The Home For Wayward Animals

I watched THE BIG LEBOWSKI tonight. That is a great piece of warped cinematography. The Cohen brothers, the geniuses who brought us RAISING ARIZONA, FARGO, and O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? really did a great job with this movie. It's a case of mistaken identity, with some really bizarre characters in it. Well worth seeing.

We have adopted another animal. I'm starting to feel like an animal shelter for weird creatures. We have a blind dog, a crazy dog, and two sugar gliders that seem to run the household. Now we're adding another hard-luck case. A friend of mine came across a black lab that's two years old, and slightly smaller than a horse. He has no name, and has apparently been abused to the point where he almost has no spirit whatsoever. He doesn't know rudimentary commands, though he's housebroken. He is very nervous, and does not like to be out of our sight. He whines and cries if left alone. Our insane dog Lucky has been trying to get him to play, and he seems to be breaking through some barriers. But it's going to take time. I feel incredibly sorry for the life this dog had. We managed to rehabilitate Lucky, and see him through distemper. Hopefully we'll be able to save this dog. But I don't know how much we can afford to do. He almost took our back gate off its hinges. I'll have to spend a good bit of tomorrow repairing the damage he did.

I am a hunter. Yes, that means I have killed animals. It's part of the natural cycle of life, and we all benefit from it. There's an appreciation of what God has given us that can only be gained through hunting. Plus, I think it taught me early on the awesome responsibility of gun ownership. With a touch of a trigger, a life can be snuffed out, never to return. I think that people who grew up hunting appreciate that, and do so from an early age. Other than this ignorant Hmong up on Minnesota, you don't really hear many stories about hunters going crazy and shooting up the town. Hunters know what a gun can do, and what an incredibly overwhelming thing it is to take a life. Find me a punk gang-banger somewhere who has a tenth of the reverence for life the average hunter has.

Random cruelty to an animal is something else entirely. I cannot understand for the life of me how someone can be so heartbreakingly cruel to a dog that it cannot even look you in the eye. It's one thing to kill an animal for population control, meat, or other natural function. To cause an animal to suffer just because it seems fun is a sick thing, about as demented as it comes. Out little Lucky was an abused dog, cowering when he was looked at. He's over it now. There are still aftereffects of whatever abuse he went through as a puppy. He does not like strangers, and he is very protective of the rest of the household. But I doubt that he even remembers what life he had in the pound before us. I hope not.

We have been able to give one little dog have a better life. I hope we can do the same for this dog, who did not even get a name from his former masters. Any suggestions on a name would be welcome. We are having a hard time coming up with anything meaningful.