The new Petcetera in Dartmouth opened today!

So today me and the dogs went over to Dartmouth to try and find the new Petcetera that opened up in the new "Dartmouth Crossing" complex - and we got abstotutely lost. We ended up calling the store to try to get directions - and then based on those directions sort of just started driving and we eventually found the spot. Yea!! haha!
While we were there looking around we met these 2 dogs who had been adopted like Buttercup and Charlie - from the SPCA in Dartmouth - I think their names were Skye and Pepper - they were very nice dogs, out having a good time with their Mom and Dad.
That's their Mom and Dad who were behind me in the checkout.
The reason why Petcetera is politically correct as a place to shop for a pet store is because they don't sell cats and dogs - they have partnered with the NS SPCA and the Metro Branch SPCA and will be having cats from there in their adoption room and all the proceeds will be going back to the SPCA - isn't that super? They DO sell fish and small animals and birds though. It was too busy today for me to get a look at that section of the store - so I'm going to have to go back and "ferret" that out, if you will - because as a former owner of rats - I have something to say about selling rats and small animals in chain stores - but certainly you can't have anything - but on the other hand - you can certainly ASK for everything.

One other good thing is I don't think Global Pets or Best Friends (or Metro Dog Wash) has too much to worry about because the stock there is different from what they sell - it wash aisle after aisle of Eukanuba and Pro Plan dog and cat food and stuff like that - whereas Global and Best Friends sells food like Natural Balance and Solid Gold - so they're obviously after a different Market - they're after the Pet's Unlimited market - which is SUPER! haha!
This photo and the above photo is of the adoption area for the cats.
This is the throng of people looking into the cat adoption area - wouldn't it be nice if all these people actually adopted animals from shelters?This is Buttercup being held by one of the mascots outside the Petcetera store - doesn't she look impressed? haha!

After I put everybody through the torture of going to an absolutely horrifically busy pet store - we went to the beach - to the "Moose" - Silver Sands beach - and for some reason I felt very kissy today - so the below pictures are the result... I think everyone had a good time - there was lots of dehydrated liver flowing, the sun was brilliant, and I even bought a big bag of horrible marrow bones for the trip from the pet store to placate everyone - and the beach was empty because it was cold and everyone had other things to do on a nice Saturday. It was a good day all around.

Livin' Large and Lovin' It

For a dog who lived completely outdoors in the elements and gave birth to 3 litters of puppies in that time - Daisy certainly does love to live the high life now.
She absolutely loves to sleep under the covers when I put a blanket over her. She will pant like crazy and seem like she's totally hyperventilating she's so hot - but she will not move if I put a blanket over her when she's lying down, she's so happy to be coddled.

She is the most amazing dog to give love to.

And Buttercup goes - what about me? How can you forget about me for one moment in this universe of Buttercupfulness?

A new place to walk the dogs

I'm always game for going just about anywhere new to walk the dogs.

I was at a convenience store last weekend and saw a co-worker of mine who sold a house to a dog-friend of mine and I asked her if there was any good places in the neighbourhood to walk dogs because my dog friend didn't know the neighbourhood - and my co-worker said - "oh yeah - there's all kinds of places" - and she described this place at the end of Whitehead Road out in Harrietsfield that everyone goes to - so today me and the dogs went and had a look-see.

This is also what's great about Spryfield and surrounding area - this is like 5 minutes from the hustle and bustle of my house and Halifax - this is all complete wilderness as you can see from the Google Earth image - I was completely in the middle of nowhere! The top of the photo is the place where my house is.

It's funny how local's who go to places who have lived in an area for generations generally don't think about who owns the land or what's on it - I'm pretty sure it's private property - so I don't think I should say exactly where it is or how I got there - but there was a really neat old graveyard on the property that I think was a family graveyard - there were some stones there from like 1831 and the latest one I saw was 1987 - there were names with "Brunt" and "Yeadon" and a couple others on them. You can see it is not maintained at all.


Buttercup says - "I am getting the hell out of here!" Daisy had a WONDERFUL time today!
Throughout the whole property there were logging roads everywhere - it was a perfect spot for walking the dogs - and no one around anywhere. It was a great day all around - if you had rubber boots on of course! Anything else and it would've been a completely shitty day though - so beware intrepid hikers of the HRM - get your rubbers out.

My Letter is in today's Chronicle Herald

I find it funny how sometimes they call and ask to confirm whether it's the person who sent in the email, so that you know the letter is going to make it in, and then sometimes you read the paper - and boom - there the letter is. And that's how it was this morning - there the letter was in the letters to the Editor.

Denise was right - I should have toned that thing down. I should have taken that "bigoted" word out. Peter Duffy is guffawing into his Bran Buds right now because of the Zinck's righteous indignation with me. Damn my vituperative vocabulary.

Oh well. The only thing you can take back is your bed linens.

http://thechronicleherald.ca/Letters/567208.html

Overblown incident


I feel compelled to respond to the March 24 article about the senior citizen who had the encounter with the off-leash dog at Point Pleasant Park, during hours when dogs aren’t allowed on Sailor’s Memorial Way.

First, the article states that more than 350,000 dogs visit Point Pleasant Park every year – with very few incidents. This one lady is now meeting with the mayor – and she wants to know what measures are going to be put in place to make sure that encounters like hers never happen again. That’s one encounter out of 350,000 – I’d say those are pretty healthy odds that encounters happen pretty rarely.

So what is the city going to do? Ban all dogs to stop one out of 350,000 incidents? I certainly hope not!

Second, the lady’s husband is quoted as saying, "If that had been a pit bull, she would have been torn to pieces … sooner or later, it’s going to happen to someone. It comes a time now that we’ve got to toughen up."

I’d just like to let her husband know that pit bulls are exactly like every other dog on this planet – healthy, well-adjusted dogs that are no more likely to "tear his wife to pieces" than any other dog. Period.

That whole article was so unnecessary, and that couple are doing nothing but furthering the cause of uneducated, bigoted people who don’t own dogs. They don’t need to sit down with the mayor – they need to meet some responsible dog owners of the Halifax Regional Municipality and become properly educated about what it actually is to own a dog here, and they will soon understand their own very misconceived and very wrong ideas.


Joan Sinden, Halifax

Frosty Paws

Being a very indulgent dog owner, and a very impulsive shopper - I broke down and bought a box of "Frosty Paws" for the dogs - and didn't look at the ingredient list until I got the stuff home and had given a container each to the dogs and they had gone absolutely ape shit over the stuff.

How can any animal - dog included - go nuts over dried whey, soy flour, animal fat, soy lecithin, microcrystalline cellulose mono-diglycerides, caroxymethycellulose, polysorbate, and a bunch of other chemicals that I'm too lazy to type out? They trick the humans into making it LOOK like vanilla ice cream - but they fill it up with some kind of animal fat to make it TASTE good to the dogs, and then chock a block it with chemicals so it doesn't go rancid.

And then charge us $3.99 a box - that's $1.00 per frosty paw. I think my first indulgence in ice cream for dogs is going to be my last and I'm going to start freezing yogurt for them instead so that they stop staring at me when I'm eating my own ice cream and I'm forced to share with them. It takes a lot of work to maintain my body shape, and I need every mouthful of animal fat and sugar for my own self.

Funny Cartoon

Some days I feel like this....

Good Comment on my Post "Lunacy at the Chronicle Herald"

Denise left a really good comment on my post this morning about the online poll about the Chronicle Herald:

What I don't get though is the name calling on your part? Old biddy? Stupid non-dog owners? You gleamed all of this from one article in a newspaper which was written and edited by someone other than the couple? I can imagine that getting knocked down when you are elderly is a frightening experience. These people felt a need to talk about it which is fine because some good education could come out of this for everyone involved.

What you didn't mention was how the lady said, "Dogs have as much right in that park as I do" So, even after her experience she is still in favour of dogs being there. Hardly an "old biddy" I think. And her Husband, well he wants signs with bigger print. You'd think by your reaction that he was asking for an outright ban on all dogs in the park!

I am a proud dog owner and advocate myself, but I find it hard to take a person seriously when they resort to name calling. All of the good points that you had to make are lost in the nastiness against people that you only know from a newspaper article. If you had a chance to meet with them personally and educated them about pit bull breeds would you say those things to their face? I am going to guess no. So, why do it here, especially in a place where you hope to help people see all dogs in a more positive light.

I am hoping for a better understanding on all sides. A little compassion, even for the "stupid non-dog owners" would go a really long way, I think.

Namaste,Denise

That has set me to thinking - and you have to think about all your life experiences when you take anything into consideration - and whenever I think about senior ladies complaining about anything (even though I myself am going to be one in the not too distant future) I unfortunately think about a car accident I had a couple years ago where I was involved with one with a senior citizen lady and my car insurance went up by $100 a month for absolutely no reason except for the fact that this woman had no idea how to drive in the city and this was her second accident in her 2 days of visiting Halifax from Cape Breton, and she was the most lame brained person I have ever met, and it left such an imprint on me that I've forever associated elderly women with that one person.

So when I read that article I saw that woman there - and one also has to take into consideration that I've been in a bad mood about off-leash dog parks because of the whole off-leash strategy meetings going on and our seemingly inability to have control about what's going to happen - by that I mean the public's inability to have control - and there you have the protagonist of this blog's viewpoint of that article going ballistic about an old bitty.

So my apologies to the readers of this blog and the subject's of that article in so far as I called them mean names.

And Denise is right that Mrs Zinck did say that dogs deserve to be there as much as she did - but I threw that baby out with the bath water. I figured that Mrs Zinck was going to do that herself when she met with Mr Kelly anyway.

I've been also thinking about something for awhile and this seems as good a time as any to talk about it - the fact that "Me and My Dogs in Nova Scotia" and the dogs portrayed there and the human behind it don't really exist - it is in fact a fantasy world that someone has created - it is a perfect world that the author "wishes" existed, but does not in fact exist. It would be nice if that world did exist - if the happy, well adjusted, well socialized, happy, seemingly perfect dogs actually existed - who seem to go for such exciting adventures almost every day - and their owner who seems to go to every dog function that the city offers and then reports back, and seems to have an opinion on everything - actually existed - but that person doesn't actually exist either. It's all just a fantasy that's been created by someone who is actually much smaller and is prone to fits of anger, smallness, pettiness, jealousy, mania, depression, and any other negative normal quality you can imagine. Unfortunately. So that's why sometimes you'll read this blog and you'll go - what in the h-e-double hockey sticks is she saying and why is she saying this? Has she gone completely off the deep end? Well - she probably has, there's been a crack in the fantasy world and the post will be deleted in a couple days - so enjoy it while it's there! haha! So there you go.

That's also why I ended my post about the Lunacy at the Chronicle Herald with my crack about the "Selma blog" - that lady's dog blog is very negative and she's always calling people bad names like stupid and idiotic, which I try not to do - I do try to stay positive, and I know I've been digging pretty low lately - so I'll try to pick things back up and "praise the positive and ignore the negative" like you do with good dog training - it really is the only way to go.

The Lunacy at The Chronicle Herald Continues

So yesterday they had that completely stupid article about the old bitty falling down after the little dog jumping up on her at Point Pleasant Park and now she's meeting with the Mayor.

So today they've got a poll going - "Are there too many dogs running loose in Halifax's Point Pleasant Park?"

And you can guess what answer is going to win. And what has won - depending on when you're reading this post.

That question is like the line from the movie Amadeus when Emperor Joseph says "It's quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that's all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect".

The thing about Point Pleasant Park is that it's IMPOSSIBLE for there to be too many dogs running loose there! It is one of the only 2 off leash parks in the whole of the regional Municipality! Where else are they going to go? And if there are too many - give us more parks!

Give me a break. Shit. I'm starting to sound like Selma. I'd better calm down, and go to the beach.

Ugh - I couldn't help it - My letter to the Editor

My stomach has just been boiling all morning while I've been out in the backyard raking up dog shit - so I had to come in and write a letter to the Editor at the Chronicle Herald about that horrible article that was in the paper today - here it is:

I titled it - "Pointing out the obvious"

Reading the article this morning about the senior citizen who had the encounter with the offleash dog at Point Pleasant Park during hours when dogs aren't allowed on Sailor's Memorial Way made me feel compelled to respond to it for 2 reasons.

The first is the fact that the article states that more than 350,000 dogs visit Point Pleasant Park every year - with very few incidents - and this one lady is now meeting with the Mayor of the City because of her encounter - and she wants to know what measures are going to be put in place to make sure that encounters like hers never happen again. That one encounter out of 350,000 as stated in the article. I'd say those are pretty healthy odds that that encounter happens pretty rarely. So what is the City going to do - ban all dogs to stop one out of 350,000 encounters? I certainly hope not!

The second point made in the article is the lady's husband when he said - "If that had been a pit bull she would have been torn to pieces . . . sooner or later it's going to happen to someone," he said. "It comes a time now that we've got to toughen up." I almost lost my breakfast over that one. I'd just like to let her husband know that pit bulls are exactly like every other dog on this planet - healthy, well adjusted dogs that are no more likely to "tear his wife to pieces" - than any other dog. Period.

That whole article was so unnecessary and that couple are doing nothing but furthering the cause of uneducated, bigoted, non-dog owners - they don't need to sit down with the Mayor - they need to meet some responsible dog owners of the Halifax Regional Municipality and become properly educated about what it actually is to own a dog here, and they will soon understand their own very misconceived and
very -- wrong ideas.

Joan Sinden

An example of stupid non-dog owners encountering stupid dog owners

What a way to start a Saturday - by reading something as assinine as this in today's Chronicle Herald - "Walk in park turns unpleasant" - a couple encounter some stupid people letting their dog run offleash in an area of Point Pleasant Park that's not allowed to have dogs at all after 10am and the stupid dog actually knocks the old woman down. And now this woman's got a meeting with Mayor Peter Kelly to talk about it.

It doesn't matter that the article also states that THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND OTHER DOGS also visit Point Pleasant every year and don't knock down old women - but this ONE WOMAN gets knocked down and she's got to meet the Mayor about it - and what is the City going to do about it. Makes me sick to my stomach.

And then the woman's husband has actually got the gall to actually say "If that had been a pit bull she would have been torn to pieces . . . sooner or later it’s going to happen to someone," he said. "It comes a time now that we’ve got to toughen up."

I almost lost my breakfast when I read that sentence. Can you imagine? I am absolutely without words on that one.

I'm not even going to write a letter to the Editor because it would be just too venemous and might cause the old lady to have a heart attack and die right on the spot to realize how absolutely numb-skulled she is.

Now how am I going to get through the rest of the day with this peach pit in my tummy?

Poor Daisy. She had to go back to the Vet today to get xrays and they have to put the dog out for that. So she had no food after midnight last night, and then she had to leave Charlie for several hours and be in a cage. And she couldn't have any food at all. And there was food everywhere she looked, and it was in bags everywhere, she could smell it.

So it cost $369.00 for the vet to tell me that she couldn't find anything wrong with Daisy, so it must be soft tissue damage that's been making her limp for weeks - so she can't have any exercise for 2 weeks to see if it'll heal on it's own, and Daisy has to lose 10 pounds and she's got to take Metacam - an anti-inflammatory analgesic that vets like to dispense like candy for the next little while - and see if any of that helps at all.
Really, I don't know how Daisy hasn't impaled herself on a tree branch when we're in the woods because she runs so fast and hard when we go on walks - so it makes sense that she's hurt herself somehow and it just hasn't healed - and when we were at the beach yesterday we were there for an hour-and-a-half. Charlie's been feeling so well lately that I've just sort of let the time we spend at places creep up.

So no exercise for poor Daisy Doodle. She's going to be doing a lot back rubbing in the back yard. She is going to go NUTS. I better keep the video camera rolling the whole time.

We're all legal! Dog Registrations in the HRM

Yesterday while I had Daisy at the vet I got all the dogs registered with the City - you can do it at most Vet's offices - you don't have to go the HRM's offices - and that way you don't have to dig out their spay or neuter certificates or other paperwork either - they have it all on file if you're at your regular vet.

I've registered Charlie over the years, but for some reason never registered Daisy or Buttercup - but this year I registered them all. I get emails quite regularly from people asking me about the process - for some reason because I have the "Charlie loves Halifax" site people think I know about those things - little do they know I'm as big a law breaker as anybody else! haha! What people mostly ask me is about the rabies thing - and how they can get around it - mostly everyone thinks that if they don't have a rabies certificate they WON'T be able to get the dogs registered - and that is in fact FALSE.

If you don't have a rabies vaccination all that happens is that you have to pay $10 more. That's it. So if you don't want to get your dog vaccinated, and you DO want to get your dog registered - DON'T vaccinate your dog! There isn't rabies in Nova Scotia yet - so don't do it if you don't want to, but DO register your dog if you want to have anything to do with dog politics in the HRM. I think it behooves us all to register our dogs if we want to have any say at all in what goes on in dog politics in our City - if you don't put your money where you mouth is, then shut your mouth. So go get your dog registered so that you can be counted - because John Charles said at one of the off-leash strategy sessions that they're thinking of tying off-leash parks to where the highest numbers of dogs are registered geographically. Think about that for a moment. And then go spend $15 or $10 or $30 if you've been especially stupid and haven't spayed or neutered your dog. The fiscal year goes from April 1st to April 1st.

A Very Busy Dog Day

Poor Daisy had to go to the vet today. She's been limpiing on and off for the last little while, and I can't figure out why she's doing it and it's not getting any better - so off to the vet we went.
Other than getting her head sliced open by an asshole who didn't like black and tan dogs, and when she was spayed - Daisy has never been to the vet because she's always been so healthy - so she was pretty stressed out today. And its only going to get worse - she's got to go back tomorrow to be sedated and get xrays. Poor Daisy!
And this scale wasn't very kind to her either - she's 88 pounds - 2 pounds more than Charlie! Dr. Lindsay said that she probably shouldn't weigh anymore than the high 70's - so she's got about 10 pounds to lose. The canine garbage can has got to cut back. Poor Daisy.
To apologize we went to Crystal Crescent beach afterward - Buttercup was VERY upset that I took Daisy out and not her - she showed her distate for that turn of events by taking a big dump in one bedroom and a big pee in another bedroom. She was not impressed. That's the first time she's done that - and I hope the last. Dogs are funny aren't they?
Daisy was very happy to be running on the rocks rather than panting among the other little dogs at the vet office! It was super windy today too - so that blew the stink off of all of us.
This is such a neat picture - here's the close up of Charlie and the long shot below. He photographs so neat sometimes.

And then lastly I got this book today, I've wanted it for years - Living with dogs - it's a book about dog paraphenalia - it has got so much neat stuff in it I can't write it all out here - it's going to take me many days to peruse. I'll have to post more about it in the coming days...

Dogs in the News

There were 3 news stories in the last couple days that have caught my eye.

1. A boy scout lost for 3 days in the woods down in the States was found by an SAR dog;
2. A bomb detection dog was just killed in Afghanistan while sniffing out bombs;
3. Millions of cans of dog food have been recalled throughout North America of all different price points because of one ingredient - wheat gluten.

The point of this post is going to be to try to show naysayers that dogs are indeed important to the fabric of society.

The boy scout had been missing for 3 days - and it was a search and rescue dog named Gandalf who sniffed him out less than 1 mile from where he'd become lost - they'd been searching over 1000's of acres for the little rat bastard, and he'd hidden himself in a bunch of rocks where no one would have found him - but that dog could smell him - so that's how they found him. And I bet his family are glad that such a thing like search and rescue dogs actually exist.

Over in Afghanistan a bomb sniffing dog was killed yesterday sniffing out bombs so that an area could be declared walkable - his handler was also injured - but not killed. I guess dogs are used extensively like this. It's probably saved 1000's of lives because they can sniff out bombs and have been highly trained to that very specific job - and you hardly ever hear about them dying - so they must be pretty good at it. And I bet they don't get too much applause for it either.

On another note - Iraqis actally use dogs as bombs - I wrote about that in a previous post. Sick.

The 3rd story is about how millions of cans of dog food are being recalled because of mouldy wheat gluten that has come from one plant down in the States. It's very interesting to me because we all feed our dogs dog food but very few of us actually think about the ingredients that go into it. Some of us have - do YOU know what wheat gluten is? You should find out what it is if you don't know.

I feel very safe that none of my dogs are going to die from renal failure like so many dogs currently are from the tainted food because I have always made sure that any dog food I gave them never had any ingredient such as wheat gluten, corn gluten meal, meat meal, poutltry by-product meal - or anyone of various gross ingredients that you can find out about if you do a little bit of research. I have always tried to feed my guys dog food that are made from "ingredients that are fit for human consumption" - and they also eat what I eat.

You wouldn't feed your child a steady diet of saltines simply because your doctor tells you to, would you? Are you really that much of an idiot? When did people become such automatons? I really hope this food recall is a wake up call to North Americans about what they're putting in their dogs' food bowl every night, and that they're starting to question the ingredients that go into dog food and where those ingredients come from. That it really IS things like brushings from the floor of human food factories and road kill. It really is.

And my dogs deserve to eat better than that.

Daisy's a doberman!

I was going through the dog's papers looking for everyone's spay and neuter documents so that I could everyone registered for April 1st tomorrow and for some reason I thought I'd look to see what they put down as Daisy's breed when they spayed her at Carnegy animal hospital in 2004, and guess what - they called her a doberman mix! haha! So I'm not going to call her a rottweiller mix anymore, from now on she's going to be a doberman mix.
I did a google image search for uncropped doberman pictures and came up with this photo - I think it's pretty close to what Daisy looks like, don't you think? So Daisy is officially not like those awful rottweillers anymore that are being banned everywhere and are owned by rotten right wing wingnut leaders of national dog legislation groups - there must be something wrong with those kinds of dogs if someone like that would want to own a dog like that I'd say. So Daisy is now going to be a very kind and gentle doberman. Isn't she so much more beautiful now?

Horrified, yet at the same time, Horrified

I really like the old Codco saying "Horrified, yet at the same time titillated" - but an ongoing experience I've been having the last few days wuth a local email group has been anything but. It has simply been horrifying x 10.

It all started when a lady who I know who I also know has for some reason got a serious vendetta against the head of Dogs Deserve Better decided to send a very vageky worded email to this group that I don't know if she knew I belonged to saying that "DDB was going after sled dogs", and that in fact for those people on the list who didn't know anything about DDB - it was a group that was in the pocket of animal rights groups like PETA and this lady had been watching it very closely and it really was quite an evil organization, set to basically take over the world.

So I decided that I was of course not going to let the 600 or so members of this Yahoo community only hear from this very biased and wrong woman about DDB, so I put myself out there as a vocal member of DDB and said that the organization was in fact not a right wing organization but a grass roots organization that was simply trying to get dogs off of chains one dog at a time and that we were not in fact "going after sled dogs" but that Tammy Grimes had simply signed an online petition. Did that mean the whole organization was going after sled dogs?

The worst part is that that several members of this "illustrious" Yahoo group - made up mainly of CKC show breeders - chimed in - in FAVOUR of continuing the practice of chaining dogs. Can you believe it? In the last couple days I have been absolutely cricified on this forum because I belong to this anti-chaining organization. How dare I try to work to free dogs from chains, and suggest that all dogs belong inside all the time. And that is an actual quote from one of the posts.

The forum is moderated and one of my posts was even refused to be posted by the moderators - a post where I said that the head of the DDB organization simply signed a petition about sled dogs was the sum and total of our organization's involvement in "going after sled dogs" - and if that was all it took for an organization to be seen as going after sled dogs - then I also saw on that same online petition that a member of our local organization "Maritime Animal Rescue" had signed as well - so by association that means that "Maritime Animal Rescue was ALSO going after sled dogs just like Dogs Deserve Better was! And if that was the case - then that also meant that a local very well known siberian husky breeder was ALSO going after sled dogs because she was ALSO a member of Maritime Animal Rescue - and how THEN did that breeder feel about the original woman accusing Dogs Deserve Better about going after slede dogs if it also meant that she was accusing the siberian husky breeder of going after sled dogs? Now WHY would a post like that be refused? hhmmm.....

I tell you, it's no wonder I hate purebred dog people sometimes. Some of them are worse bitches then their female dogs....

I was going through the drive through at Tim Horton's here in Spryfield on Sunday when I saw this guy and his dog parked in the parking lot - so I asked him if I could take his picture because I thought it was funny. The dog was sitting right in his lap and it made me think of Charlie and the fact that I call him my 110 pound lap dog. Buddy said THIS dog is 115 pounds though! haha! His name is Louie. Louie the 115 pound lap dog...

When I looked over to my right - this is what I saw - Buttercup, my 16 pound lap dog who wasn't even sitting in my lap! (:

Guys who come to fix things part Troix

So the last few days I've been going around with wet socks and saying to myself - MAN, those dogs have really been slopping the water in their water bowl - my feet are wet all the time from the water they're spilling in that bowl! Well it turned out that it was not in fact the dogs' fault, but in fact the sink in the kitchen - the pipe had become disconnected from the drain and water was flowing freely every time I turned the tap on.

I figured I could fix it myself, but my Dad was worried since he's not here to supervise, and my peeing receptacle in the bathroom has been acting up lately - so I figured I could also get that looked at at the same time - so I called this fabulously named company called "the Drain busters" - and in came a plumber this morning.
Isn't he cute? haha! This time I took a different tack and did NOT separate the dogs. And guess what. No problems. The 2 below pictures are where the dogs spent all the time he was fixing the plumbing problems. And that is exactly where they were if the cable guy would've let them be around when he was at the house.
Marjorie really IS right on some levels - other people's paranoia should have nothing to do with me and my dogs. The big question is - how do we convince the paranoid people of this?