Key-sniffer

[R.A. Hettinga]

So, I seem to be acquiring dogs down here.

We have a cat who showed up on our porch in Roslindale about seven years ago.
The wife's name is Carol, I'm Bob, so the cat's name is Alice. She came down
here with us on the plane.


The first dog we got down here, last May or so, was a female, which we named
Eve, in keeping with the crypto naming scheme. We rescued her off the street.
Or off a water truck parking lot, actually. She died of heartworm very quickly
after we got her. The very thing that made her so pathetic, skinny, dull coat,
etc., was the thing that was killing her, only we didn't know it at the time.
Anguilla's a hard place for dogs. Reality's a little more apparent here than
it is in most places in the US.

So, the local animal rescue outfit heard about Eve, and offered us another
dog. A male puppy, about six months. His name's, yes, Dave.

He's what they call a long dog in these parts. Short legs, normal size body,
though he's pretty small, too. Brown with light sable countershading. I wanted
to get a Black Mouthed Cur at one point, and ended up with a Black Mouthed
Long Dog. :-). It turns out that he can go through the bush around here faster
than most dogs can run across a lawn, so the long-dog modification seems to be
natural selection. I like to joke that Anguilla reminds me of west Texas with
a beach. Lots of pointy things in the vegetation, but it's mostly up high, so
long dogs miss most of the pointy bits being low to the ground.

Then we got another dog a week ago. This time female. We call her Mallory, of
course. There may be a male dog to be named, heh, Trent, later. Maybe.

Mallory, true to her name, is, as they say her in the local patois, "a piece
o' wuk". Kind of an Anguilla-parallel-evolved brindle mini Dalmatian, if you
can imagine that. High energy, all mouth and galumphing legs. Thinks she owns
the place.


Point is, I've just noticed that right about the time that the dogs stopped
being afraid of their new home, they started barking at anything strange. She
just looked out over the porch and barked at the neighbors, just to keep her
hand in.

Hell, I did that here on cypherpunks, myself, for a while. :-).


Eventually the dogs get bored with barking, though, and go back to watching
the scenery, when they're not trying to chew each other to death when I'm not
there to stop 'em...

Excuse me, I've gotta separate 'em again again.

Cheers,
RAH
Who's doing Don Sullivan's "Perfect Dog" stuff. Works pretty well. I've got
hollow-core polypropylene line strung all over the veranda at the moment, and
there's a pair of dogs underneath that pile somewhere... :-).