Sean, Rufus, Cookie and Linda.
Our little Cookie is nearly grown and needs to be spayed soon.
She and Amber are just about the same size.
She's got an inch or 2 on our old friend Henry.
He had a few more teeth removed recently and is feeling fine.
Cookie and Linda remain great pals and sparing partners.
Cookie has reach but Linda has a better ground game.
Elewah is surprisingly tolerant of the pup.
Maybe she notices a resemblance?
Elewah, Daisy, Cookie and Mega.
Pretty Xmul keeps an eye on the cats' evening shenanigans.
So many sweet faces at the gate!
They all want to know where I'm going.
This is a view from the other side of our gate.
I'm headed to that farthest tree, on the left side of the road.
One of the local strays had puppies and they're in a burrow there, under some tree roots.
Sean once saw four but I've only seen two. This striped angel...
and this little cutie.
The smaller brown girl is the Mom and is obviously still nursing. I think the other dog is her offspring from a previous litter. They both hang out under vehicles parked at the neighbor's place. They are too skittish for us to get near (we've been trying).
We're concerned that the burrow will flood when we get a hard rain so we built a little storm shelter next to/above it. It's a big plastic garbage can that I split in half lengthwise, weighted down with an old rubber kitchen mat and some limbs. Their burrow is to the left in this picture and the camouflaged shelter is in the center.
We aren't sure how much we can do for these girls. We can't raise every dog we find but we dread having even more fertile dogs living nearby -for their sake and ours*. The adult females will be pregnant again in no time and if these 2 survive 6 months, that will be 4 fertile females nearby! That will mean unending noise, an influx of males and an avalanche of puppies. Shit. We had the stray that lives around the army base just north of us sterilized a couple of years ago, and that has worked out great! We would do the same for these girls if we could lay hands on them.
There is a small window of time while we have access to the young ones. I think they are around 3 weeks old, maybe a little younger. Soon they will be too skittish. It rained last night and today they were still crammed in the damp burrow that they've practically outgrown. We'd be happy to foster them if there were homes for them to go to once they've been socialized and inoculated. If anyone is interested, get in touch!
This is the only time I've spotted one out of the burrow.
* We are both well aware that a likely scenario involves us on our knees, at night, in the middle of a downpour, pulling puppies out of a flooded burrow and bringing them home in our pockets.
