I try not to be that person that only posts pictures of their pets, but come on!!??? Look at them? They are Golden Retrievers. I think I deserve a pass here. Kyra (girl dog) and Koufax (boy dog), brother and sister, same litter brought up near Craters of the Moon and purchased by us for $750 buckaroos. Best money we’ve spent. So there’s a few type of pet owners, there’s the young married couples, DINC’s (Double-Income-No-Children) that lavish their attention on their pets (be they dogs or cats) in preparation for eventual parenthood. Then there’s ‘burban Dad’s like myself who have their priorities straight…from lesser to more importance: work, running, mountains, family, and of course at the pinnacle of importance–dogs.
You all who have pets know they are members of the family. When it seems all else is existential, your most tried and true relationships seem to have failed you, dogs are there. They are unconditional. Sure try not feeding them and that symbiotic relationship that first got developed when Wolves came to humans for the basics, Maslow’s foundation, shelter, safety, and sustenance… goes away, maybe they’ll turn on you to attack and eat you… but I doubt it. We are talking Retrievers here.
Before I go on and overstay my welcome talking about Golden’s, they have their quirks. They may not be the most smartest of dogs (Border Collies maybe), they may be a bit neurotic (Krya swears Hot Air Baloons are the spawn of Satan and are put on earth to kill her and she has a base fear of flashlights pointed to the ceiling), but they are the friendly faces, the dogs you immediately are drawn to, not an aggressive bone in their bodies. I used to have a dog Hamlet. When I got out of the military academy where things were so controlled… no pets allowed, and flunked out of pilot training so I could finally get a pet of my own that weren’t hermit crabs… I got Hamlet from Emmett, Idaho, the Golden Lab, half Golden Retriever and Half Yellow Lab. That was a dog that comes along once in a lifetime and the best bud I could wish for. I could go into separate stories about Hamlet but maybe the best was when he had rocks frozen to his butt and he would walk around wondering what was hanging off his butt… it was rocks fo’ sho!!!
So Kyra and Koufax, the sibs. They are different dogs than Hamlet, why we gotta rack and stack our favorites in the history of ever?? Maybe it’s a Swinney family curse to rank everything OCD-like… but I ain’t gonna do it here. We learned later you should never get siblings pups and bring them up together. Sure they are so close but for nice innocent all-American (even though it’s a Brit Breed) Golden’s, the pair have fought perhaps 3 times where it was to the death. I kid you not. So fierce that I had to grab one of them by the haunches and launch them over the fence and then jump on top of them just to get it to stop. It’s a thing I guess for sibling rivalries between litter mates being such that people in the know recommend to not bring them up together. They seem to be over that and are the best of buds these days. The girl dog humps the boy dog, the boy dog is humiliated by getting humped but what ya gonna do… but there it is. And Kyra the smaller and faster dog, is the dominant one and always gets the best of Koufax the Compliant. They have ran with me for 20 plus miles, have slept in the car with me, have slept in the RV with the fam, they have amassed snow balls (girl dog) where balls would actually be, on a winter ascent of Squaw, they have been lost for 4 plus hours with me, no water, up on Horseshoe Bend Pass, lost on the wrong side of Squaw, disappearing hopelessly over ridges on R2R chasing coyotes, deer, you name it, but they’ve always been there, always been kind. I could go on but at this point it’s really just holding you dear reader hostage to a person giving you a 4-hour home movie slide show about his dogs. Who needs that? Because a picture tells a thousand words—>
ZandMe's 999 Good Things 