Willie Nelson.

I don't mind Jane Fonda no matter what she did or didn't do during the Viet Nam war. She did what she thought was right and that's all any of us should do, is follow our conscience and do what we believe is right.

(It doesn't make it right but it's what we do.)

 

 

 

These are the stretchy bracelets I made to sell for $20. Just thought I'd throw that in.

HORSES

I have been watching the NFR rodeo finals which stretch out over an impossibly long week. I don't usually watch NFR but I do watch the PBR bull riders. However the PBR doesn't really do much horsie stuff and the NFR is all about the way man and horse interact to do a third thing: mostly roping calves. (And no, sorry, I don't worry about the calves.)

So I have, after nearly a week of kind of on-again, off-again watching, begun to note serious differences in the horses even though I would guess that 99% are Quarter Horses.

              Stolen from Google

This is a Quarter Horse so named because no horse is faster over a quarter of a mile than one of these.  What you see is those huge hips and shoulders. This is a working horse. He is also the Labrador Retriever/Golden retriever of the horse world.

He is friendly. (Understand, this is a general statement and not true of every single living Quarter horse.) He is easy. His gaits are nice and he can be trained to do just about anything you want him to do.
He can herd cattle or carry three little kids bareback around a pasture without spooking. He can shoot out of a little box and when his cowboy ropes a calf he can stop on a dime and keep the rope taut by backing up. He can carry a flag in a parade with drums and music and people yelling.

He can carry a kid who does crazy things without shying or bucking.
On the other hand, when asked to do cow things by a rider who knows what he is doing, the Quarter Horse is amazing.

He herds cattle. He ambles along quietly with a dog at his heels watching the cattle.

 

And when asked, he moves.

And he can REALLY move. And he can stop so fast that he can flip a calf at the end of a rope.

But mostly, he is just an amazingly versatile, comfortable horse. Love him and cherish him and you will receive loyalty and affection in return. The American Quarter Horse. What a guy.

 

 

DOC

Mika Keokuk Medicine Man of Liswyn.
Doc.
Named after a statue done by Mr.Biskit's great Aunt Nellie Walker that stands on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River.

 

 

The Doc. Twelve weeks. Newly arrived. Flew in from Dallas to O'Hare  and walked out of the crate as if he owned the world.

                                            And Now.

CONLEY

 

This is First Class Tonic With a Twist. Aka "Conley" He has several AKC points toward his Championship and then he decided the ride was over and quit putting his tail up. The rule is "no tail, no ribbon".  Bassets, like Beagles, are supposed to appear overwhelmed with joy at being in a dog show. Conley's opinion of dog shows was NOT joyous.

 

He will be 5 or 6 the 29th of this month. Of the three Bassets, he is the only with testicles and while he has never had the opportunity to use them as intended, it does a lot to explain his attitude. And he has one.

 

 

 

This is also Conley in one of his favorite places and one of his favorite positions doing one of his favorite things. There is that song, "These are some of my favorite things" and there are only two or three things:

eating

sleeping

tormenting the Belgian

ignoring commands, demands or suggestions.

 

Not necessarily in that order.

 

As a puppy, Conley had a Thing for knives and scissors which he would take off the counters and carry around the house, daring Nigel and Llewis to play with him.

Conley Scissormouth.

 

 

He has a Thing...

 

 

...for the backs of furniture.

This is the couch. He has fallen off that perch several times and been trapped behind the couch, but has never gotten hurt.

 

Conley is the most photogenic of the dogs. (Ssssh. Don't tell.)

He has an ego that demands that he be in front, on top, up high, first in line. This has recently caused some abrasive incidents between Conley and our still-growing Belgian, who also sports  testicles and is just beginning to grow into them. As yet, Doc the Belgian tends to give way, but I can sense that this may easily change someday soon.

 

 

Conley, not a big fan of really cold weather, nonetheless loves to play.

 

 

 

Puppy Conley. He was a real cutie.

 

Meeting the Black Dog before he became a BIG black dog.

 

Things were not always good even early on. Doc had baby teeth.

Conley did not care for them.

 

Conley discovers the advantages of stairs. This is one of my favorite photographs of him. Barely visible, he had been up and down the stairs several times and finally, refused to leave the top. It was quiet, and it made him, literally, TOP DOG.

 

NIGEL

This is Bonsai's Quietly Making Noise, TD "Nigel". This was taken right after he went down in the rear and we were buying a cart for him. He had a huge sebaceous cyst on his neck right where the harness would fit and so with unusual foresight, we had the cyst removed and he had to wear this inflatable collar.

I picked this photo especially for the expression. This is standard Nigel expression. His sense of humor is not the best. His sense of self is easily offended. He was always the "top" BAsset, if not by attitude then by sheer size. He is not huge, but is the biggest Basset we have had.

He was born here moments before or after Llewis to be honest, I do not remember. I think Llewis is actually older, by a few seconds, but Nigel believes he is, and tell me to argue with that face.

This is Nigel after Llewis has just told an hilarious Basset joke. You can see that Nigel enjoys laughter and is not paranoid enough to think all the dogs are laughing at him.

This is also Nigel. He is listening to the other dogs discuss Pet Insurance plans.

 

Before he went down in the rear Nigel did a few shows. I liked him because (I'm sorry) I liked his tail. It prevented me from looking at his front which, a breeder and very good friend told me once was the worst front she had seen in years. (Good friends do not tell you these things. They let you go on showing while the knowledgeable among them roll their eyes when they see his front.)

 

This is Conley on the left (I think) and Nigel on the right. If you compare, you can easily see that Nigel looks similar to a Mack Truck bearing down on you, while Conley appears to be a pick-up. I believe the term is "Loaded shoulders". Built like a semi, but mostly in front, Nigel was badly balanced. We quit the show ring and began tracking.

Tracking was something Nigel understood from the absolute beginning. I had tracked with Mitchell and he was GOOD. Nigel made him look dull. From the very first track it was obvious that this dog was born to do this. Any mistakes he made were mine. He got his TD but failed the TDX twice: once due to a sleet storm that soaked up both to the skin in an instant and afraid and lost, Nigel came back and sat on my feet and refused to track. The only smart one among us.
The second time, he breezed through and then did something he had never ever done before-- took a cross track. Shortly after that, he went down in the rear. This is a dog who could probably have gotten a VST without a lot of wear and tear.He already tracked across streets and drives and sidewalks. Lay a track and he could do it. I wonder if he dreams of tracking.

Somewhere

Someone

is

Cooking Food....

LLEWIS

Llewis  is Bonsai's Gravity Storm according to his papers, but is Lewis Lewis according to us or Llewis which is easier to write.
He was born here, in this room, one very hot summer morning very early morning with my friend MCBeth attending (Vet). I had the windows open it was so hot in the room but I could not run the window a/c unit for fear of chilling the little bratwurst with feet.
Nothing says sausage as much as a newborn Basset.

This was probably around 12 days. Eyes not open  but starting, and ears as well. . All the puppies were great. Ate well, Zelda was a great Mom, and they grew like weeds.

Eyes just getting there. Probably taken the same day. Such cuties.

And then we began to notice that Llewis was having trouble moving around with the others. We were told oh, he'd be fine. But we weren't so sure. This was my first (and only ever) litter so I was depending on others to tell me what to do. Finally, I decided to do something myself and took little Llewis to see the Vet, who thought it looked like a "Swimmer puppy" and it did. So we taped his back legs together in hobbles, and actually, he did better.

But they had to be taped. When the tape came off, he went right back to his hobbedly gimpy tumbly self. Nahh...there was something else going on.

I took him one afternoon to the home of one of my other Vets. This one has horses and is perhaps a bit more attuned to lameness. She watched him "walk" and fall and trip, drag one leg, hoisting it at a funny angle, and when she palated his rear she said she didn't think there was a femur there!

So off we went to the University of Wisconsin, and they poked and prodded and xrayed and palpated and their official diagnosis written in his chart, was that he was "a mess". The femur did not reach the hip socket which was basically not there anyway, and the patella was either so far out of place and misshapen or not there (to be honest I do not remember) that he could not properly bend that back leg at the hock.

 

 

If you look at these, you will see the problem. We knew we were going to keep him. I picked his brother Nigel as my future show puppy even tho his shoulders were a bit heavy and his front wide...

Off we went with Llewis to a doggie Re-habilitation place. Not for drugs, but physical re-hab.
There he became a clinic favorite as he ate frozen peanut butter while they did acupuncture and chiropractic, and we had a state of the art brace made which he wore awhile. And after awhile, the re=hab place asked us to have him re-evaluated by an orthopedic specialist because nothing much was happening.

So we called in Dr Lou. We showed him the U of Wisconsin xrays, showed him the puppy, let him do his own exam and at the end he said "Take that brace off of him, take him home and let him run around and be a puppy. He needs to USE those muscles..." and so we did.

 

 

He has learned to use his disability to his advantage.

 

This is one of his favorite toys, a carrot. He has had it for years altho I think Doc has pretty much destroyed it now. He uses just his incisors on toys and kind of gnaws on them.

 

That silly leg just won't bend and won't do what he wants.

 

 

 

All the boys, back when everyone's legs were working better.