pointy-pup

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it's nuts how making your dog chase a laser pointer is a quick and efficient way to potentially fry their brains

#luna really fixates on lights even though i have never in my life encouraged the behaviour #and its so so stressful for her #its gotten better with like... what will or won't set her off #but not with the intensity of her reactions #her biggest problem is sunlight reflecting off of cars flashing into the house/on the walls/ceiling #and also if you open the fridge when the kitchen is dark bc the door throws an arc of light across the room #if i dont have the light on in the front hall at night and nobody's home she'll be panting and super overstimulated and stressed #from running up and down the stairs chasing headlights incessantly for hours #totally fixated on them and waiting with complete intensity when theres no cars #:)))

[pointy-pup]

Following my earlier post, here is the reason for the waterlogged longline

#the utter joy in this video...........

[pointy-pup]

How to sit at a picnic table according to Archy

#hes so right for this

[pointy-pup]

Hooking up the team for a run. They have zero chill. Turn on sound for cacophony of cheering sled dogs.

Bolt and Lava in lead, Viper and Patches in swing, Wizard and his sister Svetlana (who is turning circles around me as I try to hook the snap to her tug) in team and Reign and Roswell in wheel.

We’ve had a little more snow and a deep freeze, but our snow cover is still minimal and I fear it may not hold up well in the forecasted warming trend.

#lava is so right she is so funny for that

[pointy-pup]

why must dogs prefer vomiting on soft surfaces? asking for a friend

#shoutout to luna last week going to the only patch of actual carpet (vs rugs) left in this entire house

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Nobody:

My nasty little dog: I am going to make your pillow wet with my slurp tongue.

#luna i swear to god why you gotta do this #i wake up in the morning and the couch has a massive wet spot on it from where yyouve just been LICKING it #dogs are gross and nasty and evil

[pointy-pup]

I like stubborn dogs. Not biddable, not dumb, but a third thing:

"I understand what you want, but you gotta give me a damn good reason why I would want to do it."

#literallyyyyy i love it #coincidentally this is my dad's biggest problem with luna LOL #he thinks all dogs should do what they're told just because their owner told them to #and its about ~respect~ #like im sorry dad thats a dog her brain is the size of a walnut she doesnt know what respect is #she wants to be paid for her labour fairly like any other member of society #ironically though he grew up with a malamute

[pointy-pup]

Poll time!

#like herbs #:) #erbs

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#the main bathroom upstairs has two doors bc it's like a semi-ensuite #and if i close the main door luna will come around the other side to try and get in that way #which sometimes works but sometimes that door is also closed #BUT #the secondary door is frosted glass #so i can see her stupid silhouette standing there staring through the glass #sometimes she presses her stupid nose to it and you can see it squashes against the glass #its so fucking funny

[pointy-pup]

There's a lot of dumb ass animal cruelty takes in general but my favorite is the people who think you need to force sled dogs to pull.

Have you ever walked a dog before in your entire life? They love to pull. They're the pullingest damn things you ever saw. They'll merrily rip your rotator cuff in half like a phone book for the chance to stick their own face into a pile of old feces. They'll drag you down the road while you go through all 5 stages of grief trying to make them stop.

There are hundreds of products on the market promising to get ordinary non sled dogs to stop pulling their hapless owners down the road and spilling their iced coffees. People have gone so far as to use electric collars to try and zap sense into their poor stupid labradoodle that wants nothing more but to suicidally pull itself and everyone it loves into the snarling maw of the nearest leash reactive pit bull.

A dog that's allowed to pull, nay, encouraged to pull, is probably the most self actualized animal on the planet right after seagulls that live somewhere with food stands outdoors.

#my one and only time dogsledding was this year and honestly theres nothing more joyful than seeing working dogs work #they pulled the team out of the kennel and the other dogs who werent working were going BANANAS because they all wanted a turn #also very cool and fun that it was a kennel run by an indigenous man whose family had been mushing for generations #and his dogs are bred for their working drive and it really shows

[pointy-pup]

Today's enrichment brought to you by: one specific fly that Mango is determined to catch

#big fly in the house truly is peak enrichment at zero cost #unless something gets broken

[pointy-pup]

Shoutout to the City of Yellowknife for being cool at something 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

#happy pride 🌈 #<333 #also its very weird seeing buildings in a very tiny city and being like 'oh i recognize that' #you take one trip to YK and youre intimately familiar with the whole city

[pointy-pup]

Hello is this anything?

#this is everything #the biggest mood ever

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just extremely

#anteater #i love her

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Shes the most vivid dreamer ive ever known

#this is how luna dreams as well <3 #every now and then she still suckles in her sleep but very rarely

[pointy-pup]

Please read this man’s description of his dachshund and its most annoying habit

“I have a ridiculous dog named Walnut. He is as domesticated as a beast can be: a purebred longhaired miniature dachshund with fur so thick it feels rich and creamy, like pudding. His tail is a huge spreading golden fan, a clutch of sunbeams. He looks less like a dog than like a tropical fish. People see him and gasp. Sometimes I tell Walnut right out loud that he is my precious little teddy bear pudding cup sweet boy snuggle-stinker.

In my daily life, Walnut is omnipresent. He shadows me all over the house. When I sit, he gallops up into my lap. When I go to bed, he stretches out his long warm body against my body or he tucks himself under my chin like a soft violin. Walnut is so relentlessly present that sometimes, paradoxically, he disappears. If I am stressed or tired, I can go a whole day without noticing him. I will pet him idly; I will yell at him absent-mindedly for barking at the mailman; I will nuzzle him with my foot. But I will not really see him. He will ask for my attention, but I will have no attention to give. Humans are notorious for this: for our ability to become blind to our surroundings — even a fluffy little jewel of a mammal like Walnut.

…

When I come home from a trip, Walnut gets very excited. He prances and hops and barks and sniffs me at the door. And the consciousnesses of all the wild creatures I’ve seen — the puffins, rhinos, manatees, ferrets, the weird hairy wet horses — come to life for me inside of my domestic dog. He is, suddenly, one of these unfamiliar animals. I can pet him with my full attention, with a full union of our two attentions. He is new to me and I am new to him. We are new again together.

Even when he is horrible. The most annoying thing Walnut does, even worse than barking at the mailman, is the ritual of his “evening drink.” Every night, when I am settled in bed, when I am on the brink of sleep, Walnut will suddenly get very thirsty. If I go to bed at 10:30, Walnut will get thirsty at 11. If I go to bed at midnight, he’ll wake me up at 1. I’ve found that the only way I cannot be mad about this is to treat this ritual as its own special kind of voyage — to try to experience it as if for the first time. If I am open to it, my upstairs hallway contains an astonishing amount of life.

The evening drink goes something like this: First, Walnut will stand on the edge of the bed, in a muscular, stout little stance, and he will wave his big ridiculous fan tail in my face, creating enough of a breeze that I can’t ignore it. I will roll over and try to go back to sleep, but he won’t let me: He’ll stamp his hairy front paws and wag harder, then add expressive noises from his snout — half-whine, half-breath, hardly audible except to me. And so I give up. I sit up and pivot and plant my feet on the floor — I am hardly even awake yet — and I make a little basket of my arms, like a running back preparing to take a handoff, and Walnut pops his body right into that pocket, entrusting the long length of his vulnerable spine (a hazard of the dachshund breed) to the stretch of my right arm, and then he hangs his furry front legs over my left. From this point on we function as a unit, a fusion of man and dog. As I lift my weight from the bed Walnut does a little hop, just to help me with gravity, and we set off down the narrow hall. We are Odysseus on the wine-dark sea. (Walnut is Odysseus; I am the ship.)

All of evolution, all of the births and deaths since caveman times, since wolf times, that produced my ancestors and his — all the firelight and sneak attacks and tenderly offered scraps of meat, the cages and houses, the secret stretchy coils of German DNA — it has all come, finally, to this: a fully grown exhausted human man, a tiny panting goofy harmless dog, walking down the hall together. Even in the dark, Walnut will tilt his snout up at me, throw me a deep happy look from his big black eyes — I can feel this happening even when I can’t see it — and he will snuffle the air until I say nice words to him (OK you fuzzy stinker, let’s go get your evening drink), and then, always, I will lower my face and he will lick my nose, and his breath is so bad, his fetid snout-wind, it smells like a scoop of the primordial soup. It is not good in any way. And yet I love it.

Walnut and I move down the hall together, step by bipedal step, one two three four, tired man and thirsty friend, and together we pass the wildlife of the hallway — a moth, a spider on the ceiling, both of which my children will yell at me later to move outside, and of course each of these creatures could be its own voyage, its own portal to millions of years of history, but we can’t stop to study them now; we are passing my son’s room. We can hear him murmuring words to his friends in a voice that sounds disturbingly like my own voice, deep sound waves rumbling over deep mammalian cords — and now we are passing my daughter’s room, my sweet nearly grown-up girl, who was so tiny when we brought Walnut home, as a golden puppy, but now she is moving off to college. In her room she has a hamster she calls Acorn, another consciousness, another portal to millions of years, to ancient ancestors in China, nighttime scampering over deserts.

But we move on. Behind us, in the hallway, comes a sudden galumphing. It is yet another animal: our other dog, Pistachio, he is getting up to see what’s happening; he was sleeping, too, but now he is following us. Pistachio is the opposite of Walnut, a huge mutt we adopted from a shelter, a gangly scraggly garbage muppet, his body welded together out of old mops and sandpaper, with legs like stilts and an enormous block head and a tail so long that when he whips it in joy, constantly, he beats himself in the face. Pistachio unfolds himself from his sleepy curl, stands, trots, huffs and stares after us with big human eyes. Walnut ignores him, because with every step he is sniffing the dark air ahead of us, like a car probing a night road with headlights, and he knows we are approaching his water dish now, he knows I am about to bend my body in half to set his four paws simultaneously down on the floor, he knows that he will slap the cool water with his tongue for 15 seconds before I pick him up again and we journey back down the hall. And I find myself wondering, although of course it doesn’t matter, if Walnut was even thirsty, or if we are just playing out a mutual script. Or maybe, and who could blame him, he just felt like taking a trip.”

#oh this is so good........

[pointy-pup]

this is some kinda creature

#im not sure what kind #luna #shepherd mix #gsd mix