Dog adoptions

This has been a summer remarkably free of veterinary medicine. I believe I had planned to be more enthused about inflicting my presence on local veterinarians, but between driving home every other day, gardening, and the trying to write on a daily basis, I've been remarkably busy. It takes about three hours of procrastination for me to get around to one hour of writing. This is an improvement over it taking three days to achieve the same level of frantic "must-write-NOW". At some point, I may achieve two hours of writing at a time. And that will be about the time school starts, at which point busyness truly descends with a vengeance.

In the meantime--I inadvertently talked my fiance into getting a greyhound. Not YET, but presumably we'll be picking a dog-friendly apartment for next year. I think it's Pye's fault. Pye is one of my dogs, very old but only recently starting to act like it (something about megaesophagus and retching all the time...). We adopted him when I was in middle school. He wasn't a mellow dog then, but the intervening years really reduced the running off/playbiting/barking all night. He now has just about enough energy to wander up and gaze imploringly at you. My fiance, who has never had dogs or cats, is a complete sucker for this sort of canine manipulation. And I may have mentioned, one time when I was trying to explain greyhound dispositions (from what I've seen--I admit I don't have a ton of experience with them), that they do this same sort of imploring gaze.

I'm hoping that adopting a greyhound goes smoother than adopting Pye went. I remember the local Humane Society, which I previously had considered a Good and Intelligent institution, really didn't want to let us adopt a dog from them. The problem? We live on a farm. The dog would be on a farm. The dog would be outside on the farm. Apparently, it is anathema to the humane society's mission to let any dog spend nights outside the warmth and protection of a house. If the dog came from a farm? Well, then it would be okay--unless the dog had become an indoor dog since its days on a farm. All dogs at the humane society are housed indoors. Ergo, all dogs from the humane society are indoor dogs. I think they finally let us have Pye because he had already come through the humane society twice (both times because he had way too much energy for living in a house), and they were getting desperate.

Talking with other people from farms (often vet students), this is pretty common. It doesn't matter how qualified the potential owner might be, the humane society would rather euthanize dogs than adopt them out to farms. Do they think the dogs are going to be unhappy on the farm? Do they envision horrible accidents involving combines? Do they think all outdoor dogs are abused dogs?

That said, greyhounds would not make good farm dogs. From what I know, they are capable of a little too much speed with not enough discretion for wire fences.