HOUND SOUND

You know the sound, if you have dogs, particularly HOUND DOGS.  If something new, wrong, or unexpected occurs, they will sound the doggie alarm.

Ahrooooo!

Woof!

Off Leash! dog walking by ~ OFF LEASH!!

Ahroooo!

Violation!  Violation!

BIG BOX ~ man mommy thinks is cute ~ shorts ~ brown truck.  

Stranger Danger!

Ahroooo!!

Woof!

My sister stole decapitated fat cat chew toy ~ MINE.  

Call to arms!

 AHROOOO!!

bark...BARK

Neighbor in her yard pulling weeeeds!! (woof)

Violation!  Extreme Violation!  

AHROOOOO!!

SQUIRREL on ground. 

 ALERT!!  ALERT!!!  ALL PAWS ALERT!

AHROOOOO!!!

wooOOFF!

Out of place ~ sofa has MOOOOOOVED!

Violation!

AHROOOOO!

Apparently, I, too, am at least part hound dog.  This has been quite a week for me & I am releasing my own "ALL PAWS ALERT."

Throughout my childhood, I would cry & hide in my room beside my bed from the cruelty of life on our upstate New York farm - afraid to stand up for the tormented, suffering 4-legged souls that lived in & around our barn.  

As an adult I have ignored & deleted any sad or difficult animal stories from my brain, my computer, & my bookshelf.  I have asked people not to speak of "awful" animal events in my presence.  I have always opted to remain in my magical world of All Fuzzy Things Sweet, Happy, & Wonderful.

Well I got slapped in my brain this week, hard! - something broke through my  perfect crystal wall of innocence that had been shielding me from the sad stories of evil doers, & mutilated dogs, cats & other gorgeous creatures in our world.

It was a horrific photo of torture that I simply could not ignore.  I was abruptly struck by the fact that absent from this picture & it's accompanying blurb were the important details.  And then I realized that rarely are these tales of abused, tortured, tormented, torn up critters EVER accompanied by any truly useful information.  

VIOLATION! WOOF!

I can no longer wait for Karma to do her thing.   

I cannot pretend this evil does not exist.
I am at the end of my "Mrs. Nice-Girl who ignores all things evil" rope.



I need to know & we all have the right & obligation to know:

• WHO committed these heinous acts?
• Where do they live?
• In which state & city do they live?
• On what street do they reside?
• What is their house number?
• Where do they work?
• Do they have access to children?
• Do they have other pets?

WOOF!

I am barking out my loudest hound sound.

AHROOOO!!!

Something is wrong in my world.  

VIOLATION. 

 EXTREME EPIC VIOLATION.

For me, I don't need to know the friggin' minutia of these cases.  Please, no gory details of the crime with color photos of the tortured animal lying in its own feces.   My heart still can't take it.

I do need a full color photo of the CRIMINAL, the perpetrator - the sick human that is responsible.  Their dirty deed has been done & we cannot change the atrocities inflicted upon the poor creature that died or nearly died.   BUT...We can protect ourselves & those we love from another despicable act from this MONSTER.

WOOF!

If there is an animal torturer in your neighborhood - you need to know about it.  They need to be identified & watched.  They should not be trusted near any other animals or children.

Here's the database   http://www.pet-abuse.com/     Check your city & neighborhood.
You can find abusers listed here & submit the names of abusers*.

I intend to BLAST the names & faces of these dangerous criminals to the public so we can prevent further crimes against our beloved 4-legged beauties & protect our communities.




*This data base is very good.  They collect all kinds of info.  It includes photos & details of the crime, as well as the criminal.  I understand how important this "minutia" (as I called it) is to those who track these kinds of crimes.  For me, as I've stated, it's more than my heart can bare right now.

And remember, the data base is only as good as the input they receive.  We can help make it better. 

 http://www.pet-abuse.com/

My Ancestors

For about four years now I've had an increasing interest in family history- mostly my own family, but I love the puzzling aspect of everybody's backstory.  If you haven't done it, you should check out ancestry.com.  There's so much information on this website & it's intuitively easy to use.  I could, & often do,  spend hours there doing research, looking at documents & just enjoying, what for me has been, the ever deepening mystery of my ancestors.  

Oh how I wish this bug had bitten when my Grandparents were living.  As I recall, though, they never liked to speak too much about their past - apparently some secrets, dirt, skeletons, & not always happy memories existed for them.  And in "those days" we didn't discuss that kind of thing.  I would have been strung up for my open mouth & it's loose lippy ways.  I was born in the right decade to preserve my own life.  

In addition to using the ancestry website to feed my puzzling passion (tracing your roots really is like working a puzzle) & experiencing the pure joy of putting together my family's sketchy history, I have been lucky enough to have been bequeathed boxes, bags-full, & albums of family photos from all sides.

Here's how the majority of these old family photos came to me:  "Dawn, do you want any of these old photos?  If you don't take them home, I'm throwing them away."

I love to use my OCD skills to pour over these yellowed black, sepia, & white, shedding old brown-orange crusty-taped, musty-smelling photos, trying to cipher the word or two someone might have bothered to jot on the back.  

I scan each one, label it digitally if I know who, what, when, or on the rare occasion WHERE, & then further categorize them by family, my preferences, & species (you know - "animals," "the farm," "buildings," "unknown." Don't judge  - we all have our own definition of species!)  I crop, enhance, rotate,  & create my own historical pictorial.  

My biggest joy-bomb, by far, in these photos has been in the discovery that there are so many incredible dogs in my family's history.  

I HAD NO IDEA!!!

No one EVER talked to me about dogs.  My parents never had dogs when I was growing up.  NO ONE, even in my extended family, lived with dogs.  

Well, guess what...I've found at least 15 different dogs in photos of my ancestors.  WTH???  Someone dropped the dog ball during my life time.

To see this gorgeous farm dog of my mom's mother's mother's father elevated to the two-barrel status makes me so happy!!

Meet SANDY.
In a time when you know money was
scarce, I am so proud of my family
for having a portrait made of their
tuxedo dog!!  (circa 1920)

I am still, even in this very moment, amazed that, Dogs, like horses, have always been in my family "blood."  I had to mature to the ripe old age of 41 before my (as it is obvious to me only now) inherited love & frankly out of control PASSION for dogs kicked in.  

 Warning:  Cliché ahead....

Dogs, like cotton, have become the texture of the fabric that is me.   

I KNEW it!!  White bully dogs are in my genes.  That explains
why I am obsessed with these beauties.  I came by it honestly!! (through my crazy family!!)

I have had this picture since I was probably 14 years old.  

(Long before I had a conscious passion for canines.)

I was always fascinated by the steps to no where.  

I don't remember who was going to throw this one away. 

 I probably dug it out of a burn barrel.  

The back of the photo tells us everything we need to know.

(see below)

Woof, Rover, Woof.

Anthro-Mo-Pho-Whatta?

Anthropomorphizing:  I can’t spell it without a spellcheck assist, have profound trouble saying it, but surely exemplify it a thousand times daily. 

You know the concept ... attributing human characteristics to things UN-human.

Who can blame me?

My reference IS human - it's all I have, really.  

(paraphrased from the blogger called Doyle)

Even fancy-pants scientists anthropomorphize. 

• The Weatherologists (or what-EVER they call themselves - big weather guesser people) name storm systems with, not some scientific jargon attached to a date, but very human names like Fay & Andrew.  
• Computer geeks talk to their hardware and software as if it had ears and was responding to verbal commands (hmmmm... maybe it does respond, but that doesn't make it human...). 
• At MIT in 1917 they were referring to cars/engines/gadgets/boats as SHE/HER/FEMALES.  Of course that is done by nearly all of us still today.  In fact, referring to a gigantic war ship as a she or her is currently recognized as proper and official Navy-Speak.
• In medicine there are killer t-cells that come out attack foreign bodies.
• Ever looked through a microscope & thought to yourself, "I wonder who those guys are?"  They're probably NOT guys.
• Think back to the early science classes when we were shown the graphic footage of molecules becoming attracted to each other & all the different ways they share & form bonds.  How sweet.

Language leads us to humanize so many things:

-cameras have eyes (so do needles)

-chairs have legs (so does wine)

-pins have heads (& beer, too, of course)

-clocks have faces while rivers have just a mouth.

As children, we are not so subtly led to anthropomorphize.  

• Books show us in still life - that little train that thought he could, thought he could, thought he could, & turns out, (spoiler alert!!) he actually could.
• Cartoons make nonhuman critters have many human characteristics.  You may know the rabbit that stands upright on only two of his legs, holds his carrot like a cigar & asks "Eh, What's up, Doc?"  Who could forget that big-bubble-headed little yellow bird that tawt he taw a feline & he did, he did.
• Fairy tales, like the one with three sizes of bears & the blonde girl talking about the exact perfect temperature for porridge.

Is the opposite of anthropomorphize to dehumanize?

 I hope not.  

I would guess that the majority of us who are enamored with dogs practice anthropomorphism. 

 My dogs each have their own voice with special accents & drawls & my husband & I love to verbalize what they are thinking & trying to say throughout the day.  (Don't be fooled, when my hound Lucas speaks, he sounds dopey as all get out, but he really is smart!!)  My fur kids favorite holiday is every Saturday (they get to spend the entire day with Mommy & Daddy.)  And Eiyso has a watch to let everyone know when it's dinner time.

I know - I am fully aware - that my dogs are not little fuzzy humans. 

However, they make me human.

….they contribute to my humanity & keep me humble

….they make up for all my faults.  

It’s not too much pressure to put on them;  They told me they welcome the challenge & are up to the task.   

Technology is freakin' killing me....