For the love of wild animals (March Issue of Bella)

I don’t have kids.  I have a dog and a cat.  And I should probably never have kids if my parenting skills were judged on my animal raising abilities.

The dog, Bailey, is the poster child for those bawl your eyes out commercials of adorable but sad puppies in shelters.  Never mind the fact that Bailey is overweight and has cushy beds in every room of the house.  According to the looks she gives me, I should be arrested and featured on “Animal Cops”.  Around 5:15 every day you would assume she was starving to death because I NEVER feed her.  She will lie down and look up at me with these big brown eyes that are just dripping with sadness.  Little whimpers of desperation escape her as she withers away before me.  She barely survives from one meal to the next.  When the longest fifteen minutes of her life have passed (dinner is at 5:30), she comes to life and skips into the kitchen after me (if dogs could skip…).  She alternates between jumping and barking as I fix her a big bowl of life saving food.  Her eyes are filled with excitement over a bowl of dry crunchy dog food.  And suddenly all is right with the world (until 7:30 anyway, that is her nightly Greenie time and we go through this whole ordeal again). 

Bailey is also a tormented pup.  She is a very submissive dog which I apparently take advantage of through various forms of abuse.  This abuse ranges from Halloween costumes (it was for a free day at doggie daycare) and bows around her neck.  I have even put a blanket over her head to test her canine IQ (the faster they manage to get out from under the blanket the higher their IQ).  Whenever I do anything to her, she hangs her head and slinks down to the ground.  Then she lets out a heavy sigh of resignation and just lays there.  I think she believes that if she stays there motionless for long enough I will leave her alone.  I guess this means her IQ is either in the negative numbers or off the charts because she is smart enough not to play my silly games.

But Bailey is not the only one whose life I have in my hands…there is also Phoebe the cat.  Phoebe came to me as a stray that was too young to feed herself.  I had to bottle feed and then wean her.  I essentially saved her life and she understands that.  I know this because whenever I leave the house she thinks I have left her for dead.  I am her only hope for survival. In order to escape the loneliness she will gnaw on her tail like a fox chewing through its tail to escape the trap.  I can typically leave her for a weekend but anything longer requires supervision. 

I recently returned from being away for two nights.  Phoebe greeted me at the door waving her bloody stump of a tail in excitement.  And because she had run her tail against the walls, my house looked like a Barbie-sized crime scene.  I was hoping Horatio Ken did not appear to try to arrest me in Miami Barbie CSI’s pink Hummer.   Phoebe ended up losing part of her tail and is now on kitty Prozac that I rub on her ears each night.  Hint: when the pharmacist tells you that you must wear latex gloves when applying the medicine to make sure that none enters your bloodstream; don’t say “Do I have too???”

Truth is I love my wild animals.  They make my life more fulfilling and I can’t imagine life without a little zoo in it.  There are definitely some days that make me question my caretaking abilities.  Bailey and Phoebe may be a little neurotic, but we are a little family.  I would imagine that parents feel the same way, not always sure of what they are doing but offer lots of love and support.  Maybe I wouldn’t be such a bad parent after all.

It's all fun and games until someone ends up in an e-collar

I may have mentioned this before, but my cat is certifiably crazy.  I came home last night after enjoying the merriment of Christmas at my mom's house.  I was only gone for two nights, and usually Phoebe can handle a couple of nights on her own.  I was worried that I may find her hanging in the tree like a live ornament, but I did not expect to come home and find her tail almost chewed off.  I've heard of wild animals chewing off their own legs to escape a trap....was Phoebe trying to escape her climate controlled, filled food dish, and comfy bedded home? 

I whisk her to the emergency vet and a couple of hours later we come home with a bandaged tail, an e-collar, and lots of meds.  Houdini (aka Phoebe) managed to wriggle her way out of the e-collar in her crate during the 10 minute ride home.  A crate that is so small she can barely turn around in it.  My very own little Criss Angel had escaped her cone.  I wrangle it back onto her (which I would liken to wrestling with a greased up pig. Not that I have ever wrestled a pig...greased or otherwise.  It's just what I think it would be like.  Only my pig has claws and sharp teeth to add to the enjoyment).  Phoebe crouched in a corner and growled for a while before she tried walking around.  This is when I learned that my cat has absolutely zero depth perception as she repeatedly walked straight into the wall with her lampshade necklace.  And then growled at the wall for being there.  I carried her upstairs so that we could hopefully get some sleep. 

I was not prepared for the bloody crime scene that existed upstairs.  There were blood splatters on the walls, spots on the carpet, and I don't even want to discuss my bed.  But since all of the spots were right along the baseboards, I imagine this is what it would look like if Barbie met a violent end.  I needed Horatio Ken to investigate what had taken place upstairs.  Just as I am recreating the crime, Phoebe comes in and sits in front of me...no cone, no bandage, and a freshly bloodied tail.  And I had only left her in the bedroom for 5 minutes.

I called the emergency vet again:

Me:  Um, hi, I was just there with my cat who eats her tail...and she is evidently Houdini reincarnated.  She is now being all crouching tiger and pouncing on her tail.  Can I try some sedatives until I can get her to the regular vet in the morning?

Vet:  This is your cat on sedatives. 

Me:  Oh.  I'd hate to see her on uppers....

So off we go back to the emergency vet so she can stay the night locked up tight in a cage.  I expected them to call me and say that my escape artist had broken her chains, but all was well when I picked her up.

Now she is at our regular vet.  When she comes home her tail will be a bit shorter with fewer self inflicted puncture wounds.  And some anti-anxiety meds that I have to have specially compounded into a paste so that I can just rub it on her ears ("specially compounded" is just a fancy way of saying "uber-expensive"). 

On the bright side, Bailey is enjoying her Phoebe free home today.

Merry Christmas Mom!  I got you hundreds of dollars in vet fees for Christmas!

Bailey, the canine trash compactor

Things Bailey has eaten in her lifetime (so far):

• A kitchen floor (in a rental unit!)
• Numerous toys
• A pin cushion with the pins still in it
• A hairbrush
• Shoes
• Sand (this is the only thing so far that has required emergency surgery)
• 1.5 squirrels
• Bugs
• Tomato plants
• Maybe a bird (she was sitting in a pile of feathers with a couple hanging from her mouth...the evidence points to bird snack)
• Human thyroid medication
• A Thermacare heat wrap

Things Bailey has eaten in the past two weeks alone:

• Tissues
• 2 loaves of bread
• My razor
• 2 stuffed toys
• A rawhide bone that had been buried for quite some time (the bone's remains have since been buried in my underwear drawer in the closet...yes, that was her choice, not mine)
• 3 metal tips for decorating cakes (don't tell my mom - these were borrowed from her!)

You would think that by the age of 11, some of this would have settled down.  You would think I didn't feed her.  I'm afraid she missed her calling as a sword swallower and performing on "America's Got Talent". We could have been millionaires instead of spending small fortunes at the vet!

I still love her though....

I give up!

Last night I went to bed to the sound of Phoebe retching up grass onto the floor and this morning I woke up to Bailey's late night accident in the kitchen.  That was it.  The last straw.  I'm done with trying to keep this house straight.

You know the way Dexter covers an entire room with and all of its contents with clear plastic before he slices someone up to bits?  Well I'm gonna Dexter-ize my house.  I have decided to cover the interior of my home in plastic so that I can clean it up so well not even the police would be able to determine what I do in here.  I'm not doing this so I can cut people up in my spare time, but instead so I can keep my house clean.  It would catch all of the animal hair, animal accidents, and animal stomach contents.  All I would have to do to clean would be to hose it down!  If it got really bad, I could tear it down and start fresh!

Granted, the furniture would be very uncomfortable on hot days but otherwise I see no flaws in this plan.

Auto-dial

When I go to bed at night, I plug in my phone and set it on "calls only" so that I don't hear all of its beeps, bloops, and blips.  I also do not lock the keyboard because I know that if I do receive a call that wakes me, my sleep fogged mind can barely figure out how to answer much less be able to unlock it before answering.  I learned the hard way to lock the keyboard after my handbag called my sister's boyfriend one too many times....

Early this morning my phone rang and once I processed what the sound was, I panicked.  I immediately wondered who had died.  Did it cross my mind that it could have been a wrong number?  Nope...I jumped directly to death.  Must be the pessimist in me.  I root around for my phone but can't find it.  As the anxiety increases with each chime, I finally find it under Bailey (don't ask me how it got there).  I see it is my aunt in North Carolina and I assume that my entire family here had died and that was why she was calling me and not my mom.  Unfortunately in all of this I miss the call and have to call her back.

"Hello?"
"What did you need?  Why did you call me?" I urgently ask.
"What?  I called you because you called me a half hour ago."
"No I didn't, I was sound asleep.  And I specifically asked the doctor NOT to give me Ambien to keep this from happening...."
"Yes, you did call and when I answered I just heard muffled sounds."
"Wait a minute" and I look down at Bailey....

Luckily my aunt is an early riser and has a good sense of humor.