Derekはとてもフレンドリーで、2つの訓練としつけのテストに合格し、"Canine Dog Citizen"と"Therapy Dog"という肩書きを与えられています。セラピードッグとは、学校や病院、老人ホームへの慰問を許されている犬です。私たちはすでに一度老人ホームを訪問しましたが、今度は今月の終わりに小学校に行く予定です。そこで子供たちにDerekの芸を見せたり、正しい動物の扱い方や、知らない人のペットの犬を撫でたいときの尋ねかた、よく知らない犬への近づき方などを教えるのです。
Happy New Year! Our family has a new dog named Derek. He is named after the Yankee's baseball player Derek Jeter. He is a Pit Bull. Some people think Pit Bulls are scary and mean but they are just like any other dog. They just have a bad reputation. Derek is very friendly and has passed two training and behavior tests and was awarded the titles "Canine Dog Citizen" and "Therapy Dog". Therapy Dogs are allowed to go to schools, hospitals, and nursing homes to cheer people up. We have been to a nursing home once already and at the end of the month we will be going to an elementary school to show kids some of his tricks and also to teach them about proper animal care and how to ask someone if they can pet their dog and how to approach a dog they don't know properly. Other than being very friendly, he is also very athletic. I always have to think of new ways to keep him exercised so he doesn't get bored so the other day we went to the park and did some agility training.
My dog Coleman is almost 13 years old and although he is very fit and active for his age, he doesn't like the cold and still needs exercise during the cold months so that his muscles don't deteriorate. I started taking him to a place called Fitter Critters that specializes in rehabilitating dogs with injuries but also uses their swimming pool to keep dogs in shape. Coleman loves swimming so I thought it would be fun for him to exercise by swimming through the winter. These are pictures of his first session. There is a water jet at one end so it makes it harder to swim towards it and one woman holds a biscuit there so he has to try hard to get it. He swims for a few minutes, then takes a break and does about 9 repetitions. It's not too expensive and we are planning on going every other week till Spring. David and I usually go to our favorite Indian restaurant once a week but we decided to use our money for these swimming sessions instead. Coleman is more important than what my stomach wants.
Earlier this month we fostered two puppies for a while. They were only 5 or 6 weeks old at the time and full of energy. They chewed on things and bounced around and peed and pooped and were hungry all the time. What a handful! These were puppies that were originally sitting at an Animal Control facility with no one caring much about them. It was great to give them lots of love and affection, good food, and toys to play with. They are on their way to finding new homes and I'm sure they will make some families very happy.
If you would like to also try fostering an animal in need of temporary care in Japan please contact Animal Refuge Kansai who has offices in Both Osaka ans Tokyo. Contact info - http://arkbark.net/?q=en/contact
Dave works at an organic farm store near us. The farm store is part of a bigger community that includes the actual farm, a bakery, a school for students from early childhood to high school, a school for adults learning to be teachers, as well as an alternative book publishing house. The community centers around "social and cultural renewal through education, agriculture, and the arts". It's pretty neat. Recently they had a Fall Farm Festival so I went along with Dave's parents to check it out. There were blacksmithing demonstrations, booths with beautiful locally hand made objects, farm tours, and lots of food. Our favorite parts were the talk and demonstration by the wildlife rehabilitator and the falconry demo. The wildlife rehabilitator showed us birds that were brought to him that were injured but were not able to be fully fixed and that now had to be taken care of. Normally he releases all of the wildlife that are able to be rehabilitated fully but sometimes he has to keep taking care of ones that will not be able to live on their own anymore. The falconer had all sizes of owls, hawks, and falcons that were trained to hunt. He showed us how he hunts with them but used a fake rabbit instead of a real one. Phew! I'm glad it was a fake one. I have been thinking lately that it's too bad I didn't become a biologist. I would have liked to have become a conservation Biologist. I love animals and plants and all wildlife. I wanted to share that with more people so I recently bought some pendants made by a real biologist for the store. Tanja Sova makes beautifully intricate wood burned pendants that depict different animal species. She also writes the scientific names of each animal on the back which I think is a really nice touch. The photograph doesn't do it justice so please come take a look in person.
When our store was in Ginza, then Aosando, we had a bulletin board up that showed animals that were up for adoption through Animal Refuge Kansai. When we moved to WaLL/Laforet full time, we couldn't find enough wall space to hang it. Recently we figured out a way to make a smaller version that sits on top of our tabletop and we change the animals presented every week or so. The reason I started doing this a long time ago, was just that I wanted more people to know that you could adopt a pet rather than buy one. I wanted people to see these cute little faces and realize that just because they were unwanted by their previous owners, that they were still just as good as any other pet you might buy in a store. People are often surprised that we would promote such a cause in a store that has nothing to do with selling pet food or pet accessories but I want to do it BECAUSE of that. This is the only way to reach a wider audience, by giving information to people who otherwise wouldn't ever know. Next time you're in Laforet come take a look.
When I was little I went to the same summer sleep away camp every year. My mother likes to joke that I was always the only one getting dropped of that wasn't crying. I would just walk off and wave and smile. I think I usually went for a month to six weeks. It was called Camp Redwood and it was about an hour and a half away from New York City. There were little kids there that were maybe in kindergarten up to young teenagers. There were all kinds of activities during the day like swimming, archery, tennis, basketball, arts and crafts. One of my favorites was water skiing and the other was horse back riding. Other than that we took field trips to the shopping mall on weekends and also to go bowling. It was always an adventure to be away from my parents and even though there was always some kind of supervision, we always got into a bit of mischief.
This summer we had two guest dogs staying with us for a few weeks and I couldn't help think that it was sort of like summer camp. I took these photos on the last day that Pinot and Princess were here and I wondered if, when they started to know they were going home, if they would feel like I used to at the end of summer camp. Excited and relieved to soon be sleeping in their own beds. Looking forward to the routine of their every day lives again. And at the same time a little sad about leaving their friends and the strange freedom that comes with not being with your own parents when you are young...... Coleman who now has his house back to himself seems happy to have all my attention once again but also slightly bored by the lack of drama in the house.
I bet you never thought you could adopt a dog that was ready to be a champion. I bet you think you have to get some kind of pure bred dog with papers for that. Meet Thelma. She was recently adopted from the shelter I volunteer at. She already excels at Frisbee and I bet she will get better and better very fast. Her adoptive moms both compete in Disk Dog competitions (Frisbee) and I can't wait to see what kind of routine they come up with. I guess the moral to this short blog post is "Don't under estimate dogs that are up for adoption. They are just as good as any other dog..... or better." Check out Thelma's video. I bet your dog can't do what she's doing.
Ichigo, my big turtle, went into a semi-hibernation in the fall. She barely ate and barely moved around. First week of spring, she started getting active all on her own, like she has some kind of internal clock. She is now back to swimming around and climbing on her dock in her tank, eating all her lettuce, carrots, other veggies and she will now finally eat her pellet food as long as I hand feed it to her. (She would only eat those if I hid it in something else she really liked before) I have to be very careful when I hand feed her because every once in a while my finger get stuck in her mouth and it really hurts! We are taking her out for her walks again outside on nice days. This summer we are hoping to finally build her a seasonal outdoor area.
Our dog Coleman was staying with our friends Cal & Richard for the weekend while we were in the city for David's opening. When we went to pick him up, we all went for a hike around the property which is really huge. (150 acres) The snow had only just melted recently but Coleman loves swimming so he jumped in regardless of the temperature. He really loves being free in nature. I think the thing that makes me happiest is to see him running at full speed with a big smile on his face.
We've been promoting pet adoption for a few years now with our benefit art shows as well as our ARK adoption board featuring available dogs and cats from the wonderful animal shelter ARK. It's something that I want to continue even when we move out of our Aosando space to concentrate on our sales at Wall but I haven't figured out how to make that happen yet. At least for now we have a showing of Traer Scott's photographs scheduled for the end of February at our gallery at Wall. We previously showed her work in the fall at HaNNa but we wanted to give more people a chance to see her beautiful pictures of street dogs from her travels to Mexico and Puerto Rico.
She gives dignity to dogs that were thrown away and live on the edges of human society. You can see in her photographs that they are individuals with personalities and I hope that people take away a new view of "Norainu", that they are not garbage, but beautiful beings.
I am sorry I haven't written in a long time. I was in Japan for a week, then came home to an ice storm which left us with no electricity, heat, or running water for five days. The most difficult part was that our turtles need to be in heated water and we tried different methods to keep the water warm. For two days Dave and I stayed up all night, taking turns, boiling bottled water and putting it in hot water bottles (yudanpo) which we put in the turtle's tanks. We had to do this every 45 minutes or so and was very exhausting. We finally ran out of propane so our neighbor lent us a kerosene stove. It warmed up the turtle room well but also smelled awful so we had to stop using it after a day. I was very worried that the cold water would make the turtles sick but they survived and I am very happy about that. It was SO cold with out heat! It went down to -10 degrees celsius one of the five nights! Anyway, I am finally feeling human again and can enjoy or current snow storm for it's beauty since inside the house is warm. Here is a look out on to the patio this afternoon.
A few weeks ago, while I was walking my dog, I came upon a small turtle walking on the sidewalk. At first when I saw the weeds near the fence moving I thought it must be a baby bird, but then his head popped out and he started walking towards the corner of the block. All I could think was, "Oh no, not another one!" I picked him up and walked over to the entrance of the fenced gate and asked the man on the other side if it had come from inside but he said "No, no turtles here! We have no turtles." I couldn't just leave him walking on the sidewalk so I brought him home and now, he lives with us. We named him Pan-kun after the chimpanzee.
We are quite sure that he was someone's pet that was thrown away/dumped for whatever reason. He will eat from my hand and isn't scared of people. His shell is deformed though from lack of calcium in his diet and not enough UV light.
We have been racking up the vet bills so I decided to do a fund raiser. I spent the whole week baking cookies and cupcakes for a street fair in Chelsea this weekend run by the New Art Dealers Alliance and set up a table with all my baked goods and information on both rescued turtles, Ichigo and Pan-kun.
The day started going well, people came and asked me questions, many were surprised that I found a turtle walking by himself on the street, they bought sweets and gave me donations, then mid-day, a woman that works for the Alliance came over with a family saying to them "Look, Hanna has turtle cookies and you have baby turtles!" A father with teen-aged son and daughter came over and they showed me two tiny baby turtles that they had just bought. The weird thing was that they didn't even want them. It was as if they had bought house plants on a whim and then decided it was a bad idea. They wanted to get rid of them and were trying to jokingly tell one of their friends "Hey! I got you a present." The daughter asked me what they could do, should they just release them in the park? These were very very young babies. In New York, it is illegal to sell such young turtles. They have to be four times bigger to be sold legally. They are very fragile. I felt awful. Should I take them? I don't have enough room. I don't have enough money. Could I find someone to adopt them right away?
I called my husband and he confirmed, "We have no more room. As much as it pains you, you shouldn't take them." I called my friend Amanda to see if she might want them but no one answered the phone.
They walked around the fair for another hour or so while I ran though the details of my life over and over again to see if I could figure out a way to save these too cute baby turtles. The only thing I could do was to suggest to them to take them to the city animal shelter. It is very far away from where we were. The family wasn't even from New York, they were visiting from San Francisco. It would take an hour to get to the shelter on the train. I wondered if I should take them to the shelter myself. But I still had hours of the fair left to attend to and I was trying to raise money for the two turtles in my care already.
At some point the family left and I didn't find out what they were going to do. My stomach hurt from watching the girl hold the little plastic cage out, with her arm extended, telling her father how much she didn't want them, from the lack of compassion they had for the two living beings inside.
When I was a kid, I had pets die in my care from lack of proper husbandry. I was totally ignorant of how to care for animals properly many times. Most of the time, I bought them from people who told me incorrect information, sometimes I bought them from people who didn't tell me anything at all about how to care for them. There was no internet at the time and I don't think I even knew that there were books about how to care for them. But I always cared in my heart about their welfare. I always tried my best to do whatever I was told was the right thing.
My heart broke Saturday. That's what it felt like/feels like. My heart broke. It broke from seeing other people not care and it broke from the fact that I didn't feel like I could do anything about it without jeopardizing the quality of life for me and the rest of the animals I live with and my husband's. I know that I am not normal. That most people don't care this much about other animals. (I believe we are animals too) But I really wish with all me heart that they would.
新しい年になりました!
