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<\/a>Maxie’s little aroo is the closest any of our dachshunds come to howling. There are plenty of howling doxies on YouTube, so I know they do it (little wolves, every one of them), but not ours. Schatzi, our first doxie (and the one we raised from a puppy) didn’t even learn to bark until she was around six months old and had a palo verde beetle\u00a0the size of her head cornered on the back patio. We could hear her making chuffing sounds in her throat, and a week later she let out her first full-fledged bark when a coyote sauntered past the family room window. I miss Schatzi every single day … she’ll always be my girl.<\/p>\n Mister B is a great one for barking, and he has a nice deep one … except when it’s shrill, as it gets when he sees other doggies walking on his street. He’s the most vocal of the lot, the only one of our dogs\u00a0to keep up a constant stream of chatter.\u00a0It sounds like whining, but\u00a0we know he’s talking. Where’s dad? Can I have a bite? Are we going in the car? Are we there yet? When he really wants to say something, though, like for example when he wants me to throw the ball he just laid down at my feet, he barks.<\/p>\n People use the phrase “rescue dog”\u00a0too freely. We bought Shatzi from a breeder and raised her, but the other two, Maxie and Mister B, came to us as older dogs. Friends\u00a0pat us on the back for rescuing them, but it’s not like we found them starving in some back alley. Maxie lived with\u00a0a friend’s daughter, a young woman\u00a0starting out on\u00a0her own, at that stage where one bounces from apartment to apartment. She simply couldn’t keep Maxie any longer, and bequeathed her to us. Mister B was raised in a loving home, but his human, a\u00a0widow, died when he was nine. Donna and I heard about this senior dog through a friend who knows the lady who runs the dachshund rescue charity in town, and that’s how we\u00a0hooked up with him.\u00a0We wanted them both and never thought of them as rescues … but at the same time I’m glad we were there to take them in when they needed new homes.<\/p>\n This is an old photo of Donna with our first dog, a coyote\/collie mix named Duke,\u00a0probably taken in 1969 or 70\u00a0when we lived in Sacramento, California.\u00a0Duke’s previous owner kept him locked in an outdoor chicken-wire cage; at any rate he was locked up in one and furiously barking when we\u00a0showed up to see about adopting him. I remember he was around two years old when we took him in. He was terrified of cars\u00a0and would hunker down shivering\u00a0in the footwell whenever we took him anywhere. One day I pulled a broom out of the closet to sweep up some cereal I’d spilled and he ran screaming to the other end of the house, where he cowered under the bed, so I’m pretty sure his first owner beat him. When it comes to Duke, I think rescue is the right word. He got over his fear of cars, and I learned not to use the broom around him, and he was a very good boy. We passed him on to a hippie friend when we left Sacramento for Montana and my first teaching job.\u00a0Dukers was six then, with many years left to live. We hope he had a great life.<\/p>\n It gets my back up when people say dogs don’t have souls. If we have souls, so do they. When people talk about smartness in dogs, I have the same reaction. It’s irrelevant. Dogs are as smart as they need to be, and far smarter than most of us realize. I could happily spend the rest of my life with dogs. They’re better\u00a0company than most people, and for one thing I’d be free of Facebook and Twitter. Well, maybe not Twitter, because when the news is shitty, as it is now, people post photos of their dogs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It gets my back up when people say dogs don’t have souls. If we have souls, so do they.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,2,2878],"tags":[2979,436],"class_list":["post-25292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-critters","category-personal","category-scrapbooking","tag-rescue","tag-dachshund"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25292"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25292\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25304,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25292\/revisions\/25304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/3925\/14282043207_c323dca9b2_z.jpg\")
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