Dogs on Tuesday

I was going to make this a regular thing, but other stuff has been rolling around. Down from Dogs on Tuesday to just Dog on Tuesday, Buster is still doing well and getting around like an old man. We figure he is around 20 years old, we picked him up and the animal shelter down in San Diego, and the first picture we have of him is dated is 1995. The vet figured he was four years old, so that leaves him at twenty. Whatever, Buster has lived with us for over fifteen years, and for some reason now thinks that he runs the place. Here are Buster and Max together on our blue chair about ten years ago.


That’s back when he had more teeth. He is part Chihuahua, and those little dogs are prone to having bad teeth. He had to have most of the front teeth removed a few years ago, so we shifted him from crunchies to soft food. He has a severe under bite, and always looked like he was mean and growling at people but he’s just a big softie. We used to just leave a big self feeder out and those guys could munch whenever they wanted to, now with soft food we have to put it down for him periodically. He has gained a little weight, but still weighs around nine pounds. He lost his left eye to an infection (and an incompetent vet, but that’s another story) a year ago, and his right eye has cataracts, so he can hardly see any more. He’s almost deaf, but still gets around. This is his favorite place.


I like the path of footprints up to where he is. We put pillows down both sides of the bed so that he doesn’t go off the wrong side and fall down. We have some boxes at the end of the bed that are about half the height of the bed, so that he doesn’t have to jump that high; he can’t jump up all the way anymore anyway, and put down a ‘dog sheet’ on top of the covers.

Back when we lived in San Diego our house had a long yard. There was a canyon along one side of the yard filled with brush, and strange animals used to wander into the yard. Max had a run in with a small skunk one time, raccoons used to tear up my small pond to get at the fish, and coyotes ran through chasing the cats. Most of these animals came through at night, and our boys usually stayed inside after dark. But the hillside was also full of gophers that would dig tunnels up to our yard and eat our rose bushes and flowers from the roots. Buster had very good ears and could hear them digging under his feet. He finally figured out what the noise was and would sit for hours at a gopher mound or hole waiting for them to come out.


He caught quite a few, more than the cats that lived with us did. No gophers in Vegas, the ground is too hard and there isn’t much for them to eat. Buster spends most of his time sleeping now anyway.