In January 2001 my
family adopted Ginger and Hershey, two adult golden retrievers whose other
family had a child with terrible asthma, from GRRI-NJ. Finding that their
dogs were spending too much time in the yard and their daughter too much
time in the emergency room, they decided to put the dogs up for adoption.
My husband, son and I picked up Ginger and Hershey on a cold January
morning. We were sad to be taking the dogs from the house--there were
three other children in the home who were in tears—but so happy to be
taking our new pets home. They both were great dogs, but I fell hard for
Ginger, who was a little over 4 years old. (Hershey is now 12 1/2 and
doing fine since his spleen was removed in January.) As her previous owner
said, Ginger could find an infinite number of ways to play with a ball. We
had a pool in our yard, which she loved. She would lie on the pool deck
and nudge a tennis ball into the water with her nose, watch it bob on the
pool surface until it floated a way just a bit and then stand up, put her
paw in the water and try to drag the ball back into her reach. After some
practice she could almost always bring the ball back, but if she let it
get out too far she had to jump in and fetch it.
Ginger always wanted
to be with her people: She and my son played in the yard, she sat at my
feet as I cooked, hopeful that some tasty bit would come her way, sniffed
in the garden as I dug, lay by the couch when I read, slept next to me
when my husband traveled. A look and crooking one finger would bring her
to me. She loved to run off leash along the canal: We'd walk the quarter
mile or so to the canal (past the wetlands which made her smell like a
swamp if she got into the water) and she'd bound into the water as soon as
her leash was off. One winter, when we could ice skate on the canal she
discovered the pleasure of sliding on ice--she ran right out onto the ice
and then slid until she stopped, only to walk back off the ice and do it
all over again.
She learned things
so quickly. A year ago I found a lump on her tail,which required that all
but about 5 inches of her tail be removed. The Elizabethan collar proved
no match for Ginger, who discovered that she could practically bend in
half while lying on her back in order to get to the tail. What a mess it
became--we finally resorted to a mop bucket to help her tail heal. When
the bucket came off she chased her tail endlessly; it was driving her
crazy and I didn't know what to do. But, since she liked to be with us so
much I decided that behavior modification might work. So one evening,
everytime she started to chase her tail I would say in a firm voice,
"Ginger, outside?" and when she didn't stop chasing her tail I put her out
for a couple of minutes. We repeated the exercise about 8 times that
evening and stopped when she started to get it. The next night I put her
out only three or four times and her tail chasing habit was almost broken.
Of course, then I had to figure out what to do when we were outside, and
she chased her tail!
We put Ginger to
sleep a few days ago; she had a brain tumor that was quickly overtaking
her. She was a wonderful, wonderful pet who enriched our lives.
