live blogging thanksgiving pt 2

6:15 pm
IT is with a bittersweet joy that I tell you the wonderful news that Tess seems to have been adopted! Being a holiday and all, the adoption people had the day off so I was unable to confirm, but there was a new dog in her kennel today, and Tess was nowhere to be found. I hope and believe that she is probably with her new family right now, attentively waiting for falling crumbs underneath a dinning room table on which sits a great thanksgiving feast. Maybe her new owners have given her an orange bandana to celebrate the festive season, and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if she ends up having a better thanksgiving dinner than me. I was very much looking forward to seeing her today, but her adoption is truly something to be thankful for. (hey, who ever adopted her, just in case you read my blog please drop me a line!!!)
One thing that’s for certain is she sure missed a crazy day at the humane society. It was a relative ghost town, with only a few key staff members and a small handful of volunteers on duty. The dogs were going totally bonkers, and getting them all out was wet and slow going. The kennel is jammed packed, with a current roster of 105 dogs, and since the humane society was closed today, the dogs didn’t have the normal daily interaction with people coming in to look at them. The rain was relentless, and as the afternoon proceeded, the few volunteers that were there slowly started drifting away to the call of turkey dinners. By mid afternoon it was down to just me and one other volunteer named Kelly, we had both been there for a few hours and were totally soaked, but there were still about 30 dogs needing to get out and neither of us had any big dinner plans to run off to so we stuck it out.

[Warner, a ten month old lab, was the last dog to be taken out today. I’d like to thank him for being so patient while we took 105 other dogs out before him. But something tells me, that even with the wait and the cold dark rain, he was pretty thankful as well.]
At 4:45 I got the last dog out, and soon after was thankful to get in my minivan and crank the heat. Driving home wet and tired after walking homeless dogs in the rain for six hours, the thought of people sitting in warm houses and eating lots of good food made me a little jealous. My turkey potpie wasn’t sounding so good anymore and the idea of dropping in unexpectedly at Ari and Greg’s crossed my mind, but I smelled and felt like a dirty wet dog, so I figured I just stick to my original plan.
Don’t worry; I don’t plan on this blog becoming a dog blog. I have always found it pretty annoying when people get a little too excited about talking about their pets, and it is not my intention to bore you with how funny Roscoe the old pit-bull is, or how adorable Piper the black lab is. But I have become fascinated with observing these dogs’ behavior patterns; how they interact with each other and with us- the mysterious people that just show up and take them for walks and clean up after them. There is almost always a great deal of tension amongst the dogs in the kennel, especially today when there aren’t too many people around to pay attention to them. They bark and howl and jump around their cages when you walk in the room in what seems to be a competitive fit to try to get your attention ahead of all the other dogs. Dogs are pack animals and they are used to living together, but not with walls and cages separating them. The dogs with alpha male tendencies seem to have the most stress, not being able to figure out who really is the alpha and therefore always being on a heightened sense of alert. There is a giant red Chow that I think would be the Alpha of the entire kennel right now, and every time you walk past his cage walking another dog he totally flips out, barking and snarling and looking like he might tear through the kennel door. But when you get him outside he becomes super sweet and is totally nice to other dogs he encounters while being walked. It’s just like they need that brief moment of “hey, who’s boss, oh yeah, I’m boss, let me sniff your crotch, okay see you later” and once they have that figured out they are totally cool. There is probably a couple other big dogs with strong alpha tendencies that I wouldn’t want this chow to come into contact with, but for all the others who immediately sense his manly man ways they are quick to accept him as the dominant one and are chill with it. The dogs don’t really seem to care who is in charge, just as long as they are clear on where the stand in the pecking order. But I think the close proximity but constant separation makes that very difficult. Each one is the alpha when they are alone in their kennel barking loudly, or potentially at the bottom of the ladder, they just don’t know and I think it worries them.
Okay, I am going to take a shower and stop pretending to be an animal psychologist.