The flying dog.

I am the owner.. no, i am the cohabitant of three beautiful dogs (Ok, the smallest sized and oldest at the same time is not that beautiful, i must admit), aged 8, 4 and 9 months. The oldest, who we call "the old hag" is a little nasty thing with teeth, that will practically chew the legs off anyone that she doesn't like or who she thinks have or will wrong anyone in the household (including the family objects such as slippers, couches, and so on).

The 4 year old one is a lovely labrador girl who, last year, gave birth to 7 beautiful pups, all resulted from a controlled erhm.. date with a beautiful golden labrador, vet present and all. I assisted through the birth and then the raising (feeding, cleaning, helping the mom who was scared of them at first!, weighing, administering medication and taking to the vet for checkups and vaccination) of seven beautiful and incredibly cute pups who then each found a loving home with new families. We ourselves kept a pup, a nice lil bugger who, as we'd later find out, was immune to the parvo vaccine. It is rare but it sometimes happens. No vaccine is 100% efficient. Needless to say, he got it and he (and we) went through hell in order to regain his health. After that he got babesyosis from what probably was the only tick in the country that survived the cold weather conditions outside. We cured him again but it was mostly his strong and young immune system and his will that helped him shake off those diseases like they were nothing.

I also suspect that there is a little dog god out there somewhere, somehow, sending little dog angels to watch over the mutts of the world, wings and halos and all.

The reason i'm saying this is because after parvo and babesyosis failed to kill him, our dog aquired quite a taste for adventure and adrenaline.

So he threw himself in the pool.

It might not sound like much, after all, it is every dog natural instinct to do the exact swimming movements required to keep his head above the water level. But when the neighbour saw him, floating around in the pool, with his paws outstretched and having what i imagine was a look of defeat on his stupid face, it was not the natural instinct that had kept him alive in that early saturday morning when everyone from our household was sleeping. It was merely the fact that his hind legs were touching the pool floor and therefor he was walking around, not knowing exactly where the exit was. Not that it was white and big and had steps or anything, but i can't really blame him. We threw his mom in the pool when we got her, specifically to avoid situations where she would fall in the pool unnoticed and she would not be able to see the way out. We had trained her where the exit was and after that experience we had quite a scandal on our hands; The pool is not ours and the rightful owners were convinced that we were trying to summon a fur demon to clog up their pipes and whatnot.

Getting back to our least sharp tool in the shed, we hadn't yet performed the rites of initiation of where the big shiny white steps were and how they could help him get out. After exorcising the fur demon we'd summoned on our last ceremony, my folks decided that no dog shall ever defile the pristine waters again. On this topic, we were waging a conversational war with them - and losing badly. Until the little stunt our youngest dog pulled.

After he went through this experience and the whole 10 minutes it took us to teach him where to go if ever in trouble, our little angel decided that his next valiant act would have to take him closer to the stars.

So he threw himself out the window.

We locked him and his mom, as usual, in the bathroom in our space at the 1st floor. Next morning the doorbell rang and we were both still in bed, hoping someone else would get it so we could get a few more minutes' worth of sleep. The little guy started barking happily.. from the back yard (yes, it's a loud doorbell). My fiancee asked me if i took the dogs out. "No i didn't, did't you?" i replied. So he rushed downstairs to find out what happened, while i was taking comfort in the ideas that 1. The dog clearly was in a healthy state due to the happy ruckus he was making, and 2, my fiance was all over it.

From the bathroom there came a shout; My fiancee was probably pulling some of his hair out, saying that he wants to kill himself; the dog had jumped out the window. Meanwhile, the dog was outside, barking everytime the doorbell rang. And as a dog lover, you must know to differentiate the different types of barking, it was a happy, "someone's out, who's there, i wanna see, i wanna play" sort of bark, not aggressive, not hurt.

So i rushed outside, dressed in whatever my sleepy eyes could find at that hour, only to find the brightest tool in the shed running around happy to see me, wagging his tail like crazy and throwing himself a toy high up in the air.

So i laughed, called him a few bad names and went back up to the first floor. I studied the bathroom; It was dirty, there were paws in the bathtub and the musquito net from the window was busted open. Later my fiancee would tell me how, when he entered the bathroom, the mom dog would look desperately, first at him, then at the window as if saying "That's where he went!". I went to the window and stared down to see a huge bush, almost 3 meters tall, sporting a mild disturbance in the leves found on its top. I was in awe. That dog has something watching over him. He must have plunged right into that tall bush, which, after scratching him like crazy, saved his life. "Well, at least now we know he's not afraid of heights!" i thought and closed the musquito net. After a close inspection, our little angel was revealed to have not a single scratch mark or bruise or any other sign that he had jumped from a window.

Moral of the story?

Is there such a thing? Oh yes, maybe there is.. Even if you do the same thing over and over, do not underestimate the creativity of a young mind and do not ever put it behind even a young dog to do something you wouldn't dream of in a thousand years.

And thus ends the story of our flying dog.