Three's A Crowd

Since the really cold weather showed up, left and then showed up again we've had a few more visitors in the house. They have pretty much figured out the pecking order so life is relatively peaceful even with upwards of 9 dogs in the house depending on how cold it is and who looks at me with sad puppy dog eyes - which is always a complete Oscar winning performance I might add!

The picture above is what made me laugh this afternoon. This is the dog couch which of course holds dogs. Usually it's just two but today they managed three.

Snoop is on the left. Her body decided she was quite pregnant (which she isn't) and so she stopped eating and started lactating. When it dropped to 40 below it was definitely time to bring her inside. Our dogs consume an enormous amount of calories in the extremely cold weather and so we load them up with kibble, fish, lots of warm soupy broth and plenty of straw so that they can live outside quite comfortably. But if a dog isn't eating they get cold, burn more calories trying to keep warm and lose weight rapidly. So in came Snoop.

She is a very easy going mutt where other dogs are concerned and is super affectionate. Her one trick is that she knows how to "high five."

The dog in the middle is Sneakers. He's been in the house for about a month now. Somehow he managed to wrap his chain around his leg which then froze. Normally when our dogs have a problem with their chains all the other dogs start barking frantically. In a dog yard there are barks that mean food is here, then louder joyous barks when the harnesses come out and then barks that mean "holy-crap-there's-some- major-stuff-happening-here!" In this case not a single dog made a peep. The whole yard went nuts the other day when Bart got his tongue stuck to some metal but they didn't so much as woof when Sneakers has his leg tangled in his chain.

The leg was eventually amputated just below the knee once it was obvious where the viable tissue was and for now he is a happy, albeit, 3-legged house dog. And yes he can move quite well thank you very much, especially when he gets away from me and I am chasing him.

It took Sneakers a bit to figure out where he fit in the chain of command and he finally decided that for now he's low male on the totem pole. Which gets me to the white dog. His name is Colonel.

Now Colonel is a retired leader who sounds like he's a 5-pack-a-day smoker when he howls. It's horrible really but we don't tell him that. Colonel is also a lump and lays in that spot on the couch pretty much all day except when Kiah growls at him and he moves over. Sometimes you have to look closely at Colonel to see if he's still breathing.

Colonel has also been a bit snappy with other dogs, particularly males, during his life so I was pretty surprised to see that he was tolerating Sneakers. Maybe it was that whole "dude, I'm missing part of my leg" ploy. Or maybe it's the Christmas spirit. In any event they lay like that for a while - until Sneakers fell off the couch and landed on Kiah who definitely did not demonstrate warm and fuzzy Christmas feelings!