Love Your Pet Day!
So it is Love Your Pet Day today and I thought I would get the team to commemorate the occasion with a feature on their favourite cat.
The article turned out to be…unexpected, to say the least. But I am nice and these stories are full of love (and I have been promised extra pats today), so go ahead and read them you all! Even Sarah has got sappy in this one.
Love Tuxedo Day
Sarah Hess
Business Development Manager
In case you may have missed it, February is the month of love.
As the noun proclaims; ‘Love – an intense feeling of deep affection.’
So, how lucky am I to be the giver and receiver to this most potent of feelings! And the object of my desire is my horse Tuxedo – Tux for short.
That’s right, a 15.2 hands black horse with a white stripe down his nose, weighing over 750 kgs and the most loveable Latin American hunk you could ever wish to meet.
Tuxedo is a Criollo, originally from Argentina. I met him while I lived in Langkawi, a small Malaysian Island near the Thai border.
Tuxedo became my lead horse because he had no fear – he would cross divines, swim in the sea, deal with the jungle and its many different animals, from snakes to monkeys to wild boar. I trusted him with my life as I rode him more and more each day.
During this time, Tuxedo became quite ill and needed a lot of medical help as he had a flesh-eating parasite. I won’t go into the details, but it wasn’t pleasant. Washing and changing bandages every 3 hours to keep infections and flies at bay will give you an idea on how bad it was. He still has the scars today, but as they say, ‘never judge a book by its cover.’
I then adopted Tux, as I didn’t know if he was going to make it. I flew the best equine vet over from Kuala Lumpur, Dr. Bala, who became an intricate part of this story. After he had seen Tux and taken swabs, the only course of medicine was to grow the parasite along with growing Tux’s DNA, so a one-off medicine could be produced to kill the parasite that was harming him. Yes, it was an expensive thing to do. I called this special ointment ‘Perfume Eau de Chevelle’!
In the midst of this, I had to move back to the UK for personal reasons. But I wasn’t going to leave Tux. Operation Tuxedo was put into place. First thing was organising for him to fly back to England, then a quarantine and a passport.
I asked the owner of the international horse transport company when they had a cancellation if they could pop him in, as it would save on cost. I remember it like it was yesterday – getting the phone call to say that Tuxedo was booked to leave Malaysia on June 7th 2010. This worked well as I was leaving on June 1st 2010 myself and this would give me time to get his new stable ready in England.
I was over the moon! The only dark cloud was that Tux would be in quarantine and he needed to finish his course of medicine to kill the parasite, otherwise he wouldn’t be cleared to fly. This is where Dr. Bala comes into the story. He kindly offered to go and see Tux twice a day during his final week there, to make sure he got his medicine and could be given the all-clear to start his new adventure in the UK. Dr. Bala did this out of the kindness of his heart and it’s something that Tux and me are eternally grateful for.
So, Tux and I started our new UK adventure together in 2010. I met Tuxedo in 2003 and I saved him, but in his own horsey way, he has also saved me through my emotional roller-coaster journey to date.
He makes my mornings as I go down to give him his breakfast and morning cuddle. As I smell his neck, I know I am a very lucky girl to be loved by Tuxedo.
Dobby's tale
Swara Shukla
Publishing Developer
Heart-squeezing affection for your dog (even if they ditch you mid-hug the minute they smell food in the kitchen) is quite common; but I get a true pang in the chest every time I am reminded of how far my dog Dobby (yes surprise – I was your typical Potter nerd too once) has come. I visited India last month and seeing Dobby after nearly eight months was a bit of a surprise, to state it mildly. Because that guy is huge now! He probably grows bigger every day, I am sure of it – no matter the fact that he is an old man at nearly nine years of age.
Cue back to March 2011; I was a 16-year-old kid incredibly heartbroken over the sudden death of my dog, Kudd – who died of a heart-attack – and trying to study for my examinations while being inexplicably weighed down by the silence in the house. I was also quite internally stubborn – joined in that sentiment by my twin brother – to never get a dog again. It was our first loss and we were understandably struggling.
We had buried Kudd in the backyard of the SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) shelter-home near us and on the morning of 6th of March, my parents coaxed us to visit. The shelter-home was underfunded, understaffed, and overpopulated. We noticed two pups – Dobby (then unnamed) and Scooby (named by the caretakers) – their bones jutting out at the hips and the elbows, scuttling about in their futile attempts to get some share of the food from between the legs of the bigger and older dogs. We decided then to adopt both of them.
We were told, however, that Scooby already had an interested family – so Dobby came home with us. Following the nomenclature (thanks to my insistence on a tribute to the cinematic death of Dobby-the-elf that year and on the fact that it was such a PERFECT name for a dog!), I remember a year-long blur of clinic-visits, a smorgasbord of medicines to treat his many skin-infections, learning to not slip on the puddles of urine around the house (side-effects of the said medication), discovering his house-destroying separation anxiety, and a number of diet-plans to get some muscle on him to hide his too-visible ribcage. I also remember being resentful towards him at one time, cursing our impulsive decision to get him home; it was fleeting and only induced by a sleep-deprived brain riddled with examination-anxiety. I don’t remember the exams themselves, but this one sentiment does stand out, simply because I don’t even remember how Dobby got me to keep falling back in love with him. Because that’s a feat. I was an obnoxiously studious (and competitive) nerd at the time.
Another instance that I find meaningful is our next visit to the shelter-home, about a year in. We found out Scooby never got adopted. He was bigger and lankier, yes, but so much more emaciated in contrast to Dobby. I don’t remember why we weren’t able to take Scooby with us then – circumstantial reasons – but that was the first time I remember breaking through the haze to recognise Dobby’s progress. Having spent every day attending to his problems or working on making him better, we had forgotten to notice his slow-but-steady muscle-growth, the glow of his fur, his disappearing rib-cage, his entire demeanour. With his unsure gait, visibly patchy fur, and still-bony hips – Scooby and Dobby were now so far apart it was painful to see. What a difference a home can make in a dog’s life.
It is easy to see this as a saviour-narrative, and perhaps I saw it as that too when we decided to get Dobby home after seeing his state. But as Sarah says, it always is a two-way relationship. We might not have realised or admitted it then, but Dobby – in his own unassuming way – helped two surly teenagers struggling to understand the heaviness of absence and loss of warmth for the first time in their lives.
Dobby has separation anxiety even today, although he usually isn’t destructive in his expression now – it’s mostly restricted to verbal articulation in high-pitched whines and cries that can split the neighbours’ eardrums. The logistics of going out still work towards ensuring a presence in the house to keep him calm. At least we are able to have quite lax parameters for dog-sitting, because all he does is sleep (and take occasional sips of water) just as long as he’s assured he’s not alone in the house.
Also, he still favours the kitchen after a two-minute tail-wagging session on seeing me after eight months.
Some things don’t change, I suppose.
(Because I have been around The Cat for too long now, have to mention the play on ‘tale’; Dobby’s tail is one of his most distinct features – it is spirally, like a coiled up spring. It is the only visble part that separates him from Labradors and distinguishes him as an Indian breed!)
Dobby’s Tail
