New family additions of the four-legged variety

Liza Minelli (because honestly she looks like a drag queen and she also looks like Liza Minelli)

Honey

Doesn’t have a name yet

Casper the friendly goat.

On top of these four who came home with us yesterday, there are three more who haven’t adjusted enough for me to get pictures who came home with us today.

Redneck Girls

I’ve been sitting here for a while trying to decide how best to tell this story without offending anyone. There have been many mental rewrites to soften harsh facts and morbid truths but no matter how I try the truth cannot be disguised or made nice for the general public so I’m going to just lay the facts on the table and hope that those of you reading this will understand the motives behind my actions. Well maybe I’ll put it in story format……

Once upon a time there was a girl who loved animals more than anything. She hated even to kill bugs that invaded her living quarters (altho she made exceptions for mosquitoes and ants) preferring to transfer them outside or let someone else get rid of them. She grew up surrounded by dogs, cats, goats, chickens, rats, fish and mice and loved them all. As she grew up into a tenderhearted young woman her menagerie was narrowed down to 5 dogs and an assortment of fish. She loved those dogs as if they were her own children and even had an odd attachment to her finned friends.

This young woman was somewhat timid in the face of her own danger, but when it came to protecting her babies all fear disappeared, replaced by a vicious urge to protect at all costs. Fortunately there was little that threatened her dogs- she and her husband lived on a large acreage in the country and most of the animals in their vicinity were either friendly, slow, or more likely to become prey than predators. Added to that was the fact that her husband was a bit of a hunter and anything that might endanger their dogs would be taken care of by him rather than her lifting some of that burden from her mind.

Well as these things often go, the woman’s husband was away on a journey to work in a kingdom far on the other side of the country when danger presented itself in the form of a wild male dog who looked unkempt and unmannered. One of the female dogs was in heat because the woman and her husband had not had the money to get her fixed before she became old enough to draw outside menaces. So the girl was sitting in her house one night when she heard one of her dogs screaming and howling in pain. She ran outside to find the female hooked to the wild male dog in the inseparable position that dogs get into sometimes and her poor dog was half the size of the intruder. He was running around dragging her poor dog backwards on the ground because she wasn’t tall enough to stand up. The woman gently threatened the male dog and soothed her baby until the ordeal was over and then ran like a madwoman after the male, her neon pink bathrobe flapping in the night air, screaming threats that she would act on if she ever caught said male.

Fast forward two days. The woman’s dogs have dug three new holes under the fence and she has run out of things to keep them in the fence altho she believed them to be contained until she heard the howling begin again. She rushes outside in a different set of pajamas after being yanked from sleep by the noise and finds the same two dogs in the same position. She waits until they are unattached before chasing the dog and this time throwing badly aimed and entirely ineffective gravel at the animal’s retreating backside screaming at the top of her lungs.

Later in the afternoon after returning the dogs to their fence with a wish and a prayer she hears the dogs barking by the basement door- definitely not in their yard. She thinks fast and grabs her pink .22 and some ammunition and storms down the basement stairs in a murderous rage. As she assumed, the same male dog is there trying to reattach himself to her dog who has again performed a Houdini act and escaped from her fence along with all the other dogs.

The male trots off a ways while the girl loads a bullet in the gun and fires it into the air. He trots off a ways behind a shop and when she follows him he heads back towards her dogs and the house. She chases him again, firing shots away from the house and dogs in an attempt to scare him off. He is trotting leisurely away now and so she returns to the house and barely makes it inside before he is back. This is the final straw as far as she is concerned. Now she runs after him gun in hand and he seems to sense that she means business because he is moving a little faster. She stops, takes aim, and fires past him causing him to shy away from the bullets now aimed in his direction. He is moving faster now, but not fast enough for her satisfaction. She takes aim again at the ground under him and this causes him to jump. One final shot into the air above his head and he is off like a rocket and well out of range.

Now the girl sits in her craft room typing on the computer watching out the window for that damn dog.

I don’t ever condone violence or cruelty towards animals, but when they cause my animals pain and injure them (Pepper is limping and yelps if I touch her hips) they’re asking for trouble. No I was not aiming to kill or even hurt this dog- I have more self respect than that- but I was sure as hell aiming to scare the crap out of him. I want him to think twice about coming back onto our land and trying to screw my dog again. God I feel like a redneck! Especially with my pocket full of .22 ammo……