w w w . S t r a y d o g*. o r g U p d a t e
POSTED EVERY DAY AT NOON CENTRAL TIME U.S.A.
Straydog Inc., The Arnolds' Happy Home for Strays, a No-Kill Dog Shelter
P.O. Box 1465, Gun Barrel City, Texas 75147 * (903) 479-3497 * EMAIL: straydog@straydog.org

* When Straydog is in red, we're running out of funds to sustain our mission.

Bill Arnold's Daily Straydog Log

MONDAY APRIL 12 2004

Ginger kills a rabbit in the middle of the night

     At about 3:30 this morning Ginger woke me up to let her out into the fenced yard, and Rocky heard the door open, which got him up off the couch, and he went out too.

     Usually they finish their business in about five minutes and are scratching at the door to come back in, but they didn't come back, and I finally fell back asleep. A little less than an hour later, I awoke wondering where the two dogs were, and I got up, opened the door and called to them, but they didn't come. Finally Rocky came running to me out of the darkness, and he came inside, but Ginger remained silent somewhere out in the yard. I called and called, and finally she came to me, came inside, and we all went back to bed. But a few minutes later Ginger was up again wanting to go back out. I thought maybe she wasn't feeling well, and since it was now almost five o'clock (my usual wake-up time), I turned on the lights and got dressed and went out to see if Ginger was all right and if there were any piles of diarrhea or vomit to be shoveled up.

     I shined the flashlight on a far corner of the yard, and there was Ginger busy with something on the ground. As I got close, I could see it was a recently killed adult rabbit. "Ginger!" I yelled at her. "Bad doggie! Bad doggie!" She knew from my tone that she had done something wrong, but she didn't know why it was wrong to kill one of the main food sources her ancestors have been killing and eating for hundreds of thousands of years.

     I buried the rabbit outside of the fenced yard with Ginger watching me through the fence as I continued to scold her all the while, and then Ginger and I went back inside my little RV to get to work on today's update.

Sweet, docile Ginger helps me write the update in my small RV parked on the property next to Straydog.

Over the years Pat and I grew to hate violence of any kind

     Pat and I became vegetarians in May of 1982 after passing a dead dog lying at the side of the road across from a pasture of grazing cattle. We wondered how we could feel so much remorse for that dead dog and still eat those other big, beautiful mammals. Neither Pat nor I ever again ate even one bite of a mammal (or of a bird). (We did go back to eating fish a few years later because we felt we needed some animal-source food, and we didn't consider fish to be sentient beings. As you probably know, fish are so unintelligent and so primitive they try to eat their own young as soon as the babies are born. Only some of the baby fish are lucky enough to swim away from their hungry parents to continue the existence of their species.)

     For a few years we also imposed vegetarianism on our family dogs, but when Pat started taking in strays in 1992, she had very little time to continue to cook vegetarian dog food, and we went back to mostly regular dog food for our rescues.

Thelma & Louise and their mother, Jasmine, go to the park for the first time yesterday

     Though it was a cold, wet and dreary Easter Sunday, Thelma & Louise and their mother, Jasmine, had a great first outing in the park. The two pups have now had all their shots and are officially out of quarantine and are ready for adoption as well as playtime in the big play yard.

Thelma and Louise run so fast they're almost a blur.

So much to sniff in this area that's brand new to the pups

Either Thelma or Louise steps over a toy.

"This is fun!"

More photos of Thelma & Louise and Jasmine in the park

Mpeg Video of Louise and Jasmine in the park - A

Mpeg Video of Louise and Jasmine in the park - B

First email from a reader who printed out and mailed out copies of our newsletter

     Thanks a lot to long-time supporters Deana and Jim Hanson, who followed my suggestion to make copies of and mail out to friends the PDF files of our newsletter--with color photos too!

     It probably won't happen anytime soon, but the technology is here to do away with mass printing and mass mailing altogether. It's already possible to read and print out entire books on the Internet.

     We encourage others to do what Deana and Jim have done:

Bill,

We printed newsletters, and Jim put them in the mail today. Good luck! Please let us hear from you if your shelter runs short on anything. We'll try and help.

Happy Easter,

Deana and Jim