The Houseguest

We have a friend who seems to stumble onto pit bulls in need all of the time. This is, most likely, due to the fact that she’s a bit obsessed with pit bulls (fair enough, so are we) and that she tends to spend an unusual amount of time (for unknown reasons) in shady neighborhoods. It’s a given (that I hope is changing) that if you find a shady neighborhood, you’re sure to find a plethora of pit bulls in need.

We were literally in flight from the UK to the US when the calls began coming in on both our phones. (I don’t know if she thinks Chris and I don’t spend time together or if she thinks that when we do, we don’t spend any of it communicating—either way, we tend to get identical voicemails from her.) She’d come across another pit bull in need. Only this time it was a puppy—just three weeks old! And she hadn’t been in a shady neighborhood, she’d been at a parade on the Southside. Oh, but she still lived in a no-pet building. Please call immediately. 

Oh dear….

I guess it’s not totally surprising that just 24 hours after landing and 22 hours after bringing T2 home from two weeks at sleepover camp, we found ourselves balancing a (probably seven-week-old rather than three-week-old) puppy on a barstool as we said, “No, no. He’ll be fine. It’s just a matter of a few days until we can get him into the rescue program.” You will notice we did not say, “No, no. We’ll be fine. We were just saying that what we really need after two weeks away, in addition to two slightly clingy dogs who missed us and a good round of jet-lag, is a puppy who has been taken away from his mother too early and who was just fed a bunch of different things that guarantee frequent trips outside at very short intervals. I mean, really, we’re not big fans of sleep or calm anyway.” Which is how we ended up with Scooby. (In my defense, I had really hoped we could find a more unique, admirable sort of name for the little guy, but the truth is that Scooby seemed to really suit him.)

The first evening was really quite something. We have our routine fairly down-pat, as do most families, and there really isn’t a lot of wiggle room for extras – especially extra canines. While I prep dinner, Chris settles into the

corner of the sectional with his laptop and a dog on each side. Chris works or peruses the internet while T2 use their time to catch up on some much needed sleep (somehow those four hours in the afternoon never seem to be enough). Then everyone eats and we all eventually return to the couch until it’s time for bed.

However, when you add in squiggly, wiggly, wound-to-the-brink puppy energy into the mix all of a sudden it becomes, “No, you can’t let him have her spot.” “Careful, I think he’s going to jump!” “Off the keyboard, you monkey.” “Get him out of the freaking kitchen—he’s going to get burned when I open the oven.” “Ow—those puppy teeth are sharp!” “Watch the wine!”  “Hooooney, will you please come get her…I mean him again? He can’t be in here alone while I’m cooking.” And so on. It took a full two hours every night for him to bounce and pounce and tumble enough energy out of his teeny system so he could crawl up Chris’ shirt, wiggle around to his back and settle down in a nice, warm, quiet space of his own. Every night. Two hours.

Funny thing about puppies—everyone loves them. I frequently handed him over the fence for the neighbors to cuddle and coo over. Our renters suddenly seemed more in synch with our yard schedule, stepping out to say hi to little Scooby before we went in. People on the sidewalk, a yard over from ours, even asked about him (he was so tiny I’m surprised they could even see him through the fence and grass). Even at the vet when we took him to get his vaccines and de-worming, everyone wanted a little puppy time.

It was actually at the vet that it became pretty clear to me that we, however, might not really be a puppy family, cute as they are. As we know, T2 have their own quirky relationship that involves numerous ‘conversations’ between them about who’s in charge, who gets what toy and other various things that dogs bicker over. I think it was perhaps Scooby’s added dynamic to their relationship and the arrival of an old, graying lab while we were in the vet’s lobby that prompted their first public display of what can only be described as the epitome of family dysfunction. There I was, with well-behaved Toni on one side and well-behaved Téa on the other, Scooby in a beach bag around my shoulder. The next thing I know T2 are doing their very best, most convincing

interpretation of what a two vicious pit bulls look like and why they have such a bad reputation. It only lasted about 15 seconds, but they were up on their hind legs, arms around each other with bared teeth clashing for the whole scene (no blood, there almost never is, just lots of posturing and drama). I looked around to see if anyone had noticed. The couple with the old lab were forgetting to whisper as they talked about the horrible vicious dogs in the waiting room. (I’m sure they were talking about someone else. My dogs were just having a conversation, after all.) Some staff were conscientiously shuffling papers while others had completely disappeared (to come around to help, I figured out later.) And me standing there with a puppy in in a beach bag like this was all perfectly normal. Just then I saw three prim looking King Charles spaniels and an equally prim looking woman heading in the door. I decided that it was time for my lovely family to move into the extra, out of sight waiting room for unsociables, when darned if they didn’t just up and do it again. Ten seconds of pure; all show and no damage; scare the pants of the uptight people brawling, and then back to my sides in less than 10 seconds—all wags and panting. Really, ladies?? In case we missed it the first time?

I would like to tell you that the rest of Scooby’s visit with us was drama free before he headed off to his longer-term foster home with the Chicagoland Bully Breed Rescue program. And for the most part it was. Except for one teeny tiny incident involving a rawhide, a crabby adult dog (I won’t even name names) and young Scooby’s face. I’ll leave it at that with a closing statement that Mr. Scooby is just fine. Now.

We were all a little sad to see him go, I think, but the night he left no one seemed to mind a drama-free dinnertime; her or his own space on the couch, uninterrupted; and a howl-free bedtime.

T2 get a yard!

I've been a little lax with the storytelling lately, not because we've run out of stories but because the four of us (Toni, Téa, Chris and I) have been settling in to a new home. It's taking a lot more time and energy than we humans anticipated, though T2 seem to have gotten the hang of things pretty quickly.

The basics of the move are that the four of us were living in an aesthetically amazing vintage loft in a converted former Nabisco factory. That was the up-side. The down-side was that it was exactly big enough to comfortably fit me (since I was the only one of us there when I purchased it), but now had to manage for me, Chris, Toni and Téa...and our ridiculous amount of stuff. It was also in the middle of hipster West Loop in Chicago, which is great for people but really not all that great if you're a dog (although hundreds of dogs live in the neighborhood). For instance: we had to walk a mile just to get to a decent amount of grass; the amount of semis delivering products to the various warehouses were more than poor Toni's nerves could really handle; the time it took us to get from the third floor to the first tree in the event of upset stomachs was unsympathetically long; etc.

So number one on our list of must-haves when we began the search for our new home was a yard—preferably an oversized yard. No, we did not move just to indulged our obsession with T2, but as long as we were upgrading we might as well upgrade from all family members' perspectives. More space for us, more space for T2—everyone wins!

The change in routine from four scheduled, no nonsense walks involving leashes to an ever-changing plethora of random outings involving their very own yard, various wildlife and no leashes has been hugely popular. Téa is exhausted every evening, which is something I never thought possible. Toni, who's agoraphobia was so severe that she could hardly get herself out the door for the basics when we first met her, now bounds (really, she bounds) out the back door each morning and has even been known to fling herself onto the ground for a random roll on her back, also something I never thought possible.

They even have cool new neighbors: Anya and Vivian to the north, two dog-loving little human girls; and Scooby the obnoxious chihuahua and his new little brother Rollo the 10-week-old pit bull to the south. Tonight Arthur the mastiff, one of the new tenants in our first floor apartment, moves in. Téa was eager to show him her poorest, most unfriendly manners on first meeting, but we're sure she'll get the hang of him just as quickly as she has everything else around the new home.

Téa demonstrates the life-is-good back roll.

Fun fact for the day

You are 60 times more likely to be killed by a coconut than by a pit bull (and five times more likely to be killed by a cow).

See how often you can work that into a conversation!

True Story: Téa née Nilla

I got an email today from Carolyn, who runs Chicagoland Bully Breed Rescue (CBBR). CBBR is the rescue group through which we adopted Téa. Her name was Nilla at the time (though she also went by Yellow Fever among close friends). At any rate, Carolyn sent along the photo above, which is Téa's adoption photo (like our version of her baby photo, I guess) and when I lamented over how skinny she looks (because she was), I got the following in reply:

"i remember at the one event we had this guy ask us her name. i said nilla like nilla wafers and he says you need to feed her some nilla wafers...just let her go through the manufacturing plant and eat them all!" 

Well said, buddy, well said.

Thanks to Petraits for the beginning of our funny Téa photo collection!

Practicing to become a vicious, scary pit bull

This is not exactly a story about Toni, nor is it exactly a story about Téa. It’s a story about the horrible, horrible things that pit bulls can do to children that never make the news, by way of being a story about my nephew Nate. And by “horrible, horrible things that pit bulls can do to children,” I mean, share their crates with them, teach them to sit quietly when asked in order to get a treat and other heart-breaking activities.

T2 and I took a road trip recently to visit my families in North Carolina. The first stop was Charlotte, where we stayed with my sister, her husband and my nephew Nate. Nate, coming up on three years old, spends plenty of time with

dogs. He’s practically a younger sibling to my father and step-mother’s dog Osgood, right down to chewing on Osgood’s chew toys when Os isn’t looking. My brother’s pit bull Pearl is really just a taller, brawnier version of Os in his world. Sometimes he gets their names mixed up, but as long as the names are said with affection, I don’t think Pearl or Os much mind. Nate’s been taught all of the right things—no pulling of tails or ears; no bothering sleeping dogs; no yelling at them…. In fact, if they could just get him to stop sharing the chew toys, I think he’d have the whole list of dos and don’ts down pat.

Nate also knows Toni, though he probably doesn’t remember her from her first two visits. He met her during the visit resulting in the infamous claustrophobia incident at my parents and then again when we went to Charlotte for my brother’s wedding a month later. He had never met Téa, but actually no one in Charlotte had met Téa yet. My sister shows Nate family photos every day, though, so that he will know who all of his relatives are even if they live far away. For our part of the family, those photos also include ones of T2.

It didn’t take long after our arrival to realize that not only did Nate get along with T2, he actually wanted to be T2. Every morning when Toni crawled into Téa’s crate for a little nap (and possibly a moment’s rest from Nate’s constant chatter), Nate needed to crawl in with her. “Look. Look. Pearl and I get in crate.” He was really in with Toni, but all of those

brindle pit bulls look alike anyway, right? When asked what they were doing, he would close the crate (which for some reason didn’t trigger Toni’s claustrophobia) and say, “We sleepin’,” which sounded a lot more like, “We sweepin’.” Toni was actually making a fairly good approximation of sleeping, if you can call lying in a ball with an “I’m so over this” look on your face sleeping. Nate did more of a fidgety, fussy, twist and turn kind of pretend sleeping that ended up looking nothing at all like sleeping.

Then there was trick time. T2 have to work at least a little for nearly everything. They sit before going outside, sit or lie down while a meal is being prepared and so on. So did our new “puppy,” Nate. Nate sat with T2 before going outside. He sat while I made their dinner. One morning, when Nate was feeling particularly chatty and that he ought to be touching or petting the dogs every other second, my sister was feeling particularly short of patience with

him. So when the dogs laid down, as dogs often do throughout the day, we told Nate that the dogs were having a time out quiet time. Well, if the furry dogs were having a time out quiet time, then the human dog needed to have a time out quiet time, too. So Nate got down on his belly on the floor, put his rear end toward Téa, put his head down on his hands and whispered very loudly that he was having a time out quiet time, too—look! When everyone was “allowed” to get up 10 minutes later, T2 got a liver treat each and Nate had a pretzel stick. Win-win.

I did have to stop myself short of picking Nate up his own collar when we stopped by a Target during my visit—my sister would have invited us back but I think it would have been touch-and-go with my brother-in-law if we’d put a collar on his son. Which I think makes it clear that the moral of this story, with apologies to Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, must be “Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be pit bulls.”

“You think that’s funny?”

We went to the vet this morning. We go to the vet unfortunately often. Luckily, everyone at our vet office loves T2—and I mean loveslovesloves them. So when we go to the vet, even though some unpleasant things may happen there in the course of the visit, the affection, the fawning and the endless treats they get along the way make it more like a visit to their own personal fan club than to the vet.

We don’t usually go to the vet for emergencies, so usually our trips are fairly uneventful. But today when we approached the vet, we came upon a massive

line of people (three and four deep in some places) that began at the doors of gigantic high school on the block and wrapped around the corner. When we turned the corner to get to the parking lot, we could see that the line wrapped around the next corner, and if it wrapped around the corner beyond that (which we couldn’t see) it would soon become a perfect city square block of a line. It was a mixed demographic—mostly youngish adults; some older adults; all shapes, sizes and colors represented; and a certain style among them. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but when I learned from the vet staff that the line was for auditions for the new Transformer movie, it all made sense.

At any rate, as I waited for the line to part so that we could drive into the lot, I decided this was the kind of crowd in which someone was certainly going to make a big deal out of two pit bulls hopping out of a jeep. It would be similar to the reaction I might get tossing a leash around Cerberus, the mythical multi-headed hound who is said to guard the gates of hell, and taking him into the vet for his annual vaccines. So I let T2 out of the back hatch and ignored the commentary I could hear starting among the crowd closest to us. I “excuse me-ed” our way through the line to the sidewalk, smiling at the few people who made eye contact so they could see that a nice person like me probably has nice dogs, regardless of how intimidating they may appear.

And then it happened. I almost thought it hadn’t, because I really couldn’t believe anyone would do it. But it did.

One of the young men closest to the path we had just cut through the crowd barked at Toni and Téa. Not a friendly, “woof, woof, doggie” like we sometimes get in the park. A loud, abrupt, startling bark.

As I turned and processed that Toni was (not surprisingly) completely freaked out, tail between her legs and tucked against her belly, which was nearly on the sidewalk she was crouched so low, I also realized I was watching this ignorant, immature young man snigger about it with his buddy.

I think years ago I might have been the kind of person who would have kept walking, steaming on the inside but afraid to confront them for fear of being rude. I probably would have told my friends about it later, wishing I had had said, “(insert clever, cutting comment here).” But since Toni has come into our lives, I’ve become the kind of protective mama bear that you have to be if you have pit bulls in the city. I will say something when people disparage the breed or my own dogs to my face; I will tell people to step back if they are acting inappropriately toward my dogs (for instance the crackhead who tried to rile Toni up as if we were about to go into the fighting ring, but only succeeded in getting a stern talking-to from me); and I will not let some ill-mannered idiot terrorize my dog for a laugh.

“Who did that?” I said it loudly and aggressively. Even if I hadn’t seen them laughing, it would have been so obvious who the offenders were—they were the only ones who weren’t looking directly at me by then. “Who did that? Who freaked out my dog?” Bent heads like ostriches—as if I couldn’t see them eight feet in front of me. “You. You think that’s funny? It’s not.” I had everyone’s attention by then. “It’s not cool. And everyone here knows it but you.”

Okay, so it wasn’t the clever, cutting comment I would have liked. But based on the looks on their faces, their body language and the way they turned their backs to the glass windows of the reception area when they saw T2 and me enter reception from the exam rooms, I think I got my point across.

The strange conversations we have – Part I

Anyone who has a pit bull knows what I mean when I say that a lot of people say a lot of strange things to us about our pit bulls. Some of the things people say are actually nice, complimentary or even just curious. But most of the things people say are uninformed, inappropriate or just downright mean-spirited. Sometimes we get both from the same people.

I was out one morning on a Saturday. We live near a homeless shelter and many of the guests there are out and about in the early hours. I’ve had various morning conversations with a few of them about pit bulls: ours, pits their families owned when they were growing up, pits they’ve met along the way, etc.

On this particular morning, I had both Toni and Téa with me. We had stopped to talk with a man for about five minutes about pit bulls, their personalities, how he bet no one ever messes with me when we go out walking. Then he said, pointing to Toni, “It would be really scary if that one got off his leash.” (Poor Toni—a lot of people think she’s a male due to her size and brawn.)

I was thinking we were on the same page, based on conversation up to that point. “I know. I can’t imagine how worried I’d be that someone would pick her up and try to make her fight or use her as a bait dog.”

He looked at me a little funny, paused and said, “No, I mean because she’d kill all the other dogs in the neighborhood.”

I laughed out loud. “That one?” I was cracking up. “No, that one is even afraid of cats. I wouldn’t be worried about the neighborhood dogs if she got out.”