Since today is an attempt at record breaking, I thought I'd share this about a record breaking dog we had who recently died.
Dogzilla was a rough coat Jack Russell terrier with a long heritage going back to hunting Jacks in England of the early 20th century. Her line was well liked because of temperment out hunting and the rough coat, which was much more weather resistant in the northern parts of England where her ancestors hunted.
As a puppy and young dog, she was a terror. She literally (and I mean literally) ran along the lower edges of the walls as she raced around the house. She had to spend a lot of her indoor time in her crate because she was so wild. It was not uncommon to find her on the table stealing food.
Outside, she chased down every squirrel, chipmunk and rabbit that dared to come near the house or barn. She would run full bore at a tree, bound up the trunk and climb into the upper branches, jumping from crook to crook in the branches. It was not uncommon to have to fetch a ladder to retrieve her out of the tree.
Zil or Zilla (as she was known) dialed up the awesomeness when she started having litters. The woman who had Zil's grandmother begged us to breed her, to keep the line going, which we did. With her first litter, we went to the vets to get a whelping film. The vet came out perplexed and asked when she had been run over. Apparently she had suffered a severe pelvic fracture at some point, either stamped by a horse or runover by a car and her pelvis showed a massive rotation and tilt. Because of this, I ended up helping deliver every puppy she had. She had 3 litters of her own puppies but that wasn't what led to her awesomeness. We had a Corgi who also had a couple of litter of puppies. The Corgi's first litter nearly all died. We couldn't figure out what was going on, nor could the vet. With the second litter, it was clear that she abandoned her puppies to go off to do her own thing. Her puppies starved. We figured out during the second litter of Corgi puppies because Zil had an older litter at the same time. The two of them were in different rooms with their litters.
When Zil heard the Corgi puppies cry, she would sneak out of her pen and go feed the Corgi puppies. We finally realized what exactly was going on when we found her taking the puppies back to her pen! She raised her 7 Jack Russell puppies and 5 Corgi puppies!
When the woman who owned Zilla's grandmother was in hospice with pancreatic cancer, we brought Zil's 10 week old puppies to hospice to visit her. She said, "Oh, I don't think I could take a puppy now..." We said, no, we were just bringing them so she could see the great grand-dogs. She got a huge smile on her face and started to laugh a deep robust laugh. We sat with her for about 45 minutes. When we started to leave, other families begged to take a puppy to family members who were there at hospice too. We were there over 2 hours and saw several families who had tears in their eyes from the joy those puppies brought to the terminally ill family members.
After that, her status was established. By now, arthritis was slowing her down and we never found her in a tree again, but she still jogged around the farm, looking like a broken down wheelbarrow when she ran. Still, she was full of life and would take a little playful nip at your pantleg when she'd scuttle past.
This last summer, at age 16, she started to really slow down. She rarely went down to the barn and spent most of her time in the house sleeping, going out to relief herself and then coming back in. One fall day, she went out in the morning (the usual routine) but we never saw her come in for breakfast. We looked everywhere for her that morning and the BossLady spent 2 days searching the farm and neighborhood for her. She was just gone. 10 days later, while out mowing, Janene found her body near the creek bed (where we had looked several times) and it was clear she had been killed by some animal (probably
coywolves). Likely, they snatched her right out of the yard. She's buried on the farm where she lived her life. My wife and I separately smirked, shook our heads and said almost simultaneously, “What a perfect ending for a dog that lived life to the fullest.”
Slowly failing health would not have been her way. Going out like an exploding comet, that was Zilla's way.
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