On Thursday, Dec 9th, we said goodbye to our 6yr old Doberman, Caesar. It is bittersweet. As detailed below, Caesar was very stressful to own. A pet of both our own creation and ultimately questionable genes. He developed bloat which is apparently very typical of male Dobermans between the ages of 4 and 7. It’s horrible and unless you catch it within like 20min and have $5k on you, its terminal. We hope to never have to go through this again.

My ex and I adopted Caesar from the Doberman Rescue of Colorado in the Summer of 2004. His parents were surrendered to the rescue as their owners had lost their house. Caesar was the only red dobe in a litter of black and tan.

They say you should let dogs choose you. Caesar couldn’t have cared less. All his brothers and sister were the sweetest puppies. They all loved the visitors that came to choose their favorites. Caesar couldn’t be bothered. He was too busy digging by the fence. Nonetheless, I chose him. I want the pretty one that doesn’t care about me!

So Caesar grew up in an apt with minimal socialization. Absolutely the wrong environment for just about any dog. We bought a house when he was a little over a yr old. That’s when he started fighting with his adopted brother and biting people.

So now that he’s gone:

We can go for walks and not fear seeing other people and dogs on the way.

We hopefully will never need to use the muzzle again.

We can have people over with our remaining dobe out.

There will be no more garbage to clean off the floor from him getting into it.

Jimmy, the other dobe, will no longer be eaten.

There will be no more retrieving tupparware and dishes from the backyard which were taken out of the sink in our absence.

There will be no more “pre-cleaning” done of the dishes.

Kids and small pets can come into the house.

Anyone can watch our house now.

Our house isn’t as safe anymore.

We don’t have a helper in the mornings, which was when Caesar was the cutest.

We can foster again because there won’t likely be any fighting.

We can fix the screen door.

We will need two dogs to replace the energy that is no longer filling the house.

The figure 8 worn into the grass in the back will be no more.

We won’t have to clean poop out of the fenced off garden.

We don’t have a shadow anymore.

We don’t have an always guilty but submissive “smiling” dog to come home to anymore.

We don’t have our: Asshole, poop face, pony, sarious dorsalfinious, assface, shit head, pooponious, poowhips, WHIPS, tigar shark, poo poo san…

There’s more I could say, and maybe will down the road. But there is a huge void that this dog leaves behind. I hope I never have to fill a space so large ever again.

I recently took a Web design class. It was hard. I have a whole new appreciation for Web designers. Here’s the link for as long as it’s up.

http://web4290.com/jestes/.html

Update!

So we fostered a litter or 6-6wk old puppies  (Lila, Baxter, Linus, Lilly, Lucy, and one we called Tyrone, but that’s not what we really named him, lol) from the DDFL. Anyway, they were an insane amount of work. My mom adopted Lilly who is the sweetest girl. It’s nice we still get to see one of our fosters.

We also fostered a Great Dane, Millie. We fell in love with her. Poor thing was sick the whole time we had her. She was adopted to a really good home and my husband is friends with her new owner on Facebook, so we can check in on her from time to time.

Now we’re really taking a break because our dog Caeser is a hellion. That is all.

Original post: 

As we sadly just parted with Beilie, our old lady foster Dobe, I realized I was starting to forget the little things about the awesome animals we’ve fostered.

So I decided I should write a little something about them.

My first foster was Lucy. She was older, red, cropped, and docked Dobe. She was beautiful and very sweet. She was fun because she had been trained to ring a bell with her nose when she needed to go out. She also had a bit of incontinence, which we learned tends to be a problem with spayed females. She wasn’t a fan of Caesar, our previously adopted dobe from the Doberman Rescue of Colorado. We were going to adopt her until she took out a miniscule piece of Caesar’s ear. We thought this was just shocking and awful. Little did we know how uneventful it truly was, but you know first time “parents” and all. So a very nice man adopted Lucy and after being diagnosed as hyperthyroid, she was put on medication which took care of her incontinence.

My second foster dobe was Jimmy, a large, red, natural, and docked boy. He came to the Doberman Rescue of Colorado with mange. They got him back to a decent state of furriedness and adopted him out. He was returned when his mange came back. We fostered him until he was deemed ok to adopt out again. We were so attached to this huge, goofy looking dog, and subsequently adopted him. The first year was challenging with Jimmy though. I’m pretty sure he was an outside dog, as he doesn’t know how to ask to go out and doesn’t understand when he’s in trouble. Both of which are cute and frustrating at the same time. Jimmy is now almost 6 and doing great.

My husband and I fostered Max in the winter of ’07. He looked like a puppy. So soft and had the cutest face. He was a young, red, docked doberboy with IBS. Lol. SO many mornings we woke up to a needed nasty clean up. Max, or Max cub as we called him. I don’t remember why we called him that, come to think of it… He would sneak on to the couch, whether you were on it or not. He would press his crazy cold, wet nose into your neck whilst trying to snuggle with you. He would also make this sound when he was really excited. I can’t describe it, but I also don’t think I’d forget it either. And often we would come home and say his name like he was in trouble. He would run over to his bed and start squirming around until you went to pet him. He was SO cute. He was also rather dog aggressive too unfortunately. I was concerned when a family with a dog, which he didn’t meet until after the family drove back down to the springs, adopted him. When we asked how he was, the rescue guy just said he was fine. So, we hoped that was true. To this day, Max is the only other foster we wish we’d adopted. We think it’s because he was a more involved foster, what with IBS etc. Funny.

After fostering Max for the winter, we fostered Eva. Eva was a black and tan, natural, docked dobergirl. She drove us crazy. She was chewer. So there were shoes needing replacing, and a couch cover needing sewing. A nice woman who wrote a bad check to the Doberman Rescue adopted her and they never ended up seeing a dime from her. Part of the reason the Rescue now has to close its doors. People writing bad checks for adoption fees: awesome.

We took some time off after Max and Eva. Then in ’08 we fostered three dobergirls. Willow, a blue, natural, docked girl. Lexus and Gretchen, neither of whom I can remember what they looked like. So bad! The reason being that all three of these girls were adopted SO quickly. It was awesome, merely a matter of days. One of them was scared to death of our hardwood floors. It was funny and sad at the same time. We’d have to make a path of fabric for her to get around. All three of these dobes were so sweet. I hope that they are doing well in their forever homes.

Our last foster, Beilie, a black and tan, cropped, and docked old doberlady. We agreed to foster this girl after she was turned and told the Rescue she was 8, when really she was closer to 12 and unadoptable. She was the sweetest girl.

At the same time we acquired Beilie, we started fostering three kittens from the Denver Dumb Friends League, because of losing our 14yr old cat Molly, and we also bought five chickens.

We fell in love with all three kittens (Tiger, Pot Belly (now Ellie/Eleanor), and Little (now Leelu)), but I didn’t want three. One of the kittens had a hold on it so we thought for sure we’d adopt one and take the other two in to be adopted. Well a fiasco started via one of their littermates, fostered by someone else, who died due to FIP. So we were scared that these remaining two kittens wouldn’t be adopted blah blah blah. Well we adopted two, and the third ended up being adopted in a week. So all tragedy, presumably avoided.

We then fostered two more kittens, very sweet beautiful gray boys who came with the names Tony and Tyler. We changed them to Simon and Dexter. They ended up being adopted before even being on the DDFL Web site.   

After all the kittens, we had Beilie still. Until yesterday. She apparently had some sort of catastrophic spinal issue or something of the kind, which caused her to no longer be able to walk. She was in so much pain. My husband took her to be put down. He was with her the whole time.

We’re taking a break from fostering for a while. Let things calm down. Two animal deaths in one year is a lot. We simply had a lot of animal goings on period!

I’m so glad my husband lets us do these things, as crazy as they might seem.

I’m writing to lament the loss of my 14yr old kitteh. She was not just a cat. She was so much bigger than that. To really explain, I must start at the beginning.

So my mom got me my first cat, a kitten to be precise. I don’t remember how old I was, probably elementary school. We had had some strays here and there, but this was my first cat, truly mine. Well, the cat was psychotic. He would hunt and stalk you in the house, leaping out and biting the ever lovin’ shit out of you. I mean gouging teeth marks. This was the Pet Cemetery cat. Once, this cat was curled up by my face, purring as I pet him, and he bit my face! PSYCHOTIC. He even bit my grandmother, not that cats can tell age. We grew to hate him, even wished he would get hit by a car. I mean, I’ve never wished that, on anyone or anything, save a few errant squirrels. We truly wished this cat would get mowed down and we’d be rid of him. So we did the next best thing and gave him to a friend. When passed on, he willed him to another friend. Last we heard, that damn cat was still alive. He has to be like 300yrs old, still torturing people. He bit every owner. So, I tell this story because we hated cats after this little venture. HATED them. We never wanted to get another cat as long as we lived. Well then along came Annie.

Annie was an alley cat found by classmates when I was in high school on our walk home. She was only a couple of weeks old. So tiny, and wreaked of garbage. I brought her home and called my mom to tell her of this tiny kitten I had found. My mom and I are huge animal lovers. There was never an animal I couldn’t keep. So my mom came home and saw this miniscule kitten curled up in my neck. We took her to the vet, got her cleaned up and spent 7mo with this sweet kitten before she was claimed by FIV. Now you are typically given the option to test for this, back then not at all. We were so heart broken that we decided to give adopting another cat a go. Enter Molly.

My mom had found this article about choosing a cat. All the tests seemed ridiculous, like any cat would let you lay them on their back in your arms without clawing the shit out of your face. Well Molly not only let us, but didn’t leave a mark either. She passed all the other tests with flying colors and we adopted her that summer in 1995, she was about 4mo old.

Molly was a talker. We would ask her for updates on what went on in her day. She would bark comments back. My mom has some white leather couches that started showing serious scratching. We of course assumed it was Molly. Though we’d already had her front claws removed, we removed the back ones too thinking she was the couch scratching culprit. We’re now pretty sure it was the dog, and would never declaw another cat after being informed of how awful that is to do to them. It’s an amputation and don’t let anyone tell you any different.

I took her to college with me as soon as I moved out of the dorms in ’97. She endured many college parties, including but limited to my roommate chasing her around screaming at her, poor thing. Then we’d move back home every summer.

She moved with me to Ft.Collins in ’99. She would wait for me to come home, and meow from the door when she heard the key in the lock. Then back with my mom when I was caught with her as I wasn’t supposed to have pets. Lame! She was my TV watching partner. She also loved to cuddle. She was not one of those cats where the petting was on their terms. Hence my exclamation she was not a cat.

She then moved with me again in ’03 and has been with me since. Even my husband, who was not a huge cat lover, fell in love with Molly. He even built her “the kitteh tower” a carpet tower. She LOVED it, and spent a lot of time in it.

She was dubbed the office cat as when you were working on a computer, seated in the office or elsewhere, she would come up to you on the chair, standing on her hind legs and put her front paws on your legs and paw at your arms with her smashy feet as I called them. They looked like camel feet due to the lack of claws to keep a shape to them. She would paw at you until you pet her.

She would often keep vigil over you while you worked, from her post under the table or desk.

When she drank water she’d have some leftover on her chinny chin chin hairs. We called it her water beard.

She would often “sharpen her mitts” by “clawing” the carpet, or my husband’s record collection. If she did that, then she was the DJ Cat.

She went by many names, Miss Molly, Molly McButter, The Mollusk, Molluska, The Kitteh, Molly the Cat, or MTC.

Yesterday, 06/18/2009, I came home to her having been dead for a few hours. We were nowhere near ready to say goodbye to her. She was supposed to last another 4-5yrs we’d decided. I hadn’t taken her to a vet in about a decade as she was an indoor cat and I saw no need to put her through that, so now of course I have no idea as to what was her ultimate demise.

This is our (my husband and me) first time dealing with a pet death on our own, and really nothing prepares you for parting ways with a companion that was a part of almost half your life.

Molly had been through so much with me. Always there, always with an update. Words cannot express how much we loved and will miss her.

She now resides in our garden, still keep vigil over us.