Vegetarianism

I am a vegetarian. I have been a vegetarian for six years now, plus or minus a month. (I forget, though I bet Hilary remembers.)

I'm not a vegetarian because I feel bad for the poor cute little animals. While I don't support, in any way shape or form, animal cruelty, that is not a major reason of why I am a vegetarian.

I am a vegetarian because I want to eat healthy food grown in an ecologically sustainable manner. I am lazy and don't want to hunt down the links to find actual numbers, however it is a fact that it takes a lot less land, water, and energy to create a pound of tofu than a pound of beef. And factory farms are really horrible places, with hormones and antibiotics and concentrated animal excrement. I can't really see how an animal raised in that artificial of an environment can possibly be healthy to eat.

Despite my feelings on vegetarianism I fed the dogs a total of 3-ish pounds of meat today. That is 2 lbs of green tripe, 2 chicken backs, 1 quarter of a lamb neck bone, and 6 chicken feet. That is split between 2 dogs, but Trillian only had 3 feet and 1 lb of tripe. Balou, giant growing puppy that he is, ate all the rest of it, and I will probably give him a small neck bone quarter later this evening.

This meat all comes through the San Francisco Raw Food Co-Op. I helped out with the monthly pickup and distribution a week and a half ago. All the food is ordered from local organic farms. So it is local and hormone/antibiotic free. Several volunteers go to the separate farms each month and pick up the various pieces of the whole order. Then other volunteers help to pass out the meat. It happens every 3rd Thursday of the month.

I wouldn't want to feed the dogs any other way. It's really striking to see Balou develop the muscles needed to crunch through all that meat and bone. The shape of is head is changing because of the muscles he is developing. He isn't quite as fast as Trillian yet. But they both eat the chicken feet pretty quickly. A chicken foot, when frozen, is a bit thicker than my thumb, and they can both crunch the bone into separate pieces in about 2 or 3 bites, at most. The lamb neck bones are even bigger, about the size of my wrist when frozen, but only about 1/3 of that is bone. They eat the whole thing bone and all. It's really impressive to watch. And makes me appreciate that the dogs are my friends.

Balou and Religion

This morning we took Balou and Trillian for a walk. It was a nice walk with many things for the dogs to pee on and smell. When we got back we found that we had missed a visit by the Jehovah's Witnesses. Unfortunately, they left a flyer stuck into our screen door.

This is what Balou thinks of their flyer.



To be honest that is also what Balou thinks of everything that he can fit in his mouth, and a lot of things that he can't.

Training

So Balou, as previously noted, is pretty much entirely untrained. He has mostly learned his name and kinda knows sit. We're teaching him off pretty quickly. But he needs lots of training and socialization.

Yesterday we took him to the vet. He was pretty nervous and unsure about the whole situation. There was another dog and a woman with a high-pitched voice, that were setting him off. So Balou and the other dog growled at each other through the exam room door. Now as previously noted Balou has a hair-raising growl. Definitely a growl that would scare the crap out of people that aren't sure he is their friend. So the Vet wasn't comfortable with large growly dog.

I just called the Fawn, and left her a message about setting up private training sessions for Balou. I think we need some professional help with the marking, socialization, and general training tips.

Pronunciation

Oh, and we have decided how to pronounce Balou. It is like the "a" in "father". Or like Bah-lou, if it is easier to think of it that way.

Balou is here!

Balou is here, and he is a very handsome boy! He is a sweetie and almost entirely untrained. But he is getting a bit better all the time.

To start from closer to the beginning: Last Tuesday Shari and I drove to Portland. We had a very leisurely drive. We saw lots of Redwoods along the northern coast of Califrornia. Including the Lady Bird Johnson Grove and Trees of Mystery, which was not actually as corny a place to stop as it sounds like. We also got a chance to meet and visit a friend we have played WoW with for almost two and a half years. On Thursday we arrived in Portland, where we stayed in the Hotel Monaco. Mmmm king size bed.

Friday morning we went to Redwood Krest and met Joeri, who owns and runs it, and Balou. Joeri was preparing for a trip to Argentina where he is showing 6 dogs in a world championship. I am guessing it is for schutzhund, but I have no idea. Anyway Redwood Krest is a pretty spiffy operation. Definitely not a backyard breeder. He has 9 employees and quite a large and well decked out setup. There are two different sets of kennels as well as a bunch of pretty big dog runs. He also has a neat setup for the puppies. When they are 5 weeks old they are moved to a 6 foot square room with carpeting. The only way they can get out is a dog door, so they learn pretty early to go out the dog door for their business.

Anyway we met Balou. My first impression of him was that he was filthy. Really filthy. His snout was covered in dirt, his paws were caked, and when Joeri patted his side a cloud of dust rose up. Apparently Balou is a digger, Joeri said his staff is constantly amazed at how dirty Balou gets. Second impression was that despite all the dirt he was a big excitable beautiful puppy. Balou is probably 90 or 95 lbs, but he still has that bouncy and distractable puppy walk.

But Balou was interested in us. He looked at Shari and I and wanted to get pets and give us slurpies. Mostly he wanted to give us lots of slurpies. Joeri didn't want to let Balou and Trillian have any direct contact until we were going to take Balou, so when we got her out of the car we had to keep them at a distance. But they didn't immediately hate each other, and they both made motions indicating they wanted to play.

So we said we'd take Balou home with us. Probably we are suckers. But here is this gorgeous dog, who is clearly pretty smart, and he is languishing in a kennel. His only fault is a very obvious underbite. He is digging so much because he is clearly bored out of his huge Rottweiler skull. So we arrange to pick him up Saturday and I sign the papers. We chat with Joeri a bunch more. It is pretty interesting, because Joeri is clearly a professional and has all the stories. He is very nice to be giving us Balou for free because of Dasko, and is clearly quite annoyed that Balou has this giant underbite. We are told several times that, if not for the underbite, Balou would be worth $15K. Kind of crazy really.

The drive on Saturday was pretty terrible at first. Football is a pox upon Humanity. Especially all the crazy football fans who were in our way as we drove down I5. What should have been a 45 minute section of road was closer to 2 hours. It was excruciating. Especially since the stop and go traffic made Balou sick. He threw up several times. And even weirder, he threw up ROCKS. His total for throwing up was a double handful of gravel. Apparently he also ate the dirt and rocks he was digging in...

After 14 hours of driving we got home.

And found the house a sty. A complete and utter sty. We'd done a bunch of clean up on Tuesday when we left, and had a bit of a late start as a result. We shouldn't have bothered. The living room was piled with clothes and sewing stuff, including lots of shiney pins and needles. The kitchen had both sinks full of dirty dishes and water. Also in the kitchen was bottles and bags of chemicals for cloth dying. In the hallway to the bedroom was piled a bunch of medicines. The garage floor was covered with dirty lanudry. And all of this was a dog nose height, especially the potentially fatal to ingest stuff. Oh, and the back door and all the windows were open, while the heater went at full blast.

So that night poor Balou got put in his crate, and Trillian had a much reduced run of the house. We spent all Sunday cleaning. And got about half of it done. Heather slept the whole day. When we finally were able to wake her up to ask her where to put the medicine she got mad at us. She tried to tell us how she was so tired from cleaning all yesterday. Both Shari and I lost it, since we'd been on our feet for the past 13 hours cleaning up her mess while trying to keep Balou from jumping up, peeing everywhere, and eating everything. We'd also dug and put several 1 ft square paving stones under the side gate so Balou couldn't dig out. So we both completely yelled at her for leaving the house such a mess and then whining when we woke her to tell us where to put her stuff. We weren't even asking her to pick it up, just to tell us where to put it. Argh.

Today was much better, Balou has a mostly reliable sit, and is starting to learn his name. He doesn't get down at all yet. However he is starting to learn enough and watch me. The watch me command is pretty useful to distract him from growling at his reflection. He has a hair-raising growl and is extremely offended at his reflection. It's also really neat to see him learning how to eat bones. He is so confused by them, he doesn't understand just what a meaty bone is and he is missing a lot of the jaw muscles needed to eat it speedily. It took him about half an hour to eat an already defrosted lamb neck bone quarter. In contrast Trillian was done in about 7 minutes.

I'll try to post a couple of pics soon, but for now I need to sleep.