Dear friends,
Guess what? I AM GETTING A DOG! I am SO excited! And when I am excited, everything else I am supposed to know kinda leaks out of my head. I am vaguely remembering that I was going to tell you some things I learned from rootling in Mom's seminar notes. But I am SO EXCITED about this new dog that I can't think of anything else!
You know that Mom and I have been looking and looking for a dog because we are both very sad and lonely. My Sofia kept both of us feeling very safe - I used to run out into the yard and bark at deer and coyotes and then go hide behind Sofia if they didn't run right away - and it has been hard to be brave all by myself since Sofia died. We loved her so much! And I used to sleep with her too, sometimes - and now I have to sleep all alone. And, I must confess, I have been getting just a teensy bit chubby - well, actually I am concerned that my butt is looking too big, especially when I wear this new collar I have - maybe I'll show you sometime and you can tell me if it is just the collar or if it is really my butt. It is hard to keep my weight in check since I have no one to pester and play with except Emmett. I don't think that most of us dogs think that cats are very good playmates.
Cats do not seem to have a very good sense of humor, do they? They don't like being surprised in their litterboxes, and they don't like sharing their beds with you, and they most especially don't like the way we dogs introduce ourselves to each other. Emmett taught me that last one really fast. He came into our house looking - well, I already told you in a previous letter I wrote, I think it was earlier this year, or maybe last year, (I'm too excited to think clearly) that he is a rescue Persian cat and he is pretty weird looking. Just go look at his picture and tell me if you don't agree. And he was a little snooty and stand-offish when he met me. So of course, I introduced myself properly by barking at him and sticking my nose under his tail to find out who he was.
Well.....you would have thought that I introduced myself that way to the Queen of England, the way he reacted. For such a wimpy-looking cat, he sure has a mean right hook! Can we say OWWWW!?? He hit me so hard that I fell right over - I was astonished, I tell you - and my nose was bleeding a little bit. So I decided he just needed to warm up to me a little, so I started the "poke" game. That is a game we Cairns like. If someone we are trying to play with appears disinterested, we just poke them hard with our noses until they decide they want to play. (That helps us figure out if they are dead or not.) So I tried that with Emmett and HE HIT ME AGAIN!! Can I tell you that he also has a mean LEFT hook? Well. You see why I say that cats have no sense of humor.
So I am really hoping that my new dog likes to play and most especially knows about the games most Cairns like to play. I am a little worried, though. He was a breeding dog on a puppy mill farm. And many puppy mill dogs don't even know how to be dogs. They don't know about playing games, and they don't know what dog toys are, and they have never had a treat. The baddest thing is that they have never had anyone to love them. Some of them don't even know that they are loveable, 'cause they are just used to make money for the people who own them.
Do you know about puppy mills? They are terrible places. In puppy mills, the breeding dogs live in small cages all the time, with wire sides and sometimes even wire bottoms. Often, they live outside year round. Sometimes, the cages are stacked high so the dogs in the top cage are the only ones that can stay clean. And everyone is wet and cold when it is fall and winter, and so hot they can hardly stand it in the summer. And when they have babies, the babies are taken away early and the poor dogs are bred again right away. When they are too worn out and old to breed anymore, they are killed.
Why would anyone ever buy a puppy from a puppy mill? I don't understand it. Maybe it is because a lot of people don't want to think about the TRUTH that the cute puppy they bought at a pet store or through a "broker" who brought the dog to them, or the puppy they got from "that nice Amish farm" was almost certainly a puppy mill dog. Most puppy mill dogs have pedigrees - but that doesn't mean anything, because they are breeding any dog to any dog, just to make money on the puppies. Sick puppies are often left to die, or are killed. They either get no vaccinations, or way too many - and both are bad things to do to a little puppy. Puppy mill dogs are usually fed the cheapest food possible, and many are sick and full of yucky parasites like worms.
