Did I tell you the story about my childhood dog? No? Suckers!
So while growing up we had so many different pets. We first had cats, then chickens, then rabbits and at one time a pet rat. We eventually even had a hamster which my mother resuscitated when it tried to die. Yes she gave CPR to a hamster and revived it. Oh, so much, another story!
My brother about 30 some years ago with Shoestring
One pet we kids begged her for was a dog. Which she always insisted we couldn’t do. A dog needed room, which she claimed we didn’t have. (Although we had a pretty big backyard compared to hers or mine NOW! So she must have had an acre in mind!) She told us, should we EVER even THINK about getting a dog it would be a small one. Of course, I think at heart she really just didn’t want another pet to deal with. (As a mother, I completely don’t blame her!)
So imagine how shocked we are that one day she comes home from her office (her Pediatric office) with a puppy. An Irish Setter puppy, no less! Hello!!! NOT a small dog!
“Don’t get attached, ” she announces. “I’m only holding it for 10 days for a patient.”
Turns out they couldn’t pay the fee and used the dog as collateral for payment! Needless to say that patient never came back for said collateral! And just like that we had a dog. So we had to name him. Us kids called this puppy everything from Big Red to Rex to King to Fido. But my father called him Shoestring…. because he had a shoestring tied around his neck like a collar. And of course, THAT is the name that stuck!
None of us knew how to train a dog, much less how to OWN an Irish Setter. He got minimal baths and the even rarer brushing. There was no formal obedience schooling to a leash so he was just a bitch to walk. Pulling constantly and obeying never! When he was a puppy we played with him. When he was an adolescent dog we played less. When he became an adult dog we mostly ignored him. Although it was fun to get him on the trampoline, he loved it. When he was dealing with horniness and humping everything in sight we actually took him somewhere to breed which basically cured it. I mean, after doing it with an actual female dog he left visitors and such alone!
Like the cats, it never occurred to us to have him fixed. He never used his dog house, preferring to sleep & hang out in the crawl space under the house. The better to scare the shit out of the mailman with deep, loud barking whenever he came. And as he aged he got eczema that pretty much denuded his fur from his tail up to his shoulders.
He did two things that are the most memorable for me. Once, as a high schooler I decided to take him for a walk. I put him on the leash and was successfully wrestling him down the block by trying to walk as fast as his pace when from the corner came the sudden barking of a dog.
And Shoestring lunged into a run. I, the hapless victim, was pulled off my feet and dragged the length of a house before I could even let go of the leash. When I stood up, my dog was no where in sight. The first words out of my mouth were, “I’m going to KILL that dog!” Which, looking back, was downright hilarious when you realize I then spent an hour LOOKING for the dog.
If I really wanted him dead, I would have just walked home and let Fate HAVE him. To hell with the damn beast. But even though I went home with no dog, eventually he did show up, limping slightly, sometime that night. At which point I ceased to WANT to be a veterinarian as my father suggested I examine the dog’s leg to see why he was limping. The dislike of that drove me right out of that career choice!
My other main memory of my childhood dog was how my brother would walk him. He wouldn’t exactly “walk” him. He’d put him on his leash (a choke chain collar… yes we were ignorant horrible pet owners) and then get on his skateboard and have Shoestring pull him down the street. The dog loved the effort, my brother loved the ride. But really, we should have used a harness!
We sucked as pet owners!