New Greyhound

This is mostly a personal entry. It has been the better part of two years since one of our two greyhounds had to be put to sleep.

I should say that there is a moral obligation when humans take on pets - that you must be able to say to yourself about the animal at least 'I am going to kill you' - when you take on a pet.

Because it is unfair for an animal to live its existence primarily for your pleasure and companionship to suffer a horrible painful prolonged death because you don't have the guts to know when the time is - to put that animal to sleep. To kill it. Or you don't have the courage to do what needs to be done.

And in most cases - unless you are near the end of your own life you will outlive your family pet(s). One of the dogs we almost adopted - the owners - a couple - the husband died. The dog was mostly the husbands dog and the wife I suspect may no longer have been up to handling a dog - at least for a time. Fortunately, the dog is healthy and can be re-adopted to another family. Boy it was a really friendly dog. I have cats in the house, though - and this particular greyhound failed the cat test and wanted to eat the test cat. Since I don't want to have another dog at the expense of losing all my cats - he was out of the running.

It is a stark reality that any pet owner should acknowledge when you begin your custodianship of an animal. It is responsiblity for life and death.

Determination of when that time is - to put down a pet - is much harder. But if you don't recognize the fact that this will probably come to pass on inception of taking care of an animal - it is much harder.

No matter what it is hard to put an animal down - when the balance has shifted significantly on the issue of quantity or quality of life. It is largely a judgement call - but good veterninarians won't let you put an otherwise healthy animal down - if in their judgement you are overreacting.

Ok, so we've been looking for a new dog. It is always a journey to find a good fit. Fortunately, I think we found one in a timid greyhound who is just off the track called Willy.

Unfortunately, our current greyhound is called Philly, and Willy doesn't know his name. So you call one and you get both. So we are going to change Willy's name. Usually we keep the name, with Jet and Philly - we kept their original names. They both also seemed to know their original names - so that makes it a whole lot harder to justify changing the dogs name.

I've been watching a lot of anime lately - and am a fan of the sounds that Japanese language makes. So, my wife and I came up with a first and last name for our new Greyhound formerly known as Willy.

Oku Gengetsu. Oku - meaning Timid. Gengetsu - meaning crescent moon.

Greyhounds in general are somewhere between labrador retrievers and well, I can't come up with a completely sedate breed of dog. Anyway, Greyhounds are usually fairly well-rounded in being jumpy happy dogs and lying on the couch or floor sleeping.

Oku, though - and probably because he doesn't know anything about anything - is very very timid. So, Oku means timid in Japanese - and timid he is.

Crescent moon - is because he has a large two or three inch tall crescent moon scar on his side. We actually didn't notice it when we picked him up (him being very timid and another dog that we couldn't have because of his cat-eating obsession being very pushy and wanting to be with me). It wouldn't have mattered, of course. Philly was abused before she came to us and had many scars, but nothing nearly as large as this.

Timid Crescent Moon. Doesn't sound nice or anything in English. It is transformed - even in simple words - in Japanese to Oku Gengetsu.

So, hopefully, some day - a very long time from now - will come the time of decisions for Oku. And one hopes it will be a long time for Philly as well. But Philly is getting older and a large amount of the reason we got Oku - was because she was getting lonely and stopping eating.

She is of course ecstatic to have a companion again.

Now, if only we could get Random to be disciplined enough not to scare Oku so Oku can get acclamated to our house. :)

He's doing well, though - with all so many new things around him. And he isn't allowed to come up on the couch yet.... Which has got to bug him because Philly is allowed to... But them's the rules passed down from the adoption/rescue people and that's that.

Alex