What do cockroaches do, exactly?
We have a cockroach. I say "a" cockroach because I only ever see one. When I am getting ready to go to bed, it is on the inside of the bathroom door. about 1/3 up from the floor. Always in the same place. Not moving. (I don't kill it because I'm afraid of cockroaches, as silly as I realize that is.) If I wake up at 3 a.m. to go to the bathroom and open the door cautiously, it's still sitting there in the same place as it was several hours before. When I get up at 7, it's gone. I never see more than one. I can't figure out why, if it's just going to SIT there all night, it bothers coming out of wherever it is during the day just to scare me out of my wits.
Or is that the function of cockroaches? To scare people? If so, it's working.
We had some excitement around here yesterday, briefly. I was peacefully sitting in my office when a huge ruckus broke out on the patio. Snarling and barking and Bones shrieking as if he was being beaten (though by the time I got there, he was in safely in the house, just continuing to yelp. Very, very loudly).
I don't know what started it but it looked like one of the two dogs had gone after Bones, perhaps for a good reason (he may have gotten overly amorous with one of them, which would have been very funny since the best he would have been able to reach would have been a knee or something). Or maybe not for a good reason.
What usually happens with dog altercations around here is that either Lizzie or Sheila will reach the tolerance level and roar at the offending foster dog, scaring the bejeesus out of him/her and whichever is not the attacking dog will come to the defense of the foster dog. Maybe not to the defense, exactly, but try to come between the attacking dog and the foster dog. Sheila is usually the defender, but I somehow think that it was Lizzie today. Sheila has a high annoyance threshhold (unlike Lizzie), but when that is reached, she's pretty scary, especially if you are as little as Bones.
Anyway, the kerfuffle was loud enough that Walt came running down from upstairs and he got the big dogs calmed down while I tried to comfort Bones, who turned around and bit me, thinking I was one of the dogs attacking him.
It's not quite as bad as it looks here. The mark on the right is only about 1/2" long. I washed it well and it's already healing (of course I had to take a picture first!). But whenever I touched Bones' right side he yelped and snapped again. I had noticed this a couple of days ago when I picked him up wrong and he seemed to have some slight pain on his right side.
I sent a quick message off to Ashley telling her about the incident and the bite. She came over to check Bones, who didn't want Ashley to touch him anywhere. We finally bribed him with doggie treats (he'll do anything for food). She didn't find anything really wrong with him, but thought he might have a bruise or something, since he seems to be able to jump on and off chairs all right and if it were something more serious he would be in pain doing that too. But just to be sure, she gave me some medication for him.
I wondered how easy or difficult it was going to be to get him medicated, but each of the pills had to be cut, one in two pieces and one in 4. When I was dividing the first pills into 2 pieces, one fell on the floor and Bones ate it like it were doggie candy. The other one went into a piece of cheese that he gobbled up as well. It's nice to know that medicating him won't be a problem.
He'll go over to Petco on Saturday and then move to a new foster home, so Walt doesn't have to deal with him while I'm gone.
1 comment:
Cockroaches are essentially a clean up crew - scavengers who feed off what we leave behind. One wonders if there has been a context where that may have been useful to humanity (not that humanity is the final standard. Perhaps they are tasty treats to some. After all, their lifestyles are essentially the same as lobsters (the cockroaches of the deep). Who knows - Great musing!
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