Not one but two friends said goodbye to their beloved senior dogs in the past week. I read their tributes to their beautiful dogs and looked through all the photos of the good times they had together, and wiped copious tears away. These deaths make me hyperconscious of the limited time that I have left with my senior dog, Otto.

If he makes it to November, he’ll be 15 years old. His back legs are getting weaker, and though he can still jump into my car (it’s low, and he jumps onto the floor of the back seat, then climbs onto the seat), he sometimes catches a toe when he goes up the two stairs leading to our back deck and then two more that lead to the kitchen door and his back end collapses for a moment. I try not to fuss when I help him up; he always looks embarrassed when this happens.

He doesn’t trot much anymore; his gaits include a fairly gimpy walk and a sort of swinging lope that he uses as a replacement for his formerly jaunty trot – but he also still roars at the sight of any United States postal vehicles and races to and then down the fence line to chase said vehicles out of sight. He can’t resist! But he pays a price for this after the adrenaline wears off; he retires to his sandbox and naps deeply in the cool sand afterward.

He has always been good about being groomed, but he loves being brushed now – even with a Furminator, which I have to use to try to get rid of his still-shedding thick winter coat. But I have to be careful as I brush his sides and flanks, as he has countless egg-shaped lipomas of various sizes now. They don’t cause any pain, but it can’t be good to put any sort of pressure on them!

For almost a year now, he exhibits signs of dementia at night. He pants and paces and seems confused and anxious. A few months ago, at the suggestion of his team of vets, in addition to his arthritis med and gabapentin, we tried a prescription medicine for dementia. Within days, he had fountaining diarrhea, and we had to stop the dementia medicine. Following that, even though I bathed his nether end again and again, he started over-grooming the underside of his tail, where the liquid poop had gotten on it. He caused a nasty little lick granuloma, which required shaving the underside of his tail several times before it finally healed up, weeks later. I know it’s silly and not important, but it makes me so sad to see the skinny section of his now threadbare tail, which is usually a glorious flag, curving up and gently waving high in good spirits.

Until this past year, he’s always had nice breath and clean teeth. He was well past middle age when he needed his first dental, and he’s had several since then – but now, no vet wants to put him under anesthesia for a thorough dental, so his teeth are getting a little cruddy and his breath isn’t as fresh as it used to be. Fortunately, he’s good about tolerating brushing. We’re trying to hold the line!

He’s gotten ridiculous about food, hungrily and openly begging for whatever treats he thinks someone might give him, and lurking in the kitchen when we’re cooking. He no longer bothers to “sit” or “down” on cue, but stands, tail wagging and open-mouthed in anticipation when I’m giving cues to the other dogs. He knows he gets treats whenever the other dogs get treats, no “work” is required anymore.

But turn about is fair play; the other dogs have learned his medication schedule. Any time I get the can of wet food out of the refrigerator, they will jump up out of a deep sleep or game of tug to come and sit politely. They know that after I hide Otto’s meds in a “meatball” of pâté and he has taken the meatball from my hand, I will feed them a tiny bit of the tasty food as well.

I thank goodness that 7-month-old Boone doesn’t have high exercise needs. When Woody was his age, I used to have to take daily (sometimes twice daily) long, off-leash walks in our local wildlife area in order to keep him from jumping out of his skin. If we take Otto along, we can’t go very far before he’s tired – and I can’t bear his sad, uncomprehending stare if he doesn’t get to leave the house with me and the other dogs. I try to make it up to Boone with more play on the lawn and more hide-and-seek around the property. Happily, like many “youngest children,” he’s great about entertaining himself by chewing and tugging on our grandson’s swing (we have to make a new seat!) and playing tug all by himself with the leather leash we use to retrieve our grandson’s zip line (watch him do it here!).

It will be wonderful to get a good, full night’s sleep again someday, and to take long, guilt-free hikes with Woody and Boone – but I’m not in a rush. I keep trying to memorize the sweet hayfield aroma of Otto’s thick ruff and the feel of the one silky patch of hair he has on the very top of his head, right between his distinctive half-folded, tufted ears. Though my friends’ tributes to their beloved dogs make my heart hurt, I’m trying not to pre-grieve my vibrant, joyous, mischievous Otto of the past. I’m making every effort to just be here now with my beloved dog, one slightly stinky breath at a time.

It’s officially HOT in the northern Sacramento Valley where I live. These are more or less normal temperatures for July in this part of California; it’s even hotter another 60 miles or so farther north in Redding, a town that often makes the news for the day’s record high temperatures in July and August.

Up until just a day or two ago, my dogs have been pretty comfortable. The low 90s are not so bad. This tips over into not-very-fun territory at about 95 degrees. That’s when we head for the water.

Despite the drought, we are fortunate to live close to several bodies of water to cool off in. We don’t much go to Lake Oroville, though we live right below it (yes, close enough to have had to evacuate when “that dam thing” happened some years back). We tend to go to the river that fills the lake, but downstream of the dam, where the water is quite cold (coming, as it does, out of the bottom of the lake), or to the “Lake Oroville Afterbay,” a very large, shallow reservoir that warms a portion of that river water so that it can better be used for agriculture.

Thank goodness, all of my dogs love to swim, even Boone, the newest member of our pack. As I write this, we’ve had our hottest day of the summer – and we’ve made the five-mile trek (in my air-conditioned car) to the Afterbay twice today.

In this weather, I make sure all the water bowls in my house and office are full of fresh, cool water, and provide buckets, not bowls of water for the dogs to drink outdoors. (The water in even very large bowls gets too warm outdoors in heat like this, even in the shade.)

It’s cooler in the house and cooler yet in my office, but until the thermometer hits 95° F., my senior dog Otto prefers to snooze in his shaded and properly dampened sandbox. Every morning, I shovel and rake it smooth, fluffy, and level, then wet the sand thoroughly. Then Otto gets in and digs the first of his napping holes. As the sun changes its angle over the course of the day, he’ll change positions and dig another hole, and I’ll adjust the umbrella to keep the box in full shade. Today, we hit 95° by 1 pm, and he reluctantly joined me, Boone, and Woody in my office.

When I went into the house at about 2 pm to make myself an iced coffee, I saw our young chickens had taken over Otto’s damp sandbox. Well, that’s fair. They aren’t joining us in my office, I swear!

Though the young dogs will romp and play chase games at the lake or river, I discourage any exercise at home in this heat until the sun sets. Then I’ll throw fetch items and let Woody and Boone play keep-away on our front “lawn” (a pretty motley lawn, kept barely alive with water restrictions due to the drought) – and occasionally spray them with water from the hose. Why dogs who love to swim hate being hosed so much, I don’t know, but when they are wet, they play much more raucously and without getting overheated, so I tell them to tough it out (and give them treats for coming to me, even with the hose in my hand).

All of these water-based solutions work so well for cooling here because it’s a DRY heat. I don’t know how you folks in humid parts of the country survive when it’s so hot.

How are you keeping cool?

My 10-year-old grandson is visiting from Boston and we went for a bike ride today at midday, to a local park. We were riding along a path and saw a woman walking ahead of us with a puppy on a leash and a young girl, maybe three or four years old. As we got closer, I could see that the woman was wearing a hands-free leash – one of those commercial products made for people who jog with their dogs, a waist belt with the leash attached to it. And as I got closer yet, I could see that she was essentially pulling the puppy behind her. The pup was on his feet, but was obviously hot and scared and was resisting at every step.

I took my phone off its handlebar mount and took this picture from a distance. I made an assumption – that this person was not going to be interested in dog-training advice or a stranger’s opinion about practically dragging what looked to be a 4-month-old puppy in the middle of a pretty warm day. And if I saw anything worse, I was going to call my friends at the city animal control department. After I took the picture, I called out in my best cheerful voice, “Hi, coming through on bikes!”

The woman immediately stepped to the side of the path and held her hand out to the little girl (presumably her daughter). She smiled as my grandson and I rode slowly by, and I smiled back and said, “What a cute puppy! But he doesn’t look very happy…”

Her smile disappeared immediately. “He’s getting leash trained,” she said firmly. And then added, “Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing.”

Ah, the dilemma of what to do about what we consider to be training that is, at a very minimum, certain to be ineffective and counterproductive – when we see it in public.

In this case, I didn’t stay to talk to the woman. Her response and demeanor were so determined – so not open to further discussion – that I kept pedaling slowly, before stopping 100 yards or so away to see what the woman did next. Just a minute later, she put the pup and little girl into a car and drove out of the park.

My grandson and I biked to a spot nearby, where we put the bikes down and took a quick dip in the river. As we biked home, we talked about the woman and her pup a bit more. I told my grandson, “It’s like seeing some parent do something pretty mean to their kid. You don’t want to say nothing, but you don’t want to make them even madder.”

I also assured him that if the puppy had actually been getting pulled off his feet, or if she had yanked on the leash or hit him, I would have taken some video and called animal control. “Some people just suck,” said my grandson and I agree! How could she not see that dragging the puppy along by force was not going to result in a dog who trusts or even wants to be with her and her daughter. How could that treatment possibly result in a dog who has good feelings about going on a walk with them?

Does anyone have the perfect thing to say to someone in this situation? Does anyone know a course of action that wouldn’t just make matters worse?

This is the time of year that all dog owners who live in any of the western states, particularly in any part of California, will freeze in fear when they hear their dog sneeze. If the dog sneezes more than once in a row, they drop whatever they were doing and run to look at the dog. And if the dog sneezes violently again and again, most of us are reaching for their car keys and cell phone simultaneously, looking up the number of the emergency vet.

My California compadres know what I’m talking about: the dreaded foxtail in our dog’s nose.

“Foxtail” is the common name for a few species of grass that have fox-tail-shaped reproductive structures. Hordeum murinum and Hordeum marinum (which appear across most of the western U.S.) cause the most harm to dogs (and other animals). In the spring, when grass is green in the west, the foxtail structures are soft and bushy; as spring turns to summer and the grass dries out, the foxtails also dry out and turn brown. And as summer progresses, the foxtails start to fall apart; those previously bushy structures separate into dozens of individual seeds, each topped with a hard, sharp, arrow-like tip and trailing several long, stiff awns. Each awn is covered with microscopic barbs that grow from the awn in a single direction, away from the seed tip. When these awns come into contact with anything, the barbs help propel the seed relentlessly forward.

These structures help the seeds literally bury themselves in the earth, reseeding the plants that will grow tall and grassy again the next spring. But they also bury themselves deep into any clothing, skin, or fur they come into contact with – and if you grasp one by the awn, to pull it out of your clothing, skin, or hair, the awns tend to break off. Even a tiny portion of an awn that’s connected to the seed tip will keep propelling the seed forward

If a dog, walking through the grass, gets one lodged between his toes, the seed will penetrate the skin and start to travel into the dog’s foot and even up into the leg. The discomfort makes most dogs start to lick the place where the seed broke the skin – which pushes the seed further and further into the dog’s flesh.

Dogs also get foxtails in their eyes, where the seeds can burrow back into the eye socket; ears, where the seeds can penetrate the ear drum and even enter the brain; in their genitalia, where the seeds can cause excruciating pain. But most commonly of all, dogs can accidentally sniff foxtail seeds into their noses as they are smelling the ground. And the moment a light-weight, stiff, bristly, awn enters the dog’s nose, you know it, because almost every dog will immediately and violently SNEEZE, again and again. I just read a Facebook post of one of my dog-owning friends, whose dog sneezed so explosively, trying to dislodge a foxtail in her nose, that she broke one of her canine teeth on the floor, and had to be rushed to the vet for not only for removal of the foxtail in her nose, but also, surgical removal of the painfully broken tooth. 

So imagine my horror when, on deadline, sleep-deprived, and working around the clock, I heard my 6-month-old puppy Boone walk into the kitchen this morning, and SNEEZE, SNEEZE, SNEEZE! “Boone, noooooo!” I cried, as I immediately envisioned spending the next 10 hours at an emergency vet’s office (they are all seriously overburdened with patients and understaffed at the moment).

But the gods took pity on me and the best sort of foxtail miracle seemed to occur: It seems that the awn whisked right through Boone’s nose, into his throat, and down his esophagus – the best case scenario. After another minute or two of sneezing and rubbing his nose with his paws, Boone gagged, coughed, and swallowed, and that was that –no more sneezing or rubbing his nose (dogs seem to be able to digest any swallowed awns, thank goodness). Most of the time, foxtail awns that enter the nose end up lodging deep in the folding nasal passages, or stuck in some crevice in the back of the throat, where they can dig into the tissues and travel into the sinuses, the back of the eye, or even the brain. Ack!

Any dog can accidentally sniff a foxtail into his nose during any casual smelling of a field or weeds on the edge of a sidewalk; my son’s dog, a hound-mix named Cole, once inhaled a foxtail within a minute of arriving at my house after a three-hour drive; he started sneezing when I was still hugging my son “Hello”! My son had to put Cole back into his car immediately and head to a vet. An hour and $200 later, they were back, only a little worse for wear, with Cole needing a quiet room to sleep off the sedative he was given for the foxtail removal.

But my point is, while any dog can sniff up a foxtail, some dogs seem more prone to it. Hounds, hunting dogs, and others who use their noses more than the average dog are most at risk, as are (it seems) young dogs, who are still in the habit of enthusiastically and excitedly investigating everything in their world by smelling. Which will explain why, if you happen to drop by my house this summer, you might see a young dog with a mesh bag over his head. No, Boone isn’t being punished, but I’m ordering an Outfox Field Guard for him today. It’s the only tool I am aware of that can keep a sniffy dog safe during foxtail “season.” My nerves just can’t take any more sneezing fits!