Random Thoughts

This post is going to be a hodge podge of thoughts that have been tumbling around inside my head.  I've been trying to come up with a specific focus, but I don't have anything that's actually ready.  I have training video clips, but they are better utilized once we're further along and I can explain why we're working on the exercises that we are.  So no videos to put together.  We've continued doing our closer to home light hikes, but I feel like those are really a wash, rinse, repeat.  So nothing super exciting there.  I suppose that I could say that things are going well as I have nothing terrible to report.  That's always a plus.  Now on to random thoughts!

Nutrition.  I LOVE canine nutrition.  I feed a raw, or species appropriate, diet, which has me taking a very direct role in the food that my dogs eat.  I did a fair bit of research before switching Heffner and Bess and I've continued to read more about what people are doing, the science behind it and of course, listening to podcasts that talk about it.  Taking a more involved role in what my dogs are eating has me feeling good about what's going into them and maintaining their overall health.  With that being said, I have a more heightened sense of striving for a high quality of life with some longevity to it.  In that vein, I've been diving more deeply into supplements.  As much as possible, you want your pets to get their vital nutrients in their whole form from the foods that they eat.  However, different health conditions, different activities and different environments that you take your dog into can have deleterious effects on your dog.  Sometimes their diet can use some additional help.  And sometimes I get hooked on a topic and get a little bit obsessive about it and trying to keep my dogs around as long as possible.  So I'm making some tweaks to the supplements that Dominic is receiving.  I'll share more as it progresses, but I like doing what I can to help keep him happy and healthy for as long as possible. 

Obviously my concern with longevity has a more recent emphasis with losing Miley at the age of 4.  Losing her at such a young age has spawned so many thoughts in my head.  As I'm in the process of working through all of this, Facebook pops up a memory of Heffner and Bess from 9 years ago.  9. Years.  It's nuts.  I think back to the mental space I was in with those guys and it's such a different reality than what I have now.  I knew that I would out live them.  I knew that their lifespan would never be long enough.  But I had been through so much with them both and they were both so vibrant and influential in my life, that I couldn't fathom what it would be like to be without them.  I knew that they would die, but at the same time, that fact seemed very unreal.  They were this constant in my life that influenced everything for me.  They tackled so many things with me and made it through various hurdles that without realizing it, I unconsciously started to believe that they would just always be there.  Losing those two rocked my world view.  Being involved in the dane community, I knew plenty of people who had lost their dogs.  And being involved in the conformation arena, I knew many breeders whose reality was that they would have many danes in their lives.  It was a fact that was interwoven in all that they did.  Yes each loss hurt, but they had accepted that to continue with the breed meant that they would know and love many in their own lifespan.  That fact didn't sink in fully until I lost Heffner and Bess.  Losing Miley cemented it.  This is my reality with this breed.  If I continue to choose to have great danes in my life, the truth is that there will be several.  I have no illusions that any of my dogs will just always be there.  Losing them young is unfair, but there's also no age that I can think of where I would just shrug my shoulders and say "yeah, that was enough."  It makes me think of the comment my dad made when I got Heffner paw print tattooed on my back.  He asked me "are you going to get a tattoo of EVERY dog you have?"  At the time I thought why not?  Thinking about it now, that's potentially quite the back piece.  It's just such a weird thing to think about.  And I don't know how much time I should give to thinking about it.  I don't want to intentionally stop myself from that thought process as I already know that "method" of working through grief tends to not be positively productive.  But I also don't want to dwell on it.  I don't know.  It's a process.  And it sucks.  I just keep coming back to my most recent thought process of just missing Miley.