“Lucky” walked into my life a few months back, skittish with sad-looking eyes and dermatitis. We don’t know if he was abandoned by his owners or just got lost, but after a month of us and our closest neighbors all tossing this sickly mutt of a dog food scraps every day (which only made him want to stay around longer), I finally caved in and decided to take him in. I started by shampooing him down which didn’t seem to bother him a bit. On the contrary, I think he loved the attention. That went well, so I picked him clean of fleas and set him out in the sun to dry. My neighbor recommended a very reasonable and competent local veterinarian where we took him for an injection and some blue anti-flea liquid she massaged into his neck. She suggested some anti-itch tablets and we took him down into Guanabo for a total of 3 shots over 3 weeks. He got to take rides in the car which he wasn’t so sure about, but he was very cooperative with the shots and barely even flinched. He also basked in the daily brushing in the opposite direction of his hair growth, which lifted out all his dry flaky skin. For a total cost of under $10 and in just a few weeks of treatment his hair had all grown back in and he was a shiny new boy feeling much more confident in himself.
I call him Lucky because he’s darned lucky we took him in when I definitely wasn’t looking for or wanting the duties a dog requires. We had a dog when we first married, a Belgian Shepherd. Who died of “moquillo”. That dog loved my husband but was a little crazy and would repeatedly throw itself against the metal door in the hallway when we’d leave in the morning, so much did he not like being left alone. After a couple of weeks of treating it with shots and “sueros” the neighborhood veterinarian concluded that the dog was past the point of no return, that even if he recovered he would have suffered irreparable neurological damage and it was time to put him down. I still remember the poor thing looking at us as it died, trying to hang on and the vet telling us to move out of his vision so he would just go to sleep. And then having to figure out where to get rid of the corpse. When you live in the city and back then we were traveling mostly by motorcycle. Only more recently have I discovered an improvised pet cemetery on the outskirts of Alamar, but I’m sure disposal of dead pet is an issue for many city dwellers.
We didn’t have a dog for awhile after that but my husband’s elderly grandmother had a small white dog called Canela. She loved that dog, and it was her constant companion. While I was visiting family in Canada my husband once took Canela home with him to stay at our house for a couple of days for one reason or another. Canela also hated to be left home alone during the day; she howled and howled all day long. Until she figured out how to escape and we never saw her again. We felt so bad for his grandmother’s loss that one day when we were at the beach and an evidently lost dog approached us, we decided to take him home. We bathed and perfumed him, tied a red bow on his ears and brought him to his grandmother as a present. But by then she (or perhaps more so her primary care-giver at the time) had decided that she didn’t want the work of a dog. Oh, crap. What did we do? We brought it back to the beach close to where we found it, convinced that he was quite healthy (probably not because of the abundance of beach scraps) and must have a home near there somewhere and if not somebody else would take him in.
Before Lucky arrived, I’d acted like a surrogate mother to our neighbors’ dogs for years without having the obligation of having to ensure their daily food. But those stupid sad eyes. I just couldn’t say no. He looooooves me. I assigned him a food and water dish out back in the patio. He knows they’re his, although the next door neighbor dog Dora would like some of the action since she was always the scrap recipient before Lucky. Dora the Explorer I call her, because she spends more time roaming around in our patio than her own, even though she has a guaranteed meal next door every night. She knows how to get through our wrought iron/brick fence but none of the other mangy neighborhood dogs have caught on yet. So being his most frequent visitor, Dora’s Lucky’s best friend. Dora’s the dominant female in the relationship. When they play-fight, Lucky more often than not rolls over and gives in to Dora the Boss at the first sign of trouble.
He has good habits such as doing his duty in the garden so I don’t have to clean turds off the patio. I can’t complain there. Early on during his first month living in our yard, one day at dusk I noticed his belly was swollen up like a balloon and I asked my neighbor if she’d happen to notice what he’d gotten into. She’d given him congris (rice & black beans), nothing out of the ordinary, but as we were talking he and Dora started fighting over the “frasada de piso” (Cuban mop cloth) I’d placed under the beach chair in our covered patio where Lucky used to sleep. They’d ripped it to shreds and quite a few of the pieces were missing, so we figure he ate it. My neighbor said we could take him down for an enema. But the vet was sick, and I wasn’t about to give the dog an enema, seriously. I have my limits. And my husband? Don’t even go there. My dog, my responsibility. By the next morning he was back to his regular size and apparently he’d passed the frasada in the garden. He now sleeps in an area he’s dug out in the dirt under the cover of a trailer in our garden. No more frasada de piso, sorry buddy.
He’s recently developed a bad tendency to nip at the heels or calves of strangers as they’re walking. He sneaks up behind them and catches them unaware, not quite so brave (or stupid?) as to confront them head-on. He’s nipped my stepson and my brother, and a few other people have sent in their reports. The utilities people who come to the house usually circumspectly eye him up before coming in to see if they can trust him or not. Best that they think he can only be trusted when we’re around, according to my neighbor. I wasn’t so sure about that and the other morning when my husband opened the gate to take out the car, unbeknownst to me Lucky escaped to roam around the block and mark his territory. We live on probably one of the quietest blocks in Havana and I can usually count the people who stroll by in the course of the day on one hand. Absorbed in the computer, all of a sudden a woman across the street starting yelling and I ran out to see what was amok. All puffed up with his new confidence, Lucky thought he was doing his job protecting the block, of which thinks he’s now the boss, and he’d nicked her calf with one of his sharp little teeth. The woman turned out to be my neighbor’s doctor cousin who has blood coagulation issues. She is not a dog person and was not terribly understanding about the whole situation, but fortunately my neighbor was able to smooth things over with her and explain some of his history before I sheepishly slipped over there to apologize after I thought she’d had some time to calm down after her initial fright.
I’m not about to take him to obedience classes but I am probably going to be paying a little closer attention to Cesar Milian the Dog Whisperer on Multivision. In the meantime, Lucky’s not going to be one of those dogs who has to be tied up all the time, but he’s definitely going to have to be confined to the perimeter of our property until he learns how to behave around strangers. You can bark all you want, but the biting has got to go if I’m to stay in the good graces of the neighbors.
WoWCuba 