For many years, after first spotting the picture of the monks on the cover of How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend, I was fascinated with the whimsical notion of dogs in church, accompanied by their monastic handlers.  This, to me, had all the beloved idiosyncracy of a British murder mystery set in a quaint but eccentric small town.  My idea of wonderful.  That the monks in question seemed to know dogs, really know dogs was intriguing to me.  That they apparantly walked their walk, all day long, incorporating their dogs into all aspects of a community, in this case, a religious community, was even more intriguing.  That the dogs in question were German Shepherds was, for me, the icing on the cake.  I had always loved them even though it would not be until many years later that I would first own one.    I wonder, in retrospect, how much those subliminal impressions influenced and informed my later decisions.

Death is a strange creature which comes in many flavors. There are those deaths that attack without warning, smashing one's world apart with the crash of cymbals and the ripping and rending of earth. There are those deaths that linger, oftentimes leaching a dull poisen of despair, drop by drop into the soul. And then, every now and then, if one is very lucky, and leaves one's heart open to the possibility of risk, to the possibility that where there is sorrow and grief, there can also be compassion and kindness, there is a death whose elegance, and sweetness is so fine, that to participate in such a crossing is to have an ephemeral fleeting moment of knowing divine grace. My opportunity came in the crossing of a small, four-footed friend, a non-descript golden Mexican mutt by the name of Aleuchi.

Tags: dog care | dog health | owner responsibility

It was a glorious summer morning, after a hot, wretched night bunked on a filthy bed, in a fetid line cabin high in the Sierra Azul.  Thankfully our setting in the the mountains of Sonora, Mexico was magnificent, and the discovery of water in a series of rock slides had made the days’ journey and herbing expedition well worth it, despite having been cut off from a traditional mountain route by yet another government guarded marijuana plantation with massive chain link fence topped with razor wire, and soldiers with machine guns.

Tags: dog care | dog death | dog health | owner responsibility