Tag Archives: pets

Trixie Weighs In – all 13 pounds of her

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Right, people, listen up. Some of you may not know me. My name is Trixie and I’m in charge around here.

I am the emotional support dog attached to Wendy Welch. By which I mean, Wendy is my emotional support human. I have a few… neuroses, shall we say. Wendy helps me with my anxiety.

People ask, was I a rescue, because I am so anxious. Those people are clearly not well-informed on current events. If you’re not anxious, you’re not paying attention.

I work with Wendy at some food bank stuff. Once a week she goes to this place where people line up outside like an hour beforehand. And there’s a big guy with a big husky. The guy is really nice to me, but the husky has said some rude things I don’t appreciate. Mom puts my leash under a table leg and everybody talks nice to me. But it’s still a bit taxing on my nerves. So many people wanting to pet me, saying how cute I am. A dog likes to be taken seriously. Like the big husky barking her fool head off across the parking lot. (She has to wait over there because she doesn’t volunteer with the warehouse, see.) Nobody ever calls HER cute….

I can live with cute, though, when it comes to the other place with the food. Wendy works with a bunch of med students once a month. They cook meals for people in a rent-controlled housing facility. Everybody at the facility loves me. Naturally. When they call me cute, they slip me scraps of the chicken gumbo or whatever the med students are cooking. And when the students play ball with the kids, I get to play too. It’s fun to run around at the housing complex. It is a quarter mile to walk around the whole sidewalk circling the place, and I have run this MANY times with a group of kids. Once a bunch of people chased me because I slipped my harness. Good times.

So, it’s not all bad having an emotional support human. I’ll tell you more secrets later. For now, stay warm out there. I have a winter coat attached to me, but you people have to assemble yourselves to go out. That thing with your feet, weird. But do what you need to do. It’s all good.

Bella Bella

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BELLA BELLA

Our friends Jon and Beth lost their dog yesterday. Bella could have been the poster child for pit bill rescue. She had the face for it.

Bella came to her family through a rescue that pulled her from breeding squalor. No one will ever know how many litters of pit puppies Bella gave the dog fighting world. As Jon says, if we ever find the people who ran that ring, there will be human blood and jail time and no regrets.

Beth and Jon didn’t know Bella had cancer when they got her. She was cute and had a personality twice the size of the room and she picked them out of the lineup of adoptees at the event by licking Beth. A lot.

Multiple tumors showed up in her stomach not quite a year into her adoptive life; the vet said they were due to Bella being “force-bred,” repeatedly and often. Her body would not have been given time to rest between litters: wean, breed, birth, wean, repeat.

A surgery could take them out, but they would reappear. What did Jon and Beth want to do?

Realizing they couldn’t save her life, they set out to give her a life to savor. Bella had a full year of royal treatment: a soft bed in Beth’s office, two soft beds at home. Walks: lots and lots of walks. Bella never met a blade of grass she didn’t want to sniff, or a squirrel she didn’t want to chase.

There may have been cheese and other things dogs normally don’t get because of health concerns; since Bella spent a year stretching out the sympathy, she got a LOT of forbidden stuff. Did I mention Bella’s natural intelligence? Jon and Beth swear she could even work the TV remote.

She could also counter surf; Jon came home unexpectedly one day when Bella had been home alone, and she was up on the kitchen counter, exploring her options. Thinking fast, Bella barked, “Thank God you’re home! I found a spider!” She was a very clever dog.

And sweet, to everyone but other dogs. Well, and squirrels. Bella could not hold her licker around any human; you were getting a sponge bath.

While Jon and Beth would have liked to give Bella more than the glorious two years they had, Bella knew how good she had it. She knew her retirement would be golden and that should take it all for what it was worth because her early years had been wrong in every sense of the word. I suspect she even knew that her life was a testament to the power of dog rescue and the horrors of dog fighting. But most importantly, she knew Jon and Beth adored her, and she adored them right back.