July 17, 2006

• ALL ABOUT KOJI

  I have been writing about our cats a lot lately.  oceanstarr,
  a “dog person,” wants to hear about “the dogs.”  Greyfox saw the
  comment and mentioned his favorite picture of our dog Koji.  Koji,
  AKA Doctor Snewt, was barely more than a pup four or five years or so
  ago when this pic was captured.  He is hairier now, and meatier,
  but still just as nosy as ever, or even more so.

  Granny Mousebreath, the catriarch, asserted her dominance over Koji
  when he was just a toddling, waddling furball, so he doesn’t poke his
  snoot into her business.  Hilary, the mother of all our current
  kittens and young cats, is a very aggressively protective mother, so
  when she is around he tries to restrain the sniffing, but the instinct
  is hard to suppress.  A cold dog nose in private places is just
  part of life for anybody around here.  For Koji, the hisses,
  growls and swats of offended cats are part of life.

  A couple of weeks ago, Doug and I stopped at a neighbor’s yard sale and
  overheard some talk about someone who had rented a cabin nearby, stayed
  a whille, then left and abandoned nine dogs.  A female who had
  been left running loose had been taken by Animal Control.  One of
  her puppies was found dead, and another neighbor had taken four more of
  them to his place to try and find homes for them. 

  That left a husky tied up in the yard without food or water and an
  unknown number of dogs inside the cabin in undetermined
  condition.  Neighbors had fed and watered the husky and called
  Animal Control.  Animal Control couldn’t enter the house without
  permission, so they left a tag on the door and went away.  The
  neighbors were observing the legal formalities, standing around
  listening to the barking and whining from inside the cabin and
  commenting on the fact that they could smell the dog shit from
  there.  The owners hadn’t been around for several days.

  I went in and Doug followed me.  We found two small thirsty dogs,
  and a floor with many scattered piles of feces.  The dogs were
  evidently housebroken, because they eagerly ran outside and did their
  business.  A neighbor, who had trailed along with us but didn’t go
  inside, found a container in the yard with dirty rain water and the two
  little dogs drank it eagerly until Doug found a jug of clean water and
  I found a pan to put it in.  We petted the little lap yappers and
  accepted their wagging, licking gratitude.  Then we shut them back
  inside and continued on our original errand after filling two shallow
  pans with water enough to last them a while.

  Their affectionate, affiliative pleasure at seeing us kept nagging at
  me.  They weren’t just thirsty for water.  They were starved
  for human companionship and attention.  I went back and got them
  and took them home with me.   I don’t know if it was a
  misdemeanor or a minor felony, and frankly, the dogs and their
  well-being was more important to me than that issue.  I also
  didn’t know how well they would get along with Koji and our cats, but I
  felt I had to try it for their sake.
  Koji with Hilary when she was a kitten.

  As soon as we brought the dogs in here, the cats left.  I saw that
  as a problem but felt I could deal with it later.  Koji was
  overjoyed to see the dogs.  He couldn’t get enough of them. 
  His big wet black leather nose was going nuts trying to smell two
  moving objects at once.  Several times I observed one small dog or
  the other apparently being propelled across the room like a wheelbarrow
  with Koji’s snoot under its hindquarters.  The smaller one
  retreated to the shelter of my ankles, but the bigger little guy tried
  to assert some dominance.

  He charged at Koji, yapping and growling, biting and scratching. 
  That elicited snarls from Koji, and I finally decided I’d have to take
  the dogs back to their house before Koji broke his training and did
  some damage.  A few hours after that, I got a call from my yard
  sale neighbor, saying that Animal Control had contacted the dogs’
  owners.  The dogcatcher told her not to feed or water the dogs so
  that he could monitor whether the owners were doing as they had said
  they would.   It has been a while since I’ve heard any
  barking from over there, so I’m assuming the owners took their dogs
  away, or Animal Control did.

  Koji kept sniffing around where the little guys had been, looking at me
  as if wondering where his new friends had gone.  The cats still
  sniff around suspiciously, but I’m sure they are glad the little
  yappers went away.  I’m neutral.  They were cute and sweet
  and I would take them in to keep them safe and would feed them and give
  them affectionate care, but I wouldn’t go out shopping for a dog if I
  didn’t have one.   The same goes for cats:  they come to
  me and I respond.

  When Doug was four years old, a neighbor picked up a tiny husky puppy
  from the parking lot at Sheep Creek Lodge.  He called it Anak,
  which means shit in one of the Circumpolar Native languages.  It
  wasn’t old enough to have been weaned, so young that it was sucking at
  everything it encountered, at most four weeks old when the man found
  it.  One night as I sat in my neighbor’s trailer talking to him,
  Anak sucked on my anklebone so much that my sock got wet clear down to
  the bottom of my foot.  When he was about four months old, the man
  moved back to Anchorage, leaving Anak and Tami, an ugly and
  ill-tempered long-haired black and brown cat.

  I fed and watered both animals at the man’s request.  When they
  ran out of the food, I bought more for them.  When the weather got
  cold, I bought propane for his little trailer to keep water in liquid
  state for Tami.  He came back for her about that time, but didn’t
  take the puppy.  That winter, the young dog began getting into
  garbage and begging for handouts from neighbors.  One of the
  neighbors started calling him Handout, which was better than shit, I
  suppose.  Another neighbor threatened to shoot him if he found him
  scattering his garbage again, so I took Handout to my place and chained
  him up for his protection.

  Handout was “our” dog for about 14 years.  Doug grew up with
  him.  He was always too crazy, near-feral and rambunctious, to be
  indoors or to be allowed off the chain during the garden season. 
  When there was snow on the ground, I’d let him off and watch as he ran
  free for a while.  He would run up to me, then race away, circle
  around and come back.  In spring when he began to shed his winter
  coat, I’d brush it out for him.  I’d talk to him and he’d talk
  back in husky howls and songs as I worked in the garden. 

  He grew old, arthritic and nearly blind by the time we came over here
  to housesit.   His last winter here, he failed to grow the usual
  winter coat, and he cried all the time but wouldn’t come in the
  house.  If carried in, he’d creep to the door, scratch and cry to
  get out.  Greyfox put him out of his misery and dragged his corpse
  on a sled into the woods for the scavengers. 

  The following year, Koji came along.  We had bought firewood from
  a young couple who were getting ready to leave the area.  Their
  dog had a litter of puppies they had to get rid of before they
  left.   Doug and Greyfox and I could not agree on whether we
  “wanted” another dog.  I did; they didn’t.  The couple came
  by the day before they were to leave, with a box full of puppies. 
  They said that they would have to kill any they couldn’t find homes
  for.  Greyfox wasn’t home, and Doug was easily persuaded to rescue
  a puppy.

  There were seven pups in the box, all male.  Most were blonde, and
  three were solid black.  The people said their mother was a
  “husky”, which around here means a sled dog of mixed heritage. 
  Their father, they said, had been a collie.  They said that the
  puppies were six weeks old.  My guess is that they were about the
  same age Anak had been when he was abandoned:  about three or four
  weeks.  We took all the pups out of the box and watched them
  wobble around the living room floor.

  I knew it would have been absurd to try and save them all, but that was
  my instinctive impulse.  Doug reasoned me out of trying to keep
  two or three of them.  The blondes were very cute, but some were
  obviously ill, with signs of diarrhea.  Some of the pups just sat
  there howling; others shuffled around, sniffing and crying.  One
  little bright-eyed black guy explored quietly on wobbly legs.  He
  was the one we kept.  He must know I’m thinking about him, because he just came over and laid his head on my lap.

  The people left us a sandwich bag full of “food” for the
  pup.  It was a mixture of nonfat dry milk and instant
  oatmeal.  I prepared a dish of it for him and he was hungry enough
  to try to eat it, but all he could manage was a face-plant in the
  gruel.  I fed him the first few days by letting him lick and suck
  food from my fingers.  We bonded.
  
  As
  he grew, his bone structure suggested some doberman ancestry. 
  When his guard hairs grew in, his coloration was that of an
  Alsatian.  He has always tended to stand up on his hind legs to
  see farther, causing one man who saw him to liken him to a bear. 
  Like any good sled dog, he pulls.  He wears a regular neck collar
  to which we hook the outdoor chain or his indoor tether, but if we
  tried leashing him to it for a walk, he’d pull us off our feet. 
  He wears a Gentle Leader head collar, his “snoot suit,” for
  walks.  He outgrew one and wore out another and is now on his
  third Gentle Leader.

  He chews.  At first, he would chew on anything.  He ate a
  sweater with which we had lined his bed.  We had to teach him not
  to eat firewood.  We substituted rawhide, and we keep him supplied
  with it so he won’t eat the furniture.  We trained him in bite
  inhibition so he won’t hurt us or the cats or anyone else, but that
  doesn’t keep him from doing threat charges after cats who act like prey
  or snapping at us if we want to trim his toenails or put him on his
  tether when he doesn’t want to go.  He has many traits of a
  dominant alpha dog, which he might be in a dog pack.  It’s just
  his bad luck that he ended up as the bottom dog in a mixed
  primate/feline pack.

  Koji’s worst luck came in January, 2005, while our computer was
  down.  Greyfox left a bulletin here from the public library when Doug shot the moose.  When we got the comp back, I wrote first about my initial emotional reaction to the moose stomping my dog.  My next entry had pictures of us butchering the moose
  in our front yard.  Koji still shows signs of PTSD.  He is
  jumpy and quick to bark at any noise or strange presence in our
  yard.  Before the moose-stomping, he didn’t mind if a cat ate a
  bit of his kibble.  Now, he guards his feeding station and I try
  to avoid filling his dish unless he’s ready to eat, because a full dish
  is a cause of anxiety.  If a kitten takes a playful swipe at his
  rawhide chewy, he doesn’t seem at all playful when he snarls, growls
  and snaps at the kitten.

  Nevertheless,
  he has never hurt any of them, just scared them.  He growls
  fiercely, shows his teeth and snaps his jaws, but on a couple of rare
  occasions that he has accidentally connected with my flesh or Doug’s,
  there has been no penetration and he always seems contrite if he hurts
  one of us.  

  It took a few years, but he has come to understand that we want the
  garbage collectors to steal our trash.  He no longer barks at
  them, but he barks at other passing cars — except for those of
  neighbors he knows.  His discrimination demonstrates a certain
  level of intelligence, but even though the trains run on schedule and
  we’ve tried to reassure him about them, in winter when the sound
  carries and they seem to be right outside our walls, he barks a them.

  Sometimes when he catches some scent on the wind, he snuffles at the
  bottom of the door and his neck hairs rise, and he growls.  I
  assume then that he’s smelling a moose, but it could be a bear, a stray
  dog or a fox.  I don’t know.  His nose is a lot keener than
  mine.

  

  • 7:50 pm
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