And Then There Were Four

The Cosmic Rule of Everything Governing Vacations Away From FAR Manor is: there’s going to be a crisis. Mrs. Fetched’s mom was kind enough to not let us know about it until we were on the way home.

When the World’s Most Obnoxious Dog reproduced, it was a deliberate plot by Mrs. Fetched… don’t ask me why, I’m sure she has her reasons. But she picked out one of her mom’s dogs to do the honors. In spite of what I said in that particular post, he must have just preferred to do the deed in private. Then he popped the latch and ran home. Mrs. Fetched was pretty sure that he was a couple notches removed from Crissy on the family tree, but Daughter Dearest said later that they both have the same mom. Hey, it’s Planet Georgia, a little inbreeding is to be expected, right?

Maybe we should have done it in Tennessee or Alabama, where they’re experts on that sort of thing. Four of the pups — including a female I named Walkabout because she was exploring and trying to escape the pen (I had to unsnag her from the chainlink more than once) before she had her eyes open — rapidly outgrew the other three. This wasn’t a big problem at first, but as they developed to where they could start eating food, the smaller three started having problems. By the time we were on our way home, Mrs. Fetched’s mom had taken two of them to the vet, who recommended they be put down because they were in a lot of pain. The third started having serious trouble Sunday afternoon. After Daughter Dearest said he had a seizure, Mrs. Fetched asked me to look up anything I could find online — one thing I found was that some puppies could be hypersensitive to flea powders and the like; Crissy had a flea collar and we’d been doing that stuff that comes out of the little squeeze tube, so Mrs. Fetched removed the collar and brought all the puppies in for a bath (with Crissy bringing up the rear). They did the little guy first, and had me hold him and keep an eye on him while they did the others. He had a seizure while I was holding him… we got through it, and then I noticed that his belly was hard. I started stroking it, which he protested, but he blew a little dog fart and it softened up quite a bit, which led me to wonder whether he was just having a gas attack. In a fit of optimism, I dubbed him Augustus Seizure (because it was August; I later learned that Julius actually did have epilepsy) and tried to make him as comfortable as possible.

Mrs. Fetched stayed up with him all Sunday night, and they both had a rough night. I was little better off, getting woke up by the yelping several times. She took him to the vet Monday morning, he guessed his intestines had a birth defect that would maybe let him live a few more days, and Mrs. Fetched decided to have him put down too.

The other four, fortunately, seem to be healthy and robust. The guy who’s been helping Mrs. Fetched with the chickens and other farm stuff is getting Walkabout (who is often up & moving when the other three are dozing, always looking for attention) when she’s old enough, but the other three are available. I kind of hope we’ll keep one and get rid of Crissy… they simply can’t be more obnoxious than their mom.