Thanksgiving Memories

You are going to want to skip this one if you are squeamish about animals hunting other animals, which is what animals do, but it can be upsetting if it a domestic animal hunting. To me anyway. I think about this every Thanksgiving morning and it's only in the last couple of years that it has not really bothered me.

Funny (now) Thanksgiving story...

This took place in either 2001 or 2002...I think it was 2001. I had both Daisy and Rose, and I got Rose in April of 2001.

My mother and I always had orange rolls for breakfast on Thanksgiving, and so I had them in the oven and went to get her up. I went back to the kitchen and got them out and was putting the icing on them where I heard a squeak from outside. I looked out the kitchen window, and Daisy and Rose each had one end of a rabbit. That upset me on several levels...number one, I LOVE bunny rabbits and have a collection of them (not the real ones obviously with 4 dogs and a cat) and this one had just gone to bunny heaven, and number two, my dogs had something that had recently been alive and were playing tug-of-war with it. I was horrified. So I ran out in the yard, still in my polar bear print pajamas, and started yelling at them. Rose, the more compliant and easily scared of the 2, immediately dropped her end and came down to the patio. Daisy, now triumphant with the trophy, took off for the back part of the yard.

Now, what a thinking, sane person would do is get something to lure the dog away from whatever it is they shouldn't have, secure the dog, and then go deal with the situation. I was not thinking, and there are some who question my sanity, so what I did was grab a shovel and take off for the back part of the yard too. I ran after her and of course, she did what dogs do when being chased: she ran like mad. So I ran too, a fat woman approaching middle age in polar bear pajamas. She continued to run, and continued to carry her trophy. So I continued to huff and puff and yell after her, and for some reason that made sense only in my mind at the moment, started swinging the shovel. I would have done a medieval Celtic warrior proud.

At this point, the back door opened, and my mother stepped out on the patio to see why her daughter had gone berserk. She had picked up one of the orange rolls and stood there munching and watching. That agitated me further and so I started yelling at her to come help me. Around a mouthful of orange roll, she said "What do you want me to do?" in a tone that implied 1) I'm in my 70s and if you think I'm chasing after that crazy dog, you're crazier than she is, and 2) I'm eating my breakfast. All this time, Daisy kept running until I stopped for a minute, and then she would stop and stand over her prize and when I started running, she started running...never dropping her trophy for a minute. At some point in the chase, I started crying.

Seeing the orange roll gave me the idea (finally) to get some kind of food and see if I could lure her to me. So I quit swinging the shovel and screaming and went to get some cheese and managed to get her close enough that I could grab her. She had some blood on her feet and legs (which is surprising given that the rabbit didn't seem to be really hurt...other than being dead I mean) and once I dragged her by her collar into the house I had to clean that up. When we got in the house, my mother was sitting at the table eating orange rolls. I was still crying and now was blubbering that after having a taste of blood Daisy was going to revert to a wild wolf dog and I was going to have to put her to sleep because she would attack every warm-blooded thing in her path.

We all recovered (some of us more slowly than others) and went on to have the Thanksgiving that we always had...with the exception that some of my relatives thought is was entertaining to tease me by asking if we were having rabbit stew instead of turkey. We did have turkey, by the way.

I am wearing those same polar bear pajamas this morning as a matter of fact...I love these pajamas.