Category: dogs
Dog care versus cat care
Barack Obama has already made one very good decision, early in his term. He has chosen a puppy for his children instead of a cat.
Dog Care:
Open the door let the dog out. The dog does her business and you let her back in. If you live in a city it may be a little more complicated. Go outside with the dog, Dog pees, dog poops. You pick up the poop, throw it in the trash. Job done!
Sure most dogs shed. Vacuum the floor and your pet clean-up is done! It is not my fault if you didn’t train your dog to stay off the furniture. Even if you have dog sofas and chairs your clean up is pretty simple. You can vacuum those while you are doing the floor.
Unless the dog is very good and very lucky, it will get sick occasionally. Then you may find yourself spending a lot of time cleaning up dog messes on the floor, or vigilantly watching your dog hoping to swoop it outdoors to prevent the next mess. Usually though, dogs, even when they are sick, want to go outside. If the dog is old, or you are such a deep sleeper that she can’t wake you up, you may find yourself setting an alarm every few hours to let her out. Soon the sick phase will pass and you will be back to the easy life.
Cat Care:
If you have a dog and are considering a cat, rejoice that dog care requires so little of your time because you will spend hours a day cleaning up after your cat. Basically a cat is like a sick dog that never gets well. There are hairballs, and poop – when he just couldn’t be bothered to walk to his litter box to make a deposit. Of course with a cat it is not confined to the floor, the messes will be on your furniture, window sills and counters too! I am very sorry if your cat pees outside the box. I have not had that pleasure yet, but I’ve read that it is not uncommon, especially with male cats.
The litter box: Apparently most cats, unlike most dogs, cannot be trained to use bladder and bowel control so they need to have an accessible toilet at all times. Unless you enjoy having your house smell like cat waste, which is more odoriferous than an equal volume of dog waste, you will need to clean the litter box at least once a day. Of course this is more complicated and messy than picking up and disposing of dog waste and puts you in unprotected proximity to cat waste from which you can contract toxoplasmosis. It is likely if your house has more than one room, that you will have more than one litter box, so your cat will not feel he has to to walk “too far” to poop and pee.
You guessed it! Cats shed too…a lot!! Hope you don’t have hobbies because this is going to take ALL weekend. Vacuuming the floor is just the start. Actually, if you are smart you will vacuum at the end because you are likely to dump more cat hair on the floor while you are cleaning the counters, shelves, window sills, basically every nook and cranny in your home, some of which are inaccessible to humans without a ladder or moving furniture. I suggest you spend Sunday cleaning all horizontal surfaces and vacuuming because on Saturday you will want to pick cat hair off all the vertical surfaces your cat rubs on. The more difficult it is to clean, the more likely the cat will rub on it. Hopefully you will not also have to repair furniture and door moldings that have become his favorite scratching posts.
We can all be thankful that our next president is wise enough to choose a puppy rather than a kitten. He’ll need to devote all that extra clean-up time to trying to solve the country’s problems.
Happy Jack Road
I have spent the last couple of weeks in Idaho. I am on Lisa Smith-Batchen‘s 508 crew and I have been doing some training with her and helping with the Grand Teton Races that Jay, Lisa and Zach put on at Grand Targhee over Labor Day weekend.
The races were great. One of the highlights was getting to meet Olga. She wasn’t able to run this year and many of the competitors can be thankful for that. She was out the entire 36 hours of the race giving runners great assistance at the main aid station. She was filling water bottles, helping with drop bags, taping feet, giving massages, encouragement, ultra-wisdom and smiles. I don’t know how many shoes and socks I saw her change. Her energy was amazing. She never seemed to tire.
On the drive from Colorado to Idaho Bonnie and I stopped and for an early morning trail run near the “Lincoln Monument” east of Laramie. There are some beautiful single track trails in the area. From I-80 West I took a right from the Happy Jack exit and another right past the Lincoln Monument and about 1/2 mile on a dirt road to a trail head. I started on the “National Headquarters” trail and looped around on a couple others for about a half hour. Bonnie loved it and helped me find the way back to the car. I had just picked up my orthotics the afternoon before. They felt great.
Keeping your pup cool
I really don’t recommend taking your canine family members to an extreme climate like Death Valley. It is very stressful to realize that even a few seconds lack of vigilance could result in severe injury to your best friend. I had hoped not to have Bonnie in the hottest parts of Death Valley, other than driving through, but I did not know what temperatures we would encounter on our California trip, so I prepared as well as I could. It turned out that she was near Badwater, Furnace Creek, Stovepipe Wells, and Panamint Springs for over 24 hours in 100+ F degree heat, with maximum temp of about 126 F. At times the car A/C was on. At others it was not.
In the photo she has been sitting in the car with windows and back open, no A/C, for about 20 minutes. The temperature was about 105 F. It helps that my car is white and has maximum legal window tinting, but the first line of defense when it was really hot was a space tarp clipped to the outside of the car on the sun side. These cheapo, small clips, and one of these ball bungees, secured the tarp at maximum speed of over 40 mph. If you you want to use the clips more than one day, it’s probably best to go for the larger, heavy-duty ones. The cheap ones were falling apart after a few hours in the heat and sun. It was amazing HOW much cooler it was in the car with the tarp in place.
She also had a small Cool Core Bed. She didn’t particularly like it at first, but as the temps rose, she was on it all the time. I kept it in a refrigerator overnight when I could and re-filled it with chilled water a couple times during the hottest day/evening. I think you could also put small ice cubes in it, but that would not work great with the foam core.
The towels are Cool ‘n Dry which I had first seen one of the CDD Frisbee dogs using earlier in the summer. I tried one for a few moments myself to see how much cooler it was. I did not want to give it back. Knowing humans are much more efficient at cooling themselves than dogs, I did. : ) I could tell that she felt noticeably cooler with one or two of these towels over her.
For additional ventilation, a few times I used one of these to keep the tailgate open, but secured. I have used that device much more in Colorado. I also brought along several battery operated fans, inherited from my grandfather, similar to these, but I never used them.
Those are all my canine cooling tips. Bonnie hardly panted the whole time we were in Death Valley, mostly when we were on a moonlight walk in 107 F, so I think we did a pretty good job keeping her cool. Bonnie is a naturally low key dog and I think that made it much easier to keep her cool. She was content to lie on her cooling bed and rest under her cooling towels. It would have been much more difficult to keep a dog like Jessie cool, who would have watched, and mentally taken, every step with the relay runners.