The first picture the Mook ever took of me at the SPCA - but there was so much more to my life before that
I have a bad stomach and am feeling a little under the weather. (Could be the ants I ate on the balcony yesterday.) So I've been pretty much lying around and day-dreaming and a lot of it has been thinking about my life before the Mooks.
My first name was JR-14-22-09-D when I was born in the puppy mill. Jack Russell-sire 14-dame 22-litter 9 for the dame-fourth born (D). The first thing I remember was the warmth of my mother's belly as I fought for her teats with four other siblings. The first thing I saw, when my eyes started to open, was that my mother—though still a young bitch—looked very old and worn down. She also had mange and was very, very dirty. But my brothers and sisters loved her a lot and though a fight to get to a teat is a serious thing, once fed, it turns into fun.
The first thing I felt was a broken heart because, within a week or so of us all opening our eyes, Mom was taken away from us to prepare her for her next litter. My siblings and I squealed and screamed for a day or two, but eventually we learned to make do with the sugary milk they put out for us, and with the crazy playing we did together in that pen. I loved them all very much and, when you're young and barely walking (tottering about really) you glom on to any beating heart that's near.
Though there were five of us in the litter—three males and two females—two died in pretty short order. It was usually in the night-time when it got ice cold in the place and most of the dogs—the smart ones—huddled together for warmth. Another of my siblings, who wasn't really right in the head and continued to walk funny even after he should have been able to do better, was taken away. That left two of us: my sister C, and me. I called her Ceecee and she just called me Dee (because, let's face it, Deedee is not very butch and you need to be as butch as you can in those places).
Soon I was being taken out of the pen and walked about. I learned that I was a premium dog: a dog which could actually be sold in a pet shop instead of to a lab or to the white trash who came and went at the mill trying to find the perfect fighting dog, guard dog, or vicious companion. Ceecee was also seen as premium, though less so because she was a female. This would have been a good thing for her if she had had her pedigree papers, but there was not much of a chance of either of us getting anything like that in a place like this.
As I walked about the mill, I saw some of the horrors of the place: how dirty it was, how everything we drank or ate was wrong (tainted meat, polluted water) and just made us all sick and made the place dirtier. I also met some of the other premium dogs: there were dobermans and dalmatians, poodles and lots and lots of labs because of the popularity of the book Marley and Me. There was also no shortage of JRs and that was because of the TV show Frasier and the film My Dog Skip. (Here's some interesting trivia: The dog who played Old Skip in that movie, Moose, was actually the father of the dog who played young Skip, Enzo; and Moose also played Eddie on Frasier...you can see there aren't a ton of us decent JRs around.)
The other kinds of premium dog being bred at the mill were real beasts. Unlike the psycho dogs who were bred to be sold to the white trash for fifty bucks, these were muscular, nasty dogs with good teeth and good coats bred to be sold for serious purposes (protecting very rich homes and attacking very dangerous enemies).
It was during one of my training walks around the Rottweiler enclosure that I found out what had probably happened to my brother who had been taken away because he wasn't right. As I watched, they brought a couple of really fucked-up poodle puppies into the pen and just let them loose among the huge dogs. Within seconds they were eaten alive.
Sorry...can't go on. I'll tell you the rest next time.
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