Friday, February 17, 2006

Critterblogging, Vol. 2

Well, Og is apparently fed up with cats on blogs, so I won't subject him to another picture of Rascal (who, by the way, lived up to his name in SPADES last night).

Instead, here's one of my canine four-footed companions:



Lucky is one of the dogs I inherited from Dad. She's about 12 years old, I think - hard to tell since she was a stray. A Very Lucky stray (thus the name).

You see, Lucky had heartworms when she noticed the pawprint on Dad's gate that said "Dogs are safe and well-cared for here". After she impressed Dad with her intelligence and attention in near-record time, he took her to be spayed and get her checkup and shots - and when he found out about the heartworms, agreed to have them taken care of.

Now, killing heartworms is easy. Doing so without killing the dog is the hard (and thus potentially expensive) part. Once the heartworms die, there's a big chunk of dead worms in the dog's heart. Decomposing dead worms. Artery-choking, deadly, dead worms.

The dog has to be kept calm and confined for something like six weeks (iirc) and her heartrate kept from becoming elevated until the body has had time to pass the decomposing worms out. If the dog gets her heartrate up, it's likely to wash a chunk of worm carcasses out into the bloodstream and kill the dog.

Dad paid $1200 to take care of Lucky's heartworms. Within a few years, he reckoned they were even.

Right now she's looking at me as if I owe her money. Oh, duh - it's dinnertime, and she knows it. Better get to that.

2 Comments:

Blogger og said...

Awesome dog!

4:52 AM  
Blogger Aaron Neal said...

Glad you approve, Og!

I've got more critterblogging to do - Lucky is one of four dogs I inherited from Dad, and another went to my Graddad. Then there's the ones who didn't outlive Dad, and our two cats - I've introduced Rascal, but there's another one also. And Rascal just seems to keep generating stories, one of which I may tell tonight.

9:48 PM  

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