Work (Properly)

Have you ever been excited to buy a new vacuum cleaner?



Me neither.

Foster 5.5?

Gracie Ann is back; apparently she's become the boss dog at the shelter, so she needs some time on the outside to get rehabilitated. Here's 30 seconds of her playing King of the Hill on the furniture with Buddy - you'll notice that she's winning.

Shock the Monkey

Shock the monkey.

Charlotte: Foster Five

Charlotte was our fifth foster - a blue tick coon hound stray that had just had a litter of puppies. She was emaciated; might have had worms; and her teats were chapped, full of milk, and obviously hurting her. Plus she smelled really bad. See her ribs in this photo?


While she was recuperating, she enjoyed sitting on the couch...


Sitting on the couch some more...


And wagging her really long tail. In fact, she wags her tail so much that she cut the end of her tail (what can I say, she was tragic), which then sprayed blood all over our walls and furniture at knee-height every time she wagged. I took a picture of this for the blog, but it was kinda morbid so I didn't post it. Sufficient to say, it looked like there was an elfin massacre in our living room.

This is called "happy tail" or "split tail," and is pretty common apparently for breeds like Great Danes. It's really tough to heal. Fortunately, Charlotte let us bandage her tail.


First we cleaned the cut with alcohol. Then we put on a neosporin-type antibiotic cream. Then we added a piece of gauze and wrapped it in athletic tape (the cloth type so that it breathes a little). This was changed daily.

Some dogs chew off their bandages. For them, people have developed crazy methods of tail-hiding, such as this one which requires a trip to the hardware store.

Her tail seemed to be healing but we don't know for sure because Charlotte was adopted; our first dog to get a new home while still in our care! She's got a great new family, a nice fenced back yard and a cat.