For Fun People Who Love Dogs

Why does Erwitt always check the sky — and what does science actually say about that? I was out on the front porch this morning with a few of the dogs when a hawk made a lazy pass overhead. Nothing dramatic. Just a hawk doing hawk things at a polite altitude. But Erwitt caught it. He looked up, tracked it, and issued what I can only describe as an official perimeter alert. Ears forward, full commitment. The kind of bark that says he has taken this personally. Then I watched F

May is almost over, and this is our last cancer-focused post for Pet Cancer Awareness Month. I wanted to end where the story ended best. The Day Everything Got Lighter Remission isn't exactly a place on a map, but we treated it like one. We had a destination. We had a route. And Grover finished his last Wisconsin Protocol treatment right on schedule — on his seventh birthday. Not the most glamorous way to spend a birthday, but what a present. Something shifts when you get tha

I wrote this piece about ten years ago, while sitting with my dog Grover in the lobby of the canine cancer center. Reading it again now — with Fleetwood curled up at my feet — I'd still write it the same way today. The lobby of any doctor's office can be intimidating, and I'm just talking about the regular doctor. I start to sweat before my own appointments. So imagine entering the lobby of a specialist — in our case, a canine cancer center. Grover, being Grover, decided to h

"What do you mean Grover can’t receive treatment?" That was an outside-voice moment — with tears. We’d just started chemo, and the first treatment seemed to go smoothly. Maybe a little too smoothly. So when we returned to the cancer clinic for round two and Grover’s oncologist came out and said, “Grover won’t be able to receive chemo today,” it felt like a gut punch all over again. They’d run a complete CBC and checked his vitals and weight. The results told the story: Grover

Forty-eight hours after the diagnosis, I was sitting in an oncologist's office being told my dog had "good" lymphoma. What? My dog has what? I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Good cancer. I turned those two words over in my head and — somehow — felt relieved. If you'd told me a week earlier that I'd ever be grateful for a type of cancer, I would have thought you'd lost your mind. And honestly, I kind of lost mine for a minute too. If you're joining mid-story — hi, I'm Ki

If you're new here, hi — I'm Kim, and I have five Airedales. Grover was my fifth ever Airedale and the inspiration behind Happy Aire. His full story is in the previous post. May 1st kicks off National Pet Cancer Awareness Month, which feels like exactly the right moment to talk about something I wish someone had shown me a long time ago: how to check your dog for early signs of cancer, and when to do it. What seems obvious now did not a decade ago. I had no road map. Here's o

I vividly remember the call from the vet’s office with the lab results. I had just gotten home and was standing in the driveway when it came in. Canine lymphoma. It can take several calls before the reality of certain information sinks in. I’m not hard of hearing, but I must have asked them to repeat the diagnosis at least four times. It was like an out-of-body experience. You hear every word. You know what the words mean. But your outside voice doesn’t know what to say, and

Does anyone remember the bumper sticker "Dog is My Co-Pilot?" I probably just dated myself. Lately, I've noticed a shift happening in my house, from co-pilot to co-dependent. I think working from home might be to blame. The Fab 5 have always wanted to be my co-pilot, which would make for a very crowded cockpit, but that's beside the point. The Old Routine For most of my career, I traveled weekly. Every Tuesday I dropped the pack at doggie daycare for boarding and headed to th

You guessed it…I’m talking about Fleetwood. For those of you who don’t know Fleetwood, he is one of my Airedales and he loves - loves - to have a job. 😀 By having the envelope pushed, we've accomplished a lot together, from basic obedience to recall. But lately, I have a feeling that Fleetwood is ready to push that envelope again. Wired for Work Fleetwood loves to work. He's a wire-haired terrier, after all — maybe I shouldn't be surprised by his enthusiasm. I'm convinced

Recently, several photos from 2022 popped up in my "memories." They're all from the day I picked out the puppy who would become Fleetwood. 💕 Looking at them, one thing was immediately clear: Fleetwood was not going to let me leave without him. He was determined. Every time I looked at or petted one of the other puppies, he jumped in front and tried to give me kisses. One Look and I was Hooked When I looked into those eyes and saw the "Fleety" spark, I was hooked. I knew he w

Are we not talking about the same thing? Afterall, social is part of socialized…. Nope. We are not talking about the same thing. 🧐 In fact, social dogs and socialized dogs are very different. What does it mean to have a “social dog”? It means you have a very friendly dog who… • loves everyone • plays well with others • gets gold stars at doggie daycare I’m very familiar with social dogs. The “Fab 5” considers themselves very social 😆 However, socialized dogs and socia

Last year, a tornado touched down near our home. It was early morning. I woke up to a tornado warning on my phone. My dogs already knew something was up — and nothing felt right. Hudson, Erwitt, Prayerie, Fleetwood, and Daisy were all on edge. 😬 I got downstairs with the news on. The Airedales were right — we were not only under a tornado warning, we were in the potential path. 🌪️ By that point, my dogs had completely lost their minds. Honestly, I had too. I was trying to c

I have five Airedales. Every single one of them has an agenda. Some agendas are obvious. Some are mysterious. All of them make me laugh, usually at moments I'm not expecting it. What I didn't realize until I sat down to write this is that the agendas might not be as random as I thought. Here's how the quirky behavior breaks down in our house. Hudson Hudson is my only dog who is completely comfortable just being a dog. No hidden agenda, no emotional complexity. Just a happy gu

How my Airedale Terrier Grover's battle with canine lymphoma inspired Happy Aire and our 10% donation to UF Veterinary Medicine's oncology research program.

If you have multiple dogs and have ever experience a fight between them, this one is for you ...but if you know me, you know that all my kids have 4 paws which means it wasn't an argument. It was a dog fight. All I remember was yelling no, off and stop. The fight was broken up, and everyone was okay except for me. I was not okay… rather shaken to my core. It's been over six months, and I still feel uncomfortable talking about what happened - where did I fail? I'd always had a

Erwitt turns 9 on April 11, and in keeping with our Aries energy (mine and his), I'm not doing anything subtle about it. This newsletter is dedicated to him and his four siblings, because I was looking at their birth dates recently and realized their zodiac signs are almost uncomfortably accurate. I say "almost" because I've always been a little skeptical of astrology. But then I thought about Hudson following Fleetwood around the yard after their fight, just wanting to be ne