Nothing is sacred

Mostly just 2 hours of chaos

It’s hard to tell at the 6am and 6pm clock strike, but these 10 unrelated street dogs who live together (with me, incidentally) are pretty quiet and well mannered. Sure they pull cheese wrappers out of the trash and dig holes and roll around on freshly laundered sheets off the line, that I hand wash I might add…there’s no washing machine in this house. Someone has generously offered to buy us a washer but there’s nowhere to put it except at the back door because there’s a hose and a plug and I think I can do better than that but before I ask the landlord for a plumber to wrap a drain pipe around the corner or install a drain in a perfectly washer sized space in the bathroom—I want to be here a couple months.)

Mostly there are no fights, unless you count Suzy getting picked on as the perpetual little sister fighting. As she gets bigger and fatter it’s definitely fighting. The girl dogs are Mean Girls and they decide who gets to come on the bed or not. River ALWAYS. Brindie MAYBE. Cookie only after 4am. Rocky…yea because he’s huge and doesn’t care what you say. Suzy NEVER.

I don’t have any pics of them being insane at 6am mostly because I’m trying to get out the gate, take 3 at a time for walks, keep the noise down because not everyone gets up at 5am, calling back the smart one that dashes out anyway (Rocky) and trying to put a shoe on without getting noticed and hugged to the ground because shoes on means BIG THINGS.

Morning walks are disgusting mostly.

I don’t always go 5 blocks to the shore much to their dismay. Depending on weather, lingering drunks and dealers and sicarios walking home, little kids and their mamas walking to Kinder, worker bee contractors driving super fast and kicking up more dust in this unpaved hellscape pueblo and of course the 428 other dogs that we’ll see on the way. Some days I settle for a walk around the block and down to the tienda and avoid the house with 20 cats outside in a caged garage, not because the dogs get to them, but because the owner yells at me if they bark and some of the bigger dogs can pull me right down the block (Rocky) and I’m working on it, but hey. They’re dogs. Those are cats sitting right at the gate being cats. Relax, dude. I still stand by the idea that this entire town is made up of people who were cats in a past life.

I drop food on my second walk (alone) and put tuna cans, sardines, eggs and kibble out in hidden spots for the field puppies, some other nursing and pregnant mamas, skeletons who haven’t died yet, scared abandoned dogs under gates who are getting too big to crawl back out. That black brindle pregnant gal on the corner has been missing for two days but I saw her nose and heard her growl today under the metal gate. She must have had her babies. I poured the kibble under the fence in a hole she’s dug. I sit on the corner pavement while she eats and talk to her. She comes a little closer each week. I wave at people driving past only 3 or 4 cars really. No one really lives here and the gas contractors stick to the 2 paved roads mostly. I’m usually in house slippers, stocking cap, night shirt with sweater over that and I notice that the homeless dudes in town cobble together better outfits than me. I don’t care. I do care about what will become of these new puppies should they survive. I heard the mobile vet wasn’t going to come in town any more, but that could just be gossip.

Litters born to feral mamas don’t have much chance and I know that I’m not likely going to get her to come inside here with this bunch and I definitely can’t take on more dogs and I know that what I’m doing isn’t helping anything, but I can’t NOT.