August in Carlsbad, NM. It rains or it doesn't rain, but it's overall kind of an exhausting midterm monsoon season.
Don't get me wrong, I don't really want to complain about the monsoon. If it didn't rain, it would be much worse.
But it does get on one's nerves at times, and one does welcome the cloudbursts, when they come, in all their flirtateous, rampant glory.
My dog, not so much.
I adopted Casey from the local animal shelter when he was about a year old, about two years back. The vet told me that, when I took Case there, right after adopting him, that Case was about a year old.
I think it's about right, because he was a skinny puppy then, only 37 lbs, but has not grown taller than his current 22" at the withers. And now he's about 50# and looks right for his weight.
He's a border collie, for all practical purposes. He sure looks like one, anyway. And he acts like one a lot too. Collies are pretty sensitive people.
When I found Casey at the shelter, he was in a cage, and just kind of hanging. He looked alert, he was paying attention. He didn't jump up at the gate to the cage, and neither did he cower.
I thought; that's cool. I have always liked collies and especially border collies. I'd asked the advice of a street beggar about what to look for in a dog, and one of the things the man said was "Don't go for the ones who are all up over the front of the cage and licking your hands. They're more likely to have, what is that? Separation anxiety?"
Indeed. It was good advice. I don't believe in leaving dogs alone for overly long periods of time, but in any case; Case has never trashed any of my stuff, even when left alone overnight that time I got too drunk at a party and didn't get up and come back until the next morning (guilt! Guilt! Guilt!)
Case is overall a great dog, but one thing I learned about him shortly after I adopted him was that he is extremely brontophobic. Brontosaurus = thunder lizard; brontophobic = dog that goes batshit crazy when he hears thunder.
I adopted Casey in early August of that year, and our monsoon season here in Carlsbad, NM, includes a lot of thunder. In fact, it probably includes more thunder than it does rain.
I figured out pretty fast that he didn't like thunder, in fact found it really frightening. What I didn't think about was how deep it ran.
I've always thought that he must have been left tied up outside during a thunderstorm where the cell was right above. His phobia is that bad.
Back to August of 2007, and early September. I'd worked out, like I said, that Case did not like thunder. I continued to work out that what he really liked to do when stressed out was get under things.
Unfortunately I did not work this out fast enough, or well enough, and in early September of 2007 we had one of those interminable rumbling distant thunder events we get around here fairly frequently in the late summer monsoon, and I thought nothing of it. I knew he didn't like it, but I was thinking; "He'll be cool as long as it doesn't get too loud."
Wrong. I left him in the house, windows closed, and went over to the other house (I have two, both kind of broken down, but space is good) where the kitchen is. I spent a couple of minutes there stirring the soup, and then heard the sound of shattering glass.
I ran outside in full Mom mode. "Stop that right this instant!" I howled.
Case backed off the window, while I ran into the other house (the one with the computer, my bed, and Case) and there he was flying around, bleeding, in shock. He'd gone through one of the windows, the ones with really low sills. He'd thrown himself at them to break through, to get out. He'd then gone on to rip through a fair piece of screen.
All of that in several minutes.
He still sports a scar on his lip from biting at the glass.
~~~~~~~~~
Since then, I've been extremely worried about Casey and thunder. This is very different from worrying about Casey and thunderstorms, because he first got crazy enough to damage himself, when there was no thunder near. It was all off in the distance, but it went on for a long time. Finally it got to him.
When the thunder gets closer (now that we've been roommates for two years, happy 3rd birthday Casey!) and gets into a real whaler, he hides under my bed like he always does when noises scare him. But when the storms get bad, he goes under the bed, and then comes back out, looks around frantically, and then goes back under again. Repeat, repeat, repeat. It's sad to watch.
That's all history. Today we had a thunderstorm, that wandered around the area. I love thunderstorms, I want to keep the doors open, I want to go out with my digital camera and take pictures. Case was getting nervous, and I shooed him in a couple of times. I do that when he gets nervous; tell him to go under the bed. But it gets so old always keeping the doors shut when there's a nice thunderstorm, in the summer, when it's been 100oF far too much. Mea culpa.
But this time I missed. He ran off and went over the fence (this is the first time ever he's gone over my 4' chain link fence).
I kind of suspected this might have happened, pretty quickly. I think I let it happen. Maybe that makes me a bad person, but my dog does have a licensing tags, A current rabies tags, a tag with our names, address, and phone numbers, and also an antique silver Navajo dog tag, all on his harness loop.
And he's a nice dog. I've trained him to be a nice dog. Strangers come to the fence and he jumps up at it and sucks for affection. I've gotten him pretty well trained not to bark at people, too.
When Case left today, I thought about what to do about it, and the first thing I did was turn on my phone. I went back and forth about unlocking the gates, and then thought; "nah!"
I did yell, loudly, "CASEYYYY!~!!!" once.
But I didn't have long to wait. The phone rang. I answered. A friendly-sounding woman was on the other end. "We've got your dog," she said. "I'm at (address several blocks from my house)."
"Thanks," I said. "I'll be there in a few minutes."
I walked down, and found a bunch of guys under a carport, with Casey in tow. I sat down with them and talked to Casey. I talked to the guys. I thanked them. I offered them money, even if they would want to give it to an animal rescue service. I knew it would not be appropriate to just offer them money for the service of being kind enough to retrieve my dog for me.
"No," they said. "We just didn't want him to get taken away by the animal police. That little guy back there did, once."
I said; "You are amigos, then. I will remember this."
And I will. They are my my neighbors now.