Elvis's Comfy Crate
Elvis's Story
In the spring of 2004 . . .
Every winter, I go buy 80 lbs or so of cheap cat litter and put it in the back of my truck for ballast. Then in the spring I give the cat litter to the Pocatello Animal Shelter. No doubt they can use it with the stray cats in this town outnumbering the stars in the night sky. So In late April of 2004, I went to the shelter for just such a delivery. Of course I went into the dog area to look around and I saw a pointer in there. A jowly pointer. A very jowly pointer. And skinny too. As skinny as he was jowly. A week or so later I came up again and he was still in there, so I started emailing the Pointer Rescue Organization (PRO) to see if we could post his information on their website for a little extra publicity. He was a very friendly boy, and fairly well-mannered. When he was still up there the following week, I started taking him for pretty long walks to get him out of the shelter for a longer time than the volunteers up there could afford for one dog. And he loved his walks. By the way, his name was Elvis. After a couple weeks of me taking him for his daily constitutional, PRO found a foster for him in Wyoming. So I busted him out of there and Kate and I were gonna keep him for two weeks - until he could be fattened up enough to be neutered safely and transported to Kemmerer for a more permanent foster home.
Well, Elvis was my good buddy long before he came home with me. So when time was getting short and he was preparing to head for a more permanent foster home in Wyoming, I made the decision to keep him. PRO let me keep him so long as we gave them proof of his nutlessness, so there we have it. And for now, that's about the end of the story. He's wonderful in the house and he and Sue get along just great and they wrestle and chase one another until we tell them enough is enough. He knows how to be a good boy in his kennel and has never made a mess in the house. And he does his little happy dance whenever . . . well really most of the time he's not wrestling with Susan.
In the summer of 2004 . . .
Elvis has started basic obedience class! Sorta. We take him but he's too enthused by the birds outside at the fairgrounds to pay any attention whatsoever to me. So I've gotta work him indoors at home for a few weeks until he gets the hang of paying attention to me. Once he can do it in the back yard, I'll try getting his attention for just a second in class. Then how do you reward him for paying attention? Food and toys pale in comparison to watching birds. So we'll be taking basic again. But in the meantime, I'll still take him up to class on Mondays and let him start getting used to being up there and around all those people and such.
In some other news, we take Elvis on walks up some trails near here, and he's a maniac. Now that he's got some more strength back, he cruises through the sagebrush. And since we've got him on a flexi (otherwise he'd be long gone) he takes out entire sage plants from time to time with the flexi cord. He's quite powerful and energetic. Not nearly as coordinated and athletic as Sue though. But he's very very good at freeing himself from his leashes. Not necessarily because he wants to; usually it's just his exuberance that winds him up off leash. One time he actually bent a link on his pinch collar while we were on one of these walks. He didn't get off lead though, because he'd slipped a link in the same collar once before. After that first time, we got wise and coupled his leash to his other collar as well. But after actually bending that link, we went ahead and got him the medium pinch collar, which by the way is enormous relative to the small. So we haven't had anymore of those incidents.
In general though, he's doing well. In the back yard, he's goofy and out of even his own control. His favorite backyard game is fetch, which Susan has never been all that interested in playing (of course she gets irate if she's left out of it). In the house, he's . . . well he's still quite goofy, but he's also a snuggle bunny. <grin> He still loves to hop on the couch or the bed and burrow underneath the nearest human. He's still my buddy.