If a Dog Was Your Teacher...

Posted at the Lessons Taught By Life page on Facebook. It echoed so much of my Lessons In Life From Dogs series for the April Challenge in 2014 that I simply had to share.

The secret, not just to happiness but to fulfillment and serenity? Be more dog.

The Chihuahua Who Became Chucho

The name his rescuer gave him was Everest, because she found him in Montaña, a neighborhood in here in Curaçao, which translates to "Mountain"... Personally, I might have gone with Kilimanjaro, or even Blanc (you know, for Mont), but—well, naming is the rescuer's prerogative. Either way, this first name wasn't going to last, because a couple of months later, when a fabulous woman adopted him—only temporarily, as it turned out, but I'm getting ahead of myself here—she decided that, him being a (sort of) Chihuahua and all, he needed a more Mexican name. One of the most common appellatives in Mexico is Jesús (pronounced heh-SOOS), and every Jesús I know gets called, for unfathomable reasons, Chucho for short.

So Everest became Chucho.

Chucho (even before being called Everest) came to us on October 5th, 2016, and it was thanks to Facebook. I belong to several animal rescue groups (surprise, surprise), and on this particular fine afternoon a post popped up on my timeline from a fellow member asking for advice. She'd found this tiny dog on the side of the road, walking in tight, tight circles and acting disoriented. She didn't know what to do. I was probably the third person to reply, and echoed exactly what the other two people had said: Take him to the vet. ASAP. And I added that I'd be happy to do it myself, if she wanted. People not intimately familiar with rescue have no way of gauging what the veterinary 'damage' will be, so sometimes they hesitate to take an animal to the vet out of fear they won't be able to afford the bill. Plus, not everyone can drop their lives at a moment's notice in order to rush a strange dog to the ER. In this particular case, the rescuer said in her post that she knew next to nothing about dogs, that she'd always been more of a cat person; I felt she had done enough by picking up the dog to begin with, so it seemed only reasonable to step in and offer help.

At the home of his rescuer while they waited for me. All he wanted was to sleep. No water, no food, just... sleep. Yep, not a good sign.

I arrived at her door about a half hour later, after a few wrong turns but not nearly as many as I expected; it was Election Day here, and a voting location had been set up just a block from her house, so the crowd and the lines of parked cars were hard to miss. She helped me load the dog—who really was tiny; he'd looked rather larger in the photo she posted—into the car, and I promised to call as soon as I had some sort of diagnostic. I did warn her that, from the behavior she'd described—the walking in circles, the disorientation, the lack of appetite or energy—the prognosis would probably not be very good. "There's a chance he'll need to be put down," I told her, as kindly as I could. She nodded, reached a hand in through the open window to pet the tiny head again. "I understand."

A quick & dirty rescue story

I know, I know—I'm behind on rescue stories: the blind Chihuahua, the puppies... But this one happened just recently, and it has a gorgeous happy ending, too, so... Well, happy endings are too few and far between to postpone sharing, right?

Right.

So back in January I got a job. Yeah, a real one (albeit part-time), involving actual paychecks. And it didn't really work out the way I expected—I'll get into that some other time—so I quit. But, being the responsible human being I am, I didn't just quit; I gave a three-week notice. And over the course of those last three weeks, on my way to and from work, I kept seeing a rather large black dog, all matted fur and pointy ribs, on this one street. A rather busy street. I didn't see the dog every day, but whenever I did, traffic simply didn't allow me to stop. By the time I'd turned around and gone back, s/he was gone. Now, this dog looked skinny and in need of help, but s/he also looked street-smart. S/he wasn't panicky, dashing in front of oncoming cars or acting freaked out. (If she had, sorry, everyone, but I would've put the car in Park right there in the middle of the street and stopped traffic bodily if need be. I actually did that for a kitten, probably around a month old, that dashed out into the street right in front of the car ahead of me. I screeched to a stop, got out, ran out to stop the cars in the next lane, and herded the kitten—who was, miraculously, fine—back to his panicked owner on the sidewalk.)