Harry and the Coyotes

I lived in Salt Lake City for some years and, before I ruined my right knee, I used to go running in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains in the early mornings. I had three smooth fox terriers then, Harry, Iz, and Dyna, and I would take them with me. Only deep snow or temperatures below 20F would stop us from going.

The dogs were young but relatively well trained and because the trails were in BLM-managed land, I let them run off lead. Despite the easy access of the trailhead at the top of a fairly tony neighborhood, the trails were not heavily used, at least in the mornings. There were vistas from some of the hilltops where you could see the city spread out at your feet.

One crisp fall morning, I managed to convince a friend of mine to accompany us. The trail began with a gentle curve around a hill, climbing slowly until it suddenly shot off in a straight line, mostly up, towards the hill tops. Once you rounded the first hill, you could no longer see the parking area at the trailhead.

We were around a mile and a half from the car when a pack of coyotes appeared on the trail, coming up from below us. They were somewhat spread out but were clearly operating as a unit. As usual, the dogs were ranging ahead. I managed to call Iz and Dyna to me and snapped their leads on, but the coyotes separated Harry from us and charged him.

He turned and ran, heading farther up the trail.

I threw the car keys and the leashes to my friend, told her to take the two dogs back to the car, and I took off after Harry and the coyotes. Her eyes were as wide as saucers but she turned around immediately.

The coyotes had a lead on me and it was a steep climb. By the time I crested the hill, I could see nothing, hear nothing. I began to call Harry’s name, but I was out of breath, freaking out, and what came out of me was panicked howling.

Suddenly, a man appeared, a bow hunter. He floated up from below me just like the coyotes had done. He told me he had been in the ravine below and had seen the coyote pack tracking us. He said he saw them separate Harry. He said, is that how you normally call your dog to you? I was sobbing and yelling, but I took a breath and said, no. He said, try to call to him in a normal voice.

Suddenly, in the thick scrub oak below us, we heard dogs fighting, one crying out in pain. The bow hunter shot off like he was one of the deer he was hunting, leaping down the hill before I could react. I followed as best as I could but I was dressed for trail running, not bushwhacking. I could hear the dog fight continue, but it was moving, changing location, heading down the gully. Then, suddenly, silence.

I caught up to the bow hunter. He said, we need to climb back up to get a better view. As we crested the top of the hill again, I looked back down the trail and saw my friend running up the trail towards us. She was yelling and waving her arms but she was too far away to make out what she was saying. I continued to call Harry.

The bow hunter and I waited on the hilltop while I periodically called Harry, pausing to listen in between. All we heard was the wind. I was mentally frozen, sure that the coyotes had killed my dog. The bow hunter kept telling me to trust my dog, trust my dog, be calm when you call him. Finally, my friend got close to us and I heard her yell, he’s at the car! He’s at the car!

When she reached us, and managed to gasp out, Harry was hiding under the car when she got there with the other dogs, I collapsed on the ground, sobbing. If you read historical fiction, you may have read something like “she fell onto the sofa insensible.” Well, I was insensible, literally without senses, for several minutes. My friend had tossed all the dogs in the car, not even stopping to check Harry for injuries, and turned around again. The bow hunter kept talking to us, made us drink some of his water, and jogged back with us to the car. I can’t remember what he said now. I only remember thinking, he’s in the car, Harry made it that far.

Once the coyotes separated him from us, Harry did run up the trail further, then down into the ravine. There was indeed a fight. He had a nasty bite on his right rear thigh, a puncture on the outside and more of a tear on the inside. Amazingly, that was his only injury. I think we can infer that Harry was more interested in getting away than making a point.

Somehow, he managed to keep running and make it to the car along a route he had never been before, and there he waited. Quite amazing, really. The event was physically and emotionally traumatic for him. The vet warned me that when dogs get into fights like that, it can take a couple of days for them to recover even though their obvious injuries are relatively minor (he didn’t even require stitches). Indeed, it took Harry four days before he moved off his warm fleece blanket nest at home for anything other than meals and potty breaks. The fleece blanket he was curled up in was a get-well present for Harry from my friend G and my running partner of that morning; they brought it over that day. I still have that blanket, or what’s left of it. It’s well loved, just like my tough little dog Harry.

Spiders in the Garden

Back in the spring, I planted four small spruce trees along the western fence line of my back yard. They aren't as tall as the fence and so do not provide me any shade yet. But they are growing. 

It turns out that spruce trees are excellent habitat for spiders. I've identified at least two kinds that took up residence in them over the summer. One kind builds funnel webs tucked in between branches. You can see them lurking at the center of the funnel if you sneak up quietly and make sure your shadow doesn't fall on the trees first. The other kind, a common garden spider, builds vertical webs between the trees and between the fence and the trees. The distances are around 3 to 4 feet, nothing particularly difficult for these spiders. The spiders started out quite small, maybe the diameter of a pencil eraser, but they appear to have had a successful summer of hunting and several of them have leg spans that are easily over an inch in diameter now.

I check on the spiders every morning when I let the dogs out for a last potty before I head off to the lab. Over the course of the summer, I've collected some interesting observations about these spiders and their webs.

First of all, when they were small, the spiders often centered their webs in the middle of the two objects. It is rare now to find a centered web. Nearly all the webs are offset closer to the trees. My cursory online research suggests that the spiders are simply adapting to the more likely position of prey, mainly flies, midges, mosquitoes, and the like.

But here's a really interesting thing. When the spiders started building their vertical webs back in the early summer, they would build them at a variety of heights. However, the dogs walk between the trees--the trees get watered and the grass grows green and lush there so it's a favorite pooping area, and the lane between the trees and the fence was part of Harry's daily perimeter check. And I mow the lawn of course. So the lower webs would get broken on a daily basis. 

It only took about 2 to 3 weeks but the spiders stopped building webs below Azza's head height.

That's right. I think the spiders learned that low webs were not productive so they all shifted their webs to about 3 feet up and higher. The dogs walk between the trees with impunity. I can easily push the mower between the trees and not touch a web.

In case you think that I am insane (I might be but this is not the best illustration of it), here's another example. I walk the dogs very early in the morning. Places along the sidewalk where bushes lean in close to mailbox clusters would seem to be reasonable locations for spider webs. But I never encounter webs in those locations, and I think it is because those spots are too highly trafficked--the spiders in those areas also learned that, although it might look like a nice easy distance, those are actually crummy locations for webs. I do find spider webs when I veer from the sidewalk however.

There is spotty research on this but it does appear that spiders will change the location, shape, and size of their webs in response to prey availability and type as well as competition with other spiders. One group of researchers did a cost-benefit analysis on spiders that move their webs. I turned up some amusing older references which state that spiders do nothing more than execute a fixed program, like a computer runs a program, when building their webs. Manifest destiny! But newer perspectives suggest that spiders exercise a degree of free will, that they can evaluate past experience and change their web parameters, when web building. That latter view is more consistent with what I observed, and that is a far cry from a computer running a fixed program!

I'd also like to briefly mention some super freaky little spiders that live in my front flower bed. I've only seen them there because in the front flower bed are two plants, mint and some other flowering thing, that produce white flowers. These spiders are tiny and pure white. They don't build webs; instead, they stalk their prey. And they mostly capture bees that visit the flowers. Truly diabolical.

In Search of BBQ

I've always enjoyed good barbeque. Because I've traveled a lot, I've had a chance to sample all styles of the craft, including barbeque on offer in places like Texas, New Mexico, South Carolina, Brazil, and China. I've tasted quite a variety of beef, pork, sheep, goat, chicken, and sausages made from their respective parts. I've had barbeque with dry rub spices, with tomato-sugar sauce, and with yellow mustard sauce. I've eaten meats cooked over wood, over gas, on a spit, on a grill, in a hole in the ground. Part of the pleasure of good barbeque is learning about the craft that the chef brings to the process. Part of the pleasure also comes from good sides. In the US, these tend to be white bread or corn bread, vegetables (usually boiled), beans, fried things, and cole slaw. Most good US barbeque places make desserts, usually cobblers or sweet quick breads that can be cooked quickly in large quantities; pecan pie is a common barbeque house dessert in Texas. A good chef will pay attention to the details of all these things.

I am not a strict follower of just one school--there are many paths to getting good smoked meat. I prefer pork ribs to beef but I'll never turn down an offer of the latter. While I'm not a paid food critic or a chef in my own right, I do think that I know when barbeque is done right.

I've not eaten good barbeque in some years now. I was on the hunt for a local source, and everyone raves about this family-run place in the next town over. I decided to give it a try.

It was horrible. Utterly horrible.

The cornbread was so sweet that I almost thought I had been served flan made with a dusting of corn flour. I like flan a lot. But I was expecting corn bread. I could taste nothing but sugar. I took two bites and left it.

The salad dressing was gelatinous, neon pink. Supposedly it was a raspberry vinaigrette. It is not difficult to whip up a simple vinaigrette on demand or even by the gallon each day of service. And local berry sources abound. No excuse for this nasty, processed crap from a bottle.

The sweet potato tots were fried in old oil. Under the slightly rancid flavor of the oil, I could barely taste the potato. They had not been made from pieces of sweet potato but pureed sweet potato and they were undercooked so they were mushy instead of crispy.

The sausage was identical in texture and color to the cheap "summer sausage" one buys at the grocery store, with one difference. This sausage had twice the normal amount of salt in it. There was so much salt that it made my tongue swell. I like salt. I usually add it to most of my meals. But this was extreme. I left most of the sausage on the plate. Artisanal sausage hit mainstream grocery stores years ago. There wasn't any excuse for this either. If they didn't have time to make it themselves, they could have easily obtained good quality sausage from other local sources.

The ribs were smothered in so much sticky sauce that I could hardly tell meat from bone. And the sauce had no flavor of any kind except sugar. I presume it once had other ingredients waved in its direction but it seemed to be a glaze made from sugar and nothing else. It overwhelmed the meat. It was so thick that it left me with no option of adding other sauces.

On top of this pile of disappointments, the meal cost USD 20. The portions were generous but charging this much for poor quality food was insult added to injury. 

I scraped the glaze off the ribs and brought them home for the dogs. Mimi ate one and threw it up around midnight. My feelings exactly.

A Shared Life of Adventure

I took this picture a few days after I got Harry. It is one of my favorite pictures of him. It captures so much of his spirit and joy that I was able to share for the next 16 years: tail alert, ears at the ready, head slightly down but eyes tilted up, poised to spring into action!

Like any legendary hero, Harry has his own creation myths. But they are more than myths. I got Harry when he was 4 months old from a backyard breeder in Provo, Utah. Perhaps a better description would be microhobby breeder--these folks didn't churn out litter after litter for the money. They planned their matings and litters. Harry was too tall according to the breed standards, although, as it turns out, he was better shaped for flyball than if he had been the perfect smooth fox terrier specimen. He remained lean and fit to nearly the end of his days.

Harry Houdini earned his name just a few days after I got him. I didn't know about dog crates back then, so when I went to work, I left him in a room. To prevent him from roaming the house, I closed the door. But the house was old and the door didn't latch. So I tied a string from the knob to a nail and put up a puppy gate in the doorway for good measure. He was waiting for me on my bed when I got home from work, string and puppy gate still in place in the door. The choice of his name was perfectly obvious.

Taken the day I brought Iz home in early June, 1999.

Even though I was a novice dog owner, it was clear that Harry wasn't happy on his own, so the following year, I returned to the same family in Provo and got his half-sister Iz. She took charge from the moment she arrived, a real queen bee, and he was incredibly relieved.

Sharing the joys of a nap in the sun with puppy Azza in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

He lived his entire life surrounded by tough, feisty female fox terriers. After Iz died, Mimi and her sister Gracie alternately ran the pack. Sweet little Dyna was a constant presence. And of course when I went to Saudi Arabia, it was just Harry and Mimi for two years.

Iz and Harry running along the beach south of San Francisco.

Enjoying the Oregon coast.

He managed to put up with a litter of fox terrier puppies with some grace. By the time the next puppy showed up (Azza), Harry was getting older and was far less concerned about puppy discipline. He was willing to ignore as long as he was ignored in turn.

Taken in southern Utah around 2001 or so. We had just crossed a stream and Harry is drying off.

Harry successfully hunted mice, gophers, and rabbits. He also broke the jaw of a one-eyed kitten I had at the time (Lola) who dared to step on him in the middle of the night. Happily, she didn't repeat the mistake. 

Conquering a jebel in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

Like any beloved companion, Harry had a host of nicknames: Boo, Harry Belly, Mr. Crankypants, and later in life, Old Man.

Harry swam in the Pacific Ocean and the Arabian Gulf. He went white-water rafting and canyoneering in southern Utah. He went along when we hiked and snowshoed in the mountains outside of Salt Lake City. He survived an attack by a pack of coyotes (that story will make a good future post). He hiked in the deserts of the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.

Iz in the foreground, Harry behind her. Rafting the Green River in Utah.

He lived in Utah, Texas, Saudi Arabia, and Oregon. He traveled by plane more than once. He stayed in hotels and tents and friends' homes. He went on cross-country road trips with me.

Running along the beach in Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia.

When he was around 4 or 5 years old, he developed this odd habit, a subvocal moaning or groaning sound that resembled some modes of Tuvan throat singing. He would make this noise whenever he was contemplative or poised for the next exciting thing to happen. It was a characteristic that was uniquely his that continued to the end of his life; none of my other dogs ever did anything like that.

This photo was inspiration for the design of the UTB logo.

And of course, there was the flyball. I was so incredibly lucky to have him as my partner in that game for nine years. He was a founding member of the Utah Tail Blazers (sadly no longer running). Harry and I finished off his career with the great folks of DogzRule! from Austin, Texas. His last tournament at which he squeaked by with enough points to earn his ONYX title was incredible--it is one of the memories that I relive often and cherish.

Harry with the Utah Tail Blazers.

Harry loved his tennis ball but he also loved plush squeaky toys. He most often selected quadruped-shaped ones that he could carry around by the crotch or the head, limbs dangling, ready for a good shake. Partly as a result of his flyball training, he was also a tugging fiend. He was fairly relentless in initiating play for the past few years. It tugs at my heart to take a break and check on the dogs and not see Harry standing with a toy in his mouth, waiting for me with that expectant gleam in his eyes.

Harry always lay with his legs out behind him when he was happy and relaxed.

Rest in peace, my friend. We had a long run together, a shared life of adventure and fun and hardship and sadness. You were the perfect companion: tough, loyal, ready for anything. The end came far too quickly for both of us but I knew that you were ready to go at last. I hope to see you again.

Harry Houdini

I had to let Harry go last week. He was the type of dog companion about whom poems and novels are written--loyal, loving, and tough as nails. Stubborn to the end, as a good terrier should be. He lived an incredible life for a little dog, traveling more and seeing more in his 16 years than most people. I am so lucky that he was by my side for so many adventures, and I'm sad that he won't be with me for the next one. I made the last choice for him, and his pain and confusion are now gone.

Rest in peace, old man. You were loved and you will be sorely missed.

The Clients and Pets In Front of Us

I spent another morning in Eugene vet-teching for Pro-Bone-O. Last time, I assisted the vet. This time, I and another woman, a third-year vet student at OSU, ran the "wellness" room. We took care of dogs and cats that needed routine things like nail trims and vaccinations. Sometimes people get misdirected, or they may not have described their pet's condition completely to the guy up front who organizes everyone, and we end up having to call the vet in for a quick consult. For example, we had a cat with ear mites. We decided that it was better to have a vet make the call on the preferred treatment in case it involved a prescription of some sort. Easily diagnosed, easily treated, the vet was in and out in just a few minutes and the owner was sent home with the next set of treatments to be given in three weeks.

Then in came two dogs with brittle coats, dry, flaky skin with scattered scabs from scratching, and patchy hair loss around the butt area. Could be flea dermatitis (both had live fleas on them). Could be food allergies. Could be some sort of incipient skin infection. We definitely needed a vet to take a look. She came in, spent less than a minute examining the dog on the table, then launched into a rapid and prolonged harangue on, of all things, raw diets.

She's a holistic vet, you see--she announced this right off the bat--and she feeds her dogs raw bones and raw meat along with lightly cooked, no, better make that steamed kale and winter squash and potatoes, only uses low-fat, preferably grass-fed ground meat like bison or beef...she went on and on. The two owners were gob-smacked to say the least. The vet didn't pause for breath. She didn't even stop when the guy mumbled something about food stamps. She said, if you can't feed raw, then you have to feed grain-free, of course. Because the dogs are suffering from allergies caused by the corn in their diets. And NO hotdogs or lunchmeat. NO bread or pasta. There was more, much more, but I was getting so angry that I could only focus on not throttling the vet then and there.

My fucking god, we saw a woman and her dog today who live in a fucking tent. A fucking tent! We vaccinated a lovely cat owned by another woman--they live in her car. And this crazed vet is going on and on about fucking steamed kale to two people who are at a free clinic for the homeless and indigent, who themselves are probably nutritionally deficient and may sometimes not even eat at all if they don't have the money. They are feeding their dogs the donated food they get for free from Pro-Bone-O.

This vet may feel quite proud of herself for feeding raw. But despite the lack of evidence, real, clinical-trial-based evidence for the benefits of raw diets and positive, clinical-trial-based evidence for risks associated with them (see all the posts here to get you started; click through to all the posts and make sure you read the comments and replies; lots of confirmation bias and outright delusion out there), she is really achieving nothing more than making herself feel good. Raw diets have just about as much woo in them as homeopathy. Oh, evil dog food companies! Oh, evil pharmaceutical companies! Go live under a fucking bridge, wear organic hemp sacking instead of clothes, and grow turnips already.

On top of that, she is wrong about the allergies. It is in fact the protein source that causes the allergies most of the time, not the grain. I learned this when I spent a month shadowing with a dermatologist, a vet who specializes in matters of diet and disease. Feeding grain-free may remove irritants and some non-digestible or poorly digestible components but the absence of grain won't solve the allergy problem on its own. 

After she left, I took a deep breath, then talked to them a bit about how they could buy one bag of grain-free and mix it with the food they are getting from the free clinic, how it would help improve the dogs' diet while reducing their cost. I told them about some lower-cost, single-protein source brands of food they could get at the feed supply or the grocery store. I got them to admit that they feed the dogs table scraps (hotdogs and white bread) so I suggested they try to cut back on that. Okay as treats but they make a nutritionally deficient diet. But I said this knowing full well that when they ran out of the donated dog food, the dogs probably ate what they did. I didn't give them an imperative, I made a suggestion.

Sure, you could argue that if these two people can't feed their dogs properly, they shouldn't have dogs in the first place. But I reject that from the start. Our goal as veterinarians should be to assist our clients and their pets in ways that will be most successful for them. In other words, we must work with the actual clients and pets that are in front of us, not some fucking idealized, steamed-kale-raw-bone-eating dream. We should not shame them, confuse them, or dazzle them with bullshit. That vet made a mistake today. She was not treating the dogs and clients that were there in the room with us. 

And I learned a very valuable lesson.

Chickens Have Outies

I've plowed through 69 pages of a nearly 400-page dissertation, dug up half a dozen cool papers on the role of the gut microbiome in such diverse things as mammalian radiation into diverse habitats and development of metabolic diseases (obesity, diabetes), and started building an enormous spreadsheet listing all of the published poultry flaxseed feeding trials since the mid 1980's along with a brief summary of their outcomes. I also spent half an hour at the barn and five hours in the lab this morning. Time for a break!

I thought I would share an amazing discovery with you: chickens have outies. Okay, I know, birds aren't placental mammals so technically they don't have belly buttons, innie, outie, or otherwise. But they most certainly have the functional equivalent to a structure associated with the belly button.

What is a belly button? The scientific word is omphalos, Greek for navel or center. I love the word omphalos. The navel marks the spot where the placenta attaches to the embryo during gestation. In mammals, the navel is an external feature, an embryological scar if you want to think of it that way. Birds don't have a placenta but they do have a structure that links what eventually becomes the GI tract of the embryo to the yolk, its energy source during development in the egg.

Just before birds hatch, they absorb the remaining bit of yolk into their intestinal cavity. They use the lipids in the yolk remnant for the energy that they need to break the shell then begin their search for food and water. If you've ever cut up day-old chicks (they are fed to snakes, raptors, etc) you might have noticed the runny yellow yolk remnant inside its belly.

As the birds age, they use up the yolk but the small bit that connected their GI tract to the yolk remains. It is called the Meckel's diverticulum and it specifically marks the start of the lower part of the small intestine in birds (the ileum). Meckel's diverticulum resembles a tiny outie belly button hanging off the outside of the chicken's gut. We have a Meckel's diverticulum that hangs off our lower small intestine too; originally it attaches to the placenta but once we are born, it shrivels up a bit, detaches from our belly wall, and becomes vestigial.

Photos after the break. Don't click if guts bother you.