Pet Recycling

Rodrigo received a call from our friend Pablo who lives in Queretaro, about 45 minutes from San Miguel de Allende. Pablo was contacted because the owner of a 1-year-old female Great Dane is dying from cancer and his children don’t want the dog. They told Pablo that if he didn’t find a home for her in one week, they were putting her down. “Bring her here,” Rodrigo said, “We’ll find a home for her.”
Her name is Doris and we’d had her little more than 24 hours when Cynthia came up to drop off a movie. For some time now, we’ve been introducing various dogs and cats to Cynthia, encouraging her to become a pet owner. Most of these were small and cute. As a joke, Rodrigo pointed to Doris and said, “We have a present for you.”

“I want her,” said Cynthia, “She’s magnificent.”

We were delighted and Cynthia took her home that night.

Maybe I’ll get Cynthia to write a guest piece for this blog because her stories about getting Doris in and out of the car and teaching her to walk up and down stairs are pretty comical.

Here at the Ranchito, we’re down to five dogs. Rodrigo gave Saru, the Affen Pinscher, away because he was not show-dog quality and I had set the limit at six dogs. Now he believes that he can get another. I imagine that the negotiations will heat up once he finds a dog that he wants.

Last night Rodrigo looked out the back window and saw a strange bird eating the grass seed that I had put out. We see birds all the time and this spring we’ve had our share of babies that have fallen out of nests. And then there are always the parts of birds that our cat Tisha leaves as gifts on our patio. This bird didn’t look like any we’ve seen before.

Rod went outside and upon closer inspection, discovered that it was an Australian parakeet that was missing tail feathers. I’m not really comfortable with keeping birds in cages but he has no possibility of surviving in the wild or for that matter, surviving Tisha.

So the count is now: five dogs, two cats, about 15 gold fish and koi (in the pond), and a parakeet.