{"id":4251,"date":"2020-02-18T21:26:46","date_gmt":"2020-02-18T21:26:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/accordingtokirsty.com\/?p=4251"},"modified":"2020-02-21T06:19:48","modified_gmt":"2020-02-21T06:19:48","slug":"obituary-in-dog-we-trust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/accordingtokirsty.com\/index.php\/2020\/02\/18\/obituary-in-dog-we-trust\/","title":{"rendered":"Obituary – In Dog We Trust"},"content":{"rendered":"

Katie AKA Katie-pants AKA Katie Katie fat dog<\/span><\/p>\n

26\/7\/2005 – 17\/2\/2020<\/p>\n

2005 was a testing time for our marriage. I was desperate for another child, but my husband was implacably opposed. In the end, our \u201ccompromise\u201d was to get another dog as company for our sociopathic border collie. Our gardener suggested a cairn terrier as a good breed – not that she had one, but she knew someone who knew someone who had one. That was enough for me. I was pleased to know that they were a low shedding breed, as we are a fairly atopic household.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Excited by the prospect of showing off her Scottish heritage<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On the weekend of Guy Fawkes, I drove to Wanganui to pick up our new dog. She was the last of her litter (!), so there were no difficult decisions to make. She settled in quite happily into the family. The older dog taught her to bark at the gate, and how to be grumpy, but she developed a passion for chewing shoes all by herself. We lost many pairs of shoes between us, and I still have some pairs with nibble marks that I couldn\u2019t bear to throw out.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
No, the idea is that I roll in something disgusting that disguises my odour, so that now you can\u2019t smell me at all. Clever, eh?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After a couple of years, she eventually grew out of her shoe fetish, but her love for eating in general stayed with her for the rest of her life. One particular incident involving a number of my husband\u2019s very favourite Trish\u2019s pies that were carefully placed out of her reach on a table, was quite upsetting at the time, but even then we were in awe of her prodigious ability to consume comestibles. We often wondered if there was any point at which she would stop eating if food was freely available, short of actual physical explosion, but we were never game to put it to the test.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Do you need help with that?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A few years later, the old dog finally died and was replaced with the two schnoodles. In her turn, Katie was able to pass on the skill of barking excessively at anything or nothing. She was always the alpha dog, but she had a number of serious fights with the bigger and more neurotic of the two schnoodles for supremacy over the years.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Can we please get this clipping business professionally done next time?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We moved away from our lovely home in Island Bay to a much more expensive but characterless place in Karori, so that the girls could get up at the last possible moment before the start of school. For some reason, Katie decided that this house was an essentially different style of abode and it would be OK for her to pee inside in this one. This was an extremely annoying habit that she never grew out of, although it waxed and waned so that just when you were at your wits end, she\u2019d stop doing it for a few weeks and you thought she was finally cured. We never found a cause and eventually it was diagnosed as sheer bloody mindedness.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Honestly, I was just walking through the long grass, and nek minute…<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Apart from that she was mostly unobjectionable, and occasionally even downright pleasant. She was certainly a very loyal dog, and right up to the end she would haul herself up and follow me if I left the room, even if I was just going to the loo.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Where are you Kirsty? Why hast thou forsaken me? (Photo creds: me)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Katies favourite place in Karori was the vet clinic that was just around the corner. I\u2019ve known dogs wet themselves in fear of the vet, but Katie loved it there. They treated her nicely (apart from that temperature probe, perhaps) and they gave her treats. One day she escaped from being tied up outside the supermarket, and ran away to the vet. Lucky we had ID on her collar, otherwise we would never had got her back.<\/span><\/p>\n

Over the years her eyesight and hearing began to fade, and she got slower and slower, but she was always an important part of our family. I\u2019m not sure if you could call her loving, as her demeanor has been that of a grumpy old lady for many years, but she was always very glad to see me when I came home.<\/span><\/p>\n

A mystery we never managed to find the answer to was what the noise was she made when you tried to pet or cuddle her. It sounded suspiciously like a growl but we thought there was an outside chance it was actually more of a purr. We may have been kidding ourselves.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Now this is the life!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A few months ago she developed a lump on her leg, and it gradually grew in the time since. It\u2019s been sad watching her life shrink. Even in recent weeks she\u2019s looked forlornly after us as we went for walks, even though she could only manage a few steps by herself.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The vet told us on Monday that the tumour had eaten almost all the way through her leg, which she had tolerated amazingly well, and hadn\u2019t even been in noticeable pain. Clearly it was time to say goodbye though. It was classic Katie that as she gradually drifted off to sleep from the giant IM dose of diazepam, before the pentobarb coup de gras, she was still snuffling around in her blanket, trying to find the last pieces of a treat the vet gave her. I was a complete mess, of course, but it was a lovely death for her.<\/span><\/p>\n

She wasn\u2019t the perfect dog, she wasn\u2019t even a good dog all the time, but she was mine and I loved her. RIP old dog.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Katie AKA Katie-pants AKA Katie Katie fat dog 26\/7\/2005 – 17\/2\/2020<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pa8Ukf-16z","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":946,"url":"https:\/\/accordingtokirsty.com\/index.php\/2018\/11\/12\/wellington\/","url_meta":{"origin":4251,"position":0},"title":"Wellington","author":"Interloper11","date":"November 12, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"So nice to be back in the bosom of my family. A little dismayed, though, to discover that none of them had been reading my blog while I was overseas. This was a plus in one way, in that I got to tell of my adventures all over again -\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 4 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 4 comments","link":"https:\/\/accordingtokirsty.com\/index.php\/2018\/11\/12\/wellington\/#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/accordingtokirsty.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/6ED704DB-C28A-4822-BD2C-53D27C82AE69-169x300.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1479,"url":"https:\/\/accordingtokirsty.com\/index.php\/2019\/01\/12\/dog-days\/","url_meta":{"origin":4251,"position":1},"title":"Dog days","author":"Interloper11","date":"January 12, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Walking to the beach yesterday with the dogs, a cyclist stopped me and said \u201cis that a cairn terrier?\u201d, I said it was, and she asked if she could pat her. \u00a0\u201cWe had a cairn for years, she died just before Christmas\u201d, she said tearfully. 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