Our 15 year old yellow lab is dying slowly day by day. In hindsight, his refusal to eat 2 weeks ago wasn't really refusal like it is now...it was more picky. I could hide his medicine in hot dogs that more often than not he would eat around the pill and spit it onto the floor while the hot dog slid down to his ever shrinking tummy. Which meant that I would have to try that trick again and usually the pill would go down the second time. Then we had to put peanut butter on the pill once he refused the hot dogs. Last week he wouldn't even eat bacon fat poured on his food!! That is unheard of as this dog NEVER got people food and his only encounter into our world of goodness was the bacon fat from our breakfast bacon which he devoured with abandon. I have given up my "dogs don't get people food" stance and you should see me begging him to try....scrambled eggs (they worked twice), leftover turkey (he devoured it twice and after that turned up his nose), BBQ chicken (good for a couple bites). He also goes to his water bowl 322 times a day and NEVER drinks. I need a job outside of the home so that I don't have to watch this demise minute by minute. He also wants to go outside every 15 minutes!! In and out, in and out....and while outside he stares off at the mountain and I wonder what he is thinking?
We started this grand "dog lover" adventure before we got married. My in-laws yellow lab had puppies and we were the lucky beneficiaries of one of the females. I will never forget the day that we picked which one would be ours. All the puppies were in the outdoor pen. Brooke opened the door to let them spill out into the yard. The first puppy sprinted out at top speed to chase a ball that had been tossed. She was darker than the others and had a pointier nose. Brooke fell in love. "Look at her energy! She is so much faster than all the others" he said with a huge smile on his face. He's a sucker for an athlete. Meanwhile, the last puppy moseyed out, wagged his tail and plopped himself beside me so that I could rub his tummy. Now that is MY kind of dog. This story perfectly describes our marriage in the last 22 years since. Brooke is all action and excitement. Give me a massage, hot bath and warm fire where I can curl up and read and I am in heaven. Maybe we should have paid a little more attention to the signs before? :)
Brooke won. We got Darley the most annoying fetcher ever. She was obsessed with chasing...anything and everything. She would clip the back of your legs with a huge log/tree that she would find and pick up and lug around on every hike. She'd clip you then turn around and stop in front of you and try and toss it to your feet so that you'd have to throw it and she could go fetch it again. Fetching wasn't limited to outside either. We were never safe from the obsessive fetching. Inside she would bring the tiniest piece of lint off of the floor and flick it onto the sofa beside you. She'd back up and intensely look from it to you until you flicked it. She needed daily excercise or we would pay. She was the perfect companion for Brooke's back country skiing, biking on open trails and of course running the hills around our mountain town. She mostly just annoyed me even though I loved her and was so sad when she passed at 14 years old. We couldn't face the inevitable of putting her down and canceled the appointment 3 weeks in a row. She had lived in the carpeted basement for the last year of her life as she couldn't do stairs to go outside to pee and she kept sliding on our upstairs hard wood floors. It wasn't until she didn't want to chase a ball or even mouth a ball that we KNEW it was time. Her quality of life was over. And we cried....a lot!!
And here we are again. We gave ourselves a year after Darley died to get another dog. We enjoyed not having to sweep the endless lab dog hair up on a daily basis. We liked not having to take a dog out for exercise....even Brooke enjoyed the down time as we were in the thick of autism chaos 9 years ago. Our poor first "child" Darley wasn't even making the annual Christmas photo anymore!! This is after taking 1.2 million pictures of her pre kids.
But once a dog lover, always a dog lover. We missed the companionship and Jack was begging for one. We knew that we wanted another lab and wanted a little bit older dog as Molly had developed an extreme fear of dogs in those last few years. It got to the point that she wouldn't get out of the car to go for a hike as she knew we would see other dogs on the trails. We aren't exactly sure what happened to create this fear and can only recall a neighbors puppy jumping all over her and scaring her. Maybe that was it? What we did know is that we weren't going to let that fear drive her or our lives. We live in Colorado where everyone has dogs and we love to hike....so Molly was going to live with another dog whether she liked it or not. But a puppy sounded like too much work. I started the Safe Harbor Lab Rescue application out of Golden, Colorado. I looked at the cute pictures that came across the website. We heard that the rescue had called our former vet to see if we were good owners. They wanted to know that we had 4 foot fence that surrounded our yard. They wanted to know that we wouldn't chain up the dog. They wanted a forever home for this dog as he had already been through enough and they didn't want him to have to move again. We promised that we'd keep him forever. We passed and went to pick up seven year old "Target".
Molly was at a summer camp for special needs kids that all use augmentative communication. We just had Jack home and knew that 5 days of no Molly would be good as we introduced the new dog to our home. He was a big beautiful guy with a wide head and friendly wag of the tail. We were psyched to have a male as they don't give your lawn those burned out pee circles like Darley had done. What we didn't know was that he came with A LOT of issues that we were surprised about. Brooke took him to the park that first day. He took him off the leash and threw the ball. At this point we had switched his name to Tucker (Target felt like target practice). Tucker took off for the ball and then ran right past it and down into the woods. Gone. He wasn't coming when his name(s) were called either. This habit lasted FOR YEARS!! If he got out of our front door, he was gone. Up the neighborhood and then down into our wide open space of Red Rock Canyon. I'd post to our neighborhood FB page that he had escaped (again) and someone would reply that they had him..... eventually.
He had a few behaviors that we didn't know how they started since he came to us at 7 years old. He was scared to use stairs! It took him a few months to finally get up his nerve to go down to our basement. So weird. When he'd hear a siren he would howl. He also marked all over our house. It was HIS house. Damn males. We were quickly second-guessing the desire for a male. He was aggressive with other dogs while he was on lead. Off lead, he was fine. And he was always SO sweet with people. I was too nervous to walk with him so that was left to Brooke and within the year he was great with all dogs. Lastly, we got such a laugh when we'd give him a raw hide or treat to chew on. He would gently take it in his mouth and proceed to bury it in the back yard. Darley had NEVER done that and we thought that only happened in the movies.
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| Most pictures that we have are of Tucker on a hike with Molly. |
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| These three have hiked MANY miles together through the years. |
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| Jack's lacrosse balls were safe from our non fetching lab. |
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| Always sleeps this way. |
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| When we first got Tucker, Jack loved him right away. |
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| He's SO skinny now as he's deep in thought. |
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