Post by Deleted on Jul 8, 2007 13:56:27 GMT -5
SHOGIE
June 16, 1996 - July 6, 2007
Shogie had a hard start to his life. He was abandoned twice. The first time, his breeder abandoned him to the local animal shelter in Klamath Falls, Oregon because he was not conformationally correct (as Dobermans go, he was pretty ugly), and his ears failed to stand up. Because she couldn’t show him, she threw him away. He was only two years old.
From there he went to a Doberman Rescue group in Bend, Oregon, from which he was adopted by my ex-husband in Redmond, Oregon. He took very good care of Shogie, actually. He took him everywhere with him, except to work, he spoiled him rotten with treats and bacon and egg breakfasts on Sundays, and life was good for Shogie for a while.
About a year later, my ex decided to live with someone who wouldn’t allow animals in her home. She lived in southern California in a typical upscale home which had white carpeting and furniture, and a concrete back yard decorated with potted plants, so he started looking for someone to take Shogie off his hands. I already had one full grown male Doberman, but when I heard that he was trying to dump Shogie, I told my ex to bring him to my house and I’d take him, but it would be permanent. I told him I wouldn’t give him back if he changed his mind, and asked him if he was absolutely sure about it. He said he was.
So Shogie came to live with me when he was a little over 3 years old. The two dogs seemed to get along really well, and in fact we called them the Doberman Excavation Team because their favorite pastime was digging really large holes and trenches in the back yard. There were some rock-chucks (marmots) living in a pile of rocks out there and they had tunnels underground. The dogs could hear them squeaking and it drove them crazy, digging to find them. It was pretty funny, but you had to watch your step out there. The “back yard” was about half an acre of sand, sagebrush and rocks, so it wasn’t really a big deal.
A few months later, sure enough, the ex came back to Redmond because he found he couldn’t get along with the girlfriend, and he asked if he could take Shogie back. I laughed and told him, “No, he’s happy now, and he has a permanent home with me.” Cruel, maybe, but honestly, what did he expect?
Eventually, the two Dobies started having issues. The first one, Thor, was obviously the alpha dog, and Shogie cheerfully accepted his subordinate position to Thor, but after about six months, Thor started pushing it and one day they actually got into a pretty serious fight. Thor drew blood. So I decided one of them had to go. I loved them both, but Shogie was just somehow more special, so I gave up Thor. Thor’s story is a long one, and I won’t go into it here, but his dam and sire were littermates, and he had some serious mental issues. He wasn’t mean, but he was as crazy as a loon. So Thor left and Shogie stayed.
After Thor was gone, Shogie blossomed into the wonderful dog he really was. I also had another smaller dog at that time, Flash, a Black Lab/Norwegian Elkhound/Australian Shepherd mix. Shogie and Flash were constantly trying to decide who was alpha after Thor left. They never had a fight about it, but there was a lot of scrambling to see who would go in or out the door first. Just minor stuff. Sometimes they would growl at each other, but eventually even that stopped, and they lived happily together as best buddies, and I assume, as co-alphas.
Shogie has never been clever, as dogs go, and his mouth-eye coordination was really bad. Flash can catch a fast-moving tennis ball coming straight at him, but Shogie couldn’t manage to catch an easy lob. It would hit him square between the eyes, and only then would he open his mouth in a vain attempt to catch the ball. It’s horrible to tease a dog, but sometimes it was so funny I couldn’t help myself. Seeing that delayed reaction was hysterical. And I know he really wanted to catch it. He just couldn’t manage it.
Cats were another issue for Shogie. He’s always been fine with them, until one day, our new kitten, PJ, jumped on him while he was sleeping and traumatized him for life. Shogie was sleeping on the sofa, and PJ was playing up on the back, when he jumped down and landed right on Shogie. Now, Shogie was a big dog, weighing about 120 pounds, and PJ at the time probably weighed one pound, or less, but you’d think a mountain lion had landed on him! He yiked and leaped off the couch, shivering and shaking. For the rest of his days, any cat made him nervous, and of course, all our cats just loved Shogie. He was the one they went to when they wanted a snuggle and Rich or I were unavailable. I used to joke that our big, bad Doberman needed to go to therapy to get over his fear of cats, and kittens in particular.
When we moved to South Dakota, Shogie was in hog heaven. There was grass to roll in, shade trees to lie under on a summer day, and plenty of room to sniff and explore. The winters were hard on him, because of his short coat, but I got him a foal blanket and he wore that when it got too cold outside. He didn’t like it, but at least it kept him from freezing when he went outside.
He was always beside me, wherever I was. When I would sit and watch TV, he’d either lie on the floor under my feet, or get up beside me on the sofa. He slept on the bed with me at night. And he laughed much. He had the biggest goofy grin on his face most of the time. He was truly a happy dog.
Sometimes he’d be on the sofa when Rich and I were at the dining table, and he’d snortle. He’d rub his face on the back of the sofa and blow air – it sounded like a pig snuffling for truffles. So we nicknamed him “Housepig.”
In July of 2005, we had a lightning strike on our house, which ran down the wiring and exploded some light fixtures, as well as burning out a lot of electronics. But the flash/boom and the exploding glass was scary. Rich and I were yelling at the dogs (by now we had three, Shogie, Flash, and another rescue Black Lab named Thumper), to stay out of the area where all the glass was, and I guess somehow Shogie associated the thunderstorm with us being “mad” at him, so forever after he was deathly afraid of thunderstorms. If he saw a flash of lightning or heard the faintest rumble, even on TV, he’d start shaking and slobbering. It was so pitiful. Finally, earlier this year, I discovered that if I gave him a couple of melatonin tablets, he was much calmer. Melatonin is the sleep hormone, and if I gave it to him early enough in the course of the thunderstorm, he’d sleep right through it. Sometimes thunder would rattle the windows, and he still reacted badly to that, although it wasn’t as severe. As soon as the thunder moved away a bit, he’d put his head back down and relax.
Shogie had such a soft heart. The first time he brought us a dead bird, I thought it was a fluke. I saw him carrying it in the back yard, and went out to take it away so he wouldn’t try to bring it in the house. But he laid it down at my feet, then sat back and looked at me expectantly, then at the dead bird, then back at me. It was like he was saying, “Mommy, it’s hurt, can you fix it?” Almost broke my heart, it was so sweet. But that wasn’t the only time. Whenever he found any little critter that was “broken,” he brought it to me or Rich to see if we could fix it. Always the same, lay it down at our feet and step back and wait.
He had never really liked to be outside, except for potty time, until we moved here to South Dakota. During the nice weather, even if it was cold, but the sun was shining, he liked to lie out in the grass with his nose into the breeze. About the only time he really wanted to be inside was if it was too cold out, or too hot. When he would come in finally, I’d have to brush all the grass off him. He loved to get out there and roll in the cool grass.
A couple of years ago, he started crying sometimes when he would get up from sleeping, and I started to wonder if maybe he was getting arthritis. He seemed to go through phases, where he would cry almost every time he moved, then there would be weeks at a time when he didn’t cry at all. During this time, Rich and I discovered the link between joint pain and corn consumption, so we started looking for a dog food that didn’t contain corn. This is extremely hard to do, because almost every commercial dog food on the market contains corn as the first or second ingredient. We finally located one, and switched all the dogs over to it, and gradually the crying spells stopped. He was moving around like he did when he was three. He bounced, he ran, he “galumped” all over the place. He lost a few pounds, although he still weighed well over 100 pounds. He was a very big dog, 29 ½ inches at the shoulder, so he was much larger than the average Doberman. But he was healthy and happy, and life was good for him.
So this past Friday evening, I had no reason to suspect anything was out of the ordinary when I let Shogie and Flash outside to potty. They were out there for about 15 or 20 minutes. It was kind of hot out, and Flash, being black with longer hair, wanted back in and started barking at the door, so I went to the door and let him in. I called Shogie, but he didn’t come, so I went outside and around the house to see where he was. I expected to see him bounding out of the tree rows on the edge of the property, with his big goofy grin, but instead I saw a lump lying in the grass about 20 feet from me. It was Shogie. His feet were still mostly under him, and he looked like he was dead before he hit the ground. To say I was in shock is a gross understatement. I was devastated! How could my beautiful, healthy dog be so suddenly and utterly dead? I went and got Rich and he looked him over carefully to see if there was any sign of the cause of death and he found nothing. The only thing we can think of is that his heart just stopped. He literally dropped dead in his tracks. I’m thankful that it was quick, but that doesn’t really ease the pain in my heart, or the huge gaping hole in my life. We buried him that night out behind the garden.
So Shogie is gone, and I don’t know how long it will take me to get over this horrible sadness, but I wanted to write his story so that other people would know what a wonderful person he was. And he was like a person. He was more like a person than a dog, which makes it doubly hard on me. It’s like losing a child. Well, I guess he was my child, since I had no human children of my own. He was my special boy and he is greatly missed. Oh, how he is missed. But I have all the memories, and that’s something. I also still have two “children,” Flash and Thumper, who need my love and attention, so that makes the hurt a tiny bit less than it could have been.
Wait for me at the Bridge, Shogie…
Edited to add:
When I lost my first Dobie, Ninja, my vet sent me a card with this inscription:
We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached. Unable to accept its awful gaps, we would still live no other way. We cherish memory as the only certain immortality, never fully understanding the necessary plan...
- From "The Once Again Prince" by Irving Townsend
It is so true.
There's little to say to ease that hole that's in your heart right now; but time and good memories will help.
, but out of all the dogs I've ever lived with, and there have been many, if I only had to pick one, it would be him. 
