February 24, 2025

Yellowstone Adventures: Moose Kissing Beaver

My friend, Margaret, and I decided to visit Yellowstone together. I can’t get enough of Yellowstone, she’d never been, and we knew between the Park’s bounty, our high spirits, and my clumsiness we’d have adventures. Especially since we had no intention of avoiding any (although Margaret thought seeing Old Faithful once was enough, which is just plain wrong).

Late May is a great time to visit Yellowstone: it can be cold and snowy, but it isn’t very crowded and the animals are active and close. For wild animals, who have no interest in either photo shoots or getting out of the road when you’re trying to drive on it.

Margaret and I are unabashed wolf groupies, so we hung out where the wolves were, and got lucky. News of wolf kills or sightings spreads quickly throughout the Park, which I learned by eavesdropping in bathrooms, a good reason to use social media.

We saw grizzlies and pronghorn antelope and deer, rabbits, coyotes, elk and bison, bald eagles, white pelicans, mountain goats, squirrels, chipmunks, birds of all kinds, animals everywhere. Herds and flocks and whatever you call it when there’s more than one and they aren’t mall rats.

We were heading out of the park when we tallied up our animal sightings. We’d seen pretty much every animal you could expect to see in Yellowstone, but no moose.

“Or beavers,” I said.

“Yeah, no beavers,” she said, giving me a look. I’m not sure she appreciated beavers any more than Old Faithful.

Seeing Yellowstone seemed incomplete without beavers, although I can’t say why. I don’t really think about beavers, and I could probably see them in Seattle, like bald eagles and river otters, which live in our neighborhood. I wanted to see animals we don’t have in Seattle, like wolves and bison and elk. In fact, as many times as I’d been to Yellowstone, I’d never even thought of looking for a beaver. That’s a backcountry thing, and I only do backcountry on videos.

But somehow I had beavers on the brain. It had something to do with tallying up our animal sightings, including baby bison (are they bisettes?) and elk (elkies?), wolves (pups), and grizzlies (cubs). And in the tallying we were thinking of what we hadn’t seen yet, and it was beavers. And moose.

We were on our way out of the Park, heading north from the Norris Geyser Basin, through the narrow, boxed-in, river-fed meadows leading to Mammoth Hot Springs and Gardiner.

We were talking about how lucky we’d been, from geysers and hot springs and mud pots to animal sightings. Then we saw the cars pulled over. In Yellowstone that means animals.

“What is it?” Margaret asked, concentrating on not running over anyone while she parked, a good thing.

It also gave me a chance to play Ranger Robyn, whipping out my binoculars to peek into the private lives of the wild and not-so-interested. I pointed them where everyone else was looking, down into a small grassy meadow. There was a moose placidly grazing, knee-deep in spring grasses.

“A moose!” I yelled. Yippee! We were almost out of the Park, and we could now add a moose to the tally!

We watched the moose for a few minutes as it hung out.

Then I saw it. Something tucked low in the grass, about 50 feet behind the moose. We’d seen elk being chased by grizzlies and wolves, and my heart sank. Briefly (I am, after all, an American). Moose sightings are rare even in Yellowstone, and this scene was pretty as an idyllic painting. And possibly not benign.

“Oh no!” I yelled. “There’s something else there, sneaking up on the moose!”

“What?” Margaret asked anxiously.

I could see the top of the head. What could that be? Wait, there was water nearby, lots of it. The animal was small.

“It’s a beaver!” I yelled.

“Really?” Margaret asked, excited.

And then the moose turned and looked at the beaver. And calmly meandered over to it, head down to peer closer.

“The moose spotted it and is going over!” I reported.

Do beavers fight moose? If so, why? Don’t they eat sawdust? What kind of a trick could a beaver pull to get a fresh moose on its plate? Did I really have to see the moose cream it? Yes. We need to know about nature, so we can avoid it.

But the moose wasn’t looking mad. Or violent. In fact, it looked, and acted, like it was in love. Moony and gentle.

“That moose likes the beaver,” I reported.

Margaret was grumbling, possibly something about city slickers and idiots, trying to distract me as she grabbed for the binoculars. I dodged her, hard to do in a car.

Then the moose moved in on the beaver, peering down at it, tender and loving. Then it …

“The moose is kissing the beaver,” I yelled.

Margaret yelled, “What? No, no, no.”

I didn’t get it either.

“Wait,” I said. “That can’t be right.” Even I knew that much about nature.

I stared at the moose kissing the beaver, who was kissing the moose back. Then the beaver stood up—wobbling on its baby moose legs.

“It’s a baby moose! The moose is kissing her baby!”

We howled in laughter. There’s nothing like friendship, when you can be dumb and your friends just laugh with you.

We watched the moose and her baby nuzzle each other, not a care in the world. Right then. I knew the odds in Yellowstone, even for moose. I hoped they’d make it, together.

Margaret and I still laugh at me thinking I’d just witnessed the impossible: moose kissing beaver. But really, wouldn’t it be great? Isn’t that what building community and multi-species families is all about, that anything is possible with love?

Frankly, I want to always be a person who’d think a moose and a beaver would kiss. Especially in Yellowstone.

What about you?

(c) 2011 Robyn M Fritz

Co-incidence and Community: How A Dog, Three Women, and a Book Saved a Life

Cavaliers and catSometimes we wonder if we’ve done the right thing in life. Sometimes we get lucky and know we did, even though we were just trying to get by. Sometimes that story co-incidentally defines another, which is what building community is all about.

This is the story of how a chronically ill dog saved another dog 10 years later. Nobody saw it coming until it was over. It still makes me smile.

In 2010 I published a small gift book, with essays and comic stories about new ways of thinking about the human-animal bond. Bridging Species: Thoughts and Tales About Our Lives with Dogs, chronicled my journey of buying a dog as a pet, and how I ended up creating a multi-species family with two Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, Murphy and Alki, and Grace the Cat.

My publishing goal? To get people together to talk about what it means to see our animals as not just pets but family members, and how that can help us create community, one family at a time.

I was thrilled when East West Bookshop in Seattle created a book signing event for me. I had three choices for a date, and instantly chose July 16. It just felt right, and I quickly realized why: it would be Murphy’s 12th birthday.

Murphy’s birthday was a stunner all by itself. She’d come to live with me when she was 11 weeks old. We had lots of fun and too many problems: Murphy was chronically ill almost from the first, and at 2-1/2 years the anxiety and vet bills and just plain mystery and misery of her health woes were near to breaking both of us.

People told me to get rid of her and get a new dog.

People do that. The very idea shocked me, and even today is part of the reason why I work so hard to help define and live the idea of a multi-species family. Murphy’s problems were at times debilitating and often expensive, small things that added up and puzzled us, but never things that seemed worth killing her over. That just didn’t seem right.

By December 2000 Murphy had been suffering from a long-term infection no one could pinpoint. For some months she also had eye problems. We finally found Dr. Joyce Murphy, a holistic veterinary ophthalmologist who lived in Port Hadlock, a 5-1/2 hour round trip by car and ferry from our Seattle home.

The whole story is too long to recount here, but the gist of it is that Dr. Murphy took one look at her, exclaimed that she had the “medical record of a 13-year-old dog,” and promptly identified the problem. She operated the next day, essentially giving Murphy tear ducts and a tear gland she didn’t have, and the infection was finally resolved.

We’ve been going to see Dr. Murphy ever since. And when Murphy’s Cavalier brother, Alki, came along, he went there, too. And still does.

Dr. Murphy saved Murphy’s life, and, as I think about it, Alki’s, too.

She’s also been there for us through multiple traumas and illnesses, by phone or by appointment. Murphy, in particular, holds a special place in her heart.

Over the years I discovered that Dr. Murphy did a lot of volunteer work at the Jefferson County Animal Shelter. She and her partner and their staff have helped an awful lot of animals. Many happy multi-species families have benefited from her warm, generous heart and skilled veterinary services, families created through the shelter.

When I published my book I decided to give something back, to honor in my small way the work that Dr. Murphy did with my own—my writing. I gave her 5 copies and said to sell them and put the money into her shelter work.

Some time later the dogs and I were in Port Hadlock, getting a checkup with Dr. Murphy. She very seriously thanked me for donating the books to her practice, said that they had sold and the buyers thought my book was “excellent.”

She then told me what she did with the money. An older dog had come to the shelter, he needed “this and that,” medicine and surgery and general fixing up, but he’d recovered nicely, and was now in a happy home, as delighted with his new family as they were with him.

She said he lived because I donated book sales to the shelter.

In my usual blunt and occasionally tactless way I said, “I don’t think my books paid for all that.”

She didn’t miss a beat. She, too, is into creating community.

She said that her work as a vet and my work writing my book produced the sales that made the money that went to the shelter that saved the dog and created a new family.

“It’s all about community,” she said.

And she was right.

I felt pretty warm and fuzzy. My book got compliments and, bonus! somehow figured in saving an old dog’s life.

My old dog started it! It was her problems and our solutions that made me start thinking about looking at the human-animal relationship as something more than just a human and a pet. Dr. Murphy is the reason my Murphy lived, she’s how Murphy and I got the time to create a family that I could write about.

But the story doesn’t end there.

Clearly, Dr. Murphy is popular with dog people in these parts. One of her clients is a well-known, respected Cavalier breeder who had moved to the area from several states away. I didn’t even know that she was here or one of Dr. Murphy’s clients until she bought one of the books I donated to the shelter at Dr. Murphy’s office. And praised it so highly that Dr. Murphy passed on the compliment.

It was some of that Cavalier breeder’s money that bought the book that saved that old dog’s life at the animal shelter. And, 12 years earlier, that Cavalier breeder was also the owner of the stud dog who became my Murphy’s dad.

This was the story I shared at East West Bookshop at our book signing on July 16, 2010. On the very day that the little dog people kept telling me to give up on celebrated her 12th birthday: happy, healthy, energetic, a bit arthritic, and, practically unheard for a Cavalier at that age: heart clear.

Co-incidence? Let’s have more of them.

On July 16 people paid a small amount to come to my book signing. The money went to the Jefferson County Animal Shelter, in care of Dr. Murphy, to honor all of our work, together. We gave her $90, not a lot, but something.

And what she did with that money is another story, for another time.

For now, this is what I know: this story will never stop making me smile, just like the little dog who started it all.

(c) 2011 Robyn M Fritz

Alchemy West: Our Interview at Working Dog Wednesday

Robyn: One of the best things at Alchemy West in 2010 was working with Bella the Boxer and her staff, Ellen Galvin and Patrick Galvin, on Bella’s book.

Yes, Bella is a dogpreneur and wrote Secrets of a Working Dog: Unleash Your Potential and Create Success. Bella has upped the ante on the self-help genre, showing humans how they can create successful lives with the vigor, wisdom, and wit that only a working dog like a boxer can provide.

I loved helping Bella shape her book. And we also helped her publish it, teaming up with Robert Lanphear, the artistic director who is the creative and technical expert at Lanphear Design in Seattle.

Bella writes a blog, too, http://blog.bellatheboxer.com/, and has a regular column, Working Dog Wednesday, where she ‘interviews cool working dogs.’ In our case she graciously agreed to include me and Grace the Cat in her interview with Alchemy West’s Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, Murphy and Alki.

Bella is Director of Goodwill (D.O.G.) at Galvin Communications in Portland, Oregon. Ellen Galvin is the company’s chief wordsmith. Patrick Galvin is a professional speaker who galvanizes audiences to achieve greater levels of success in work and life.

Match Bella’s spunkiness with a couple of Cavaliers and a cat and you end up laughing a lot as you chat about working and living in the 21st century. Here’s the complete interview, before editing (not even an intuitive communicator like me can keep three dogs and a cat from goofing off on the job and just gabbing). It also had to be edited for things that might not meet FCC standards, like a cat saying the word ‘naked.’ It would come from a cat, wouldn’t it?

You can also find us at Bella’s blog, Bella the Boxer!

Here’s the complete interview.

Bella: Well, this is a first … I’m interviewing a whole team! Murphy, Alki and Grace the Cat make up the powerful board of directors at Alchemy West Inc., a Seattle-based company led by Robyn M Fritz. Robyn also happens to be the editor of my book, which is one reason that I’m so proud of it! Welcome!

Robyn: Hi, Bella! I’m glad you liked my help with your book. You have wonderful things to tell all of us about leading balanced lives, with the emphasis on fun! And you were fabulous to work with! I can’t wait to see what you write next!

Grace the Cat: What, a dog writing a book? How does that happen?

Murphy and Alki: Bella’s talented. And we helped by keeping the office in order while Robyn worked with her.

Grace the Cat: Well, there was a lot of laughing.

Murphy and Alki: Bella’s funny!

Bella: And smart.

Murphy and Alki: And wise! We have to admit, boxers are cool, especially Bella. But we’re Cavaliers, known for exceptional clarity of thought and devotion to duty, well, okay, cookies and fun times. We could write a book.

Robyn and Grace the Cat: What?

Murphy and Alki (giggling): Well, there is that thing about Bella being a working dog!

Bella: Wait, why are you guys laughing?

Murphy and Alki: We’re toy dogs! We get paid to play and look cute!

Grace the Cat: Sheesh, dogs. You don’t say that kind of thing around humans!

Robyn: Really. I see a lock on the cookie jar coming.

Murphy, Alki, and Bella: Oh, no!

Grace the Cat: Like I said …

Bella: Tell us a bit about yourselves and Alchemy West, Inc.

Robyn: It’s all about storytelling. I believe that telling stories creates good will, good humor, and great communities, so I tell my stories and help visionary writers tell theirs. I go out and talk with groups about storytelling, especially telling stories about their animals. And because I’m also an intuitive communicator, I help people speak with the beings in their life. It’s all connected because a healthy, balanced world starts with an intuitive, heart-based connection between humans and the beings they most treasure, from their writing projects to their animal companions, homes, businesses, and the land around them.

I love working with writers who are eager to jump into an intuitive, gut-level approach to find and shape their books, whether it’s through individual book development services or group writing seminars.

And it’s inspiring and deeply fulfilling to see how intuitive communication enriches people’s family and business lives by simply helping them talk with the beings who are waiting to talk with them.

Bella: I understand that Robyn wrote a book about you, Bridging Species: Thoughts and Tales About Our Lives with Dogs. The Dog Writers Association of America has nominated it as 2010 Best Book – Humor. It was also nominated for the 2010 Merial Human-Animal Bond Award, given to the work that best highlights the unique relationship between a dog and its owner and best brings to life the concept of the human-animal bond. Very big deal for you guys. So, what does it feel like to be famous?!

Grace the Cat: We’re famous?

Murphy and Alki: Well, we are! We get all the attention at book signings and public events because we’re the cover dogs. People actually stop when they drive by and see us on the street (even when Robyn is outside in her pajamas).

Grace the Cat: I’m the only one here with fashion sense. Those are NOT pajamas. And the dogs—they wear raincoats outside! I’m for the natural look: naked!

Murphy and Alki and Robyn: We noticed.

Robyn: Grace, you just said …

Bella: Robyn, why do you write about the human-animal bond?

I worked in Cavalier rescue for a few years, helping dogs find new homes. I realized that I could help a few dogs that way or help a lot more by writing about how and why we create families with animals, and what that means from a mystical, cultural, practical, and even comic aspect.

Murphy: I’m very funny. And Alki, you can’t help but laugh with him!

Grace: You’re dogs, goes without saying.

Robyn: It’s like that all day around here. The cat and dog wisecracking! I sometimes wonder how we get any work done.

Bella: What other projects do you have in store for Robyn in 2011?

Murphy and Alki and Grace: Robyn is busy writing Murphy’s Tales. It tells how Murphy’s chronic illness as a young dog inspired our family’s journey to wellness and sparked Robyn’s intuitive abilities. And how Murphy taught Robyn street smarts—

Robyn: Sad, but true, and she was only six months old.

Alki and Grace: And saved them both from an earthquake—before it happened!

Robyn: Yes, all things that made me wonder what was going on in animal minds, and how I could find out. This year I’m also doing a lot of writing coaching and teaching events, to help people focus and tell their stories efficiently and well and get them out into the world. And speaking about how we deepen relationships with all life, from animals to the world around us.

Murphy and Alki and Grace: We’re also writing an online magazine, Bridging the Paradigms, full of stories about creating community with all life. And Robyn is doing all kinds of intuitive work with our newest family member: the crystal, Fallon. It’s intense, but we’re never too busy to play, eat, and power nap!

Bella: So, Robyn, are Murphy and Alki and Grace the Cat your creative muses?

Robyn: In many ways, yes. They help me explore a new normal for a family: that multi-species families are families first, and species second, and what matters is that we’ve chosen to live our lives together. When I look at my family I see thinking, intelligent, resourceful, loving, intriguing souls who just happen to be in animal bodies. Their lives are worthwhile, and ours are together. They accept my limitations with far more diplomacy and patience than I do theirs.

Grace: Yes, dogs can be a trial. That’s why I trained mine well.

Murphy and Alki: What?

Robyn: Grace, that’s a secret of a working cat.… Seriously, my family makes me think about what the world can be like if we accept the diversity of all life. If we can create loving relationships within a multi-species family, how hard can it really be for humans to get along?

Murphy and Alki and Grace: We’re the inspiration—and the comic relief! We’re not just pets, we’re family. We help Robyn see what families look like when we don’t take each other for granted, when we don’t set limits on how they should look but explore what they can and do look like when everybody’s equal.

Robyn: That’s right. I pay attention to what bores, entertains, intrigues, annoys, or puzzles them, and I write about how we try to mesh that into a multi-species family, where we all have attitudes.

Grace: What’s an attitude?

Bella and Murphy and Alki: A cat.

Murphy and Alki and Grace: We joke around, but we’re creatives, just like Robyn. We helped her realize that families come in all shapes and sizes and manner of beings, and learning how to adapt to each other is how we come together to make the world a better place.

Bella: What are your roles? How do you avoid stepping on each other’s fuzzy little toes?

Grace: Alki snoozes all day on his dog bed and Murphy holds down the recliner, so I clearly have to supervise them and watch for intruders from my windowsill perch. When I decide the work day is done, I sit by the keyboard, push all the pens off the desk, and, if that doesn’t work, I climb on Robyn’s shoulder and put my tail in her face.

Murphy and Alki: We taught Grace how to shut the laptop.

Robyn: That trick I could do without.

Murphy and Alki: Plus we take Robyn for walks, fetch sticks, lobby for cookie breaks, make people laugh at our cute grins, run errands, greet visiting writers, take Grace for car rides, and feed Robyn one-liners. We’re on duty all day unless a sunspot shows up or we need to snoop on the neighborhood.

Bella: Any advice for other working dogs (er, cats, too!)?

Murphy and Alki and Grace: We like being part of the new families people are creating with us. Teach your humans how to laugh, take breaks, and play and exercise with us, and keep imagining new ways for all of us to be together in one big community. Take your jobs as family members and office mates seriously. The pay is great.

Robyn: The pay? Well… thanks, Bella, for chatting with us. And keep writing!

(c) 2011 Robyn M Fritz

What Do Animal Communicators Really Do?

There are so many people doing animal communication that they’ve begun to specialize. I don’t do animal communication exclusively. I communicate with all life, from animals to businesses, homes, and nature, including wild/domestic land and weather systems.

Essentially, animal communicators help us telepathically connect with animals, by hearing or seeing them, experiencing their feelings, or knowing intuitively through a felt, ‘gut’ sense.

I utilize whatever telepathic line works for a particular family or animal, including intuition.

Working with Families

I work with families to deepen their relationships with animals by creating multi-species families with them. And I work with wild animals as well, because two of the beings who work with me at Alchemy West are deceased wild animals. Family conversations cover the gamut, from fun and inspiring family harmony sessions to easing transitions.

Looking at Medical and Behavior Issues

I’ve certainly learned a lot about animal health and behavioral issues over the years. I can intuitively help people look at these issues and give them some ideas to take to your vet for further exploration. I also recommend reading a lot and working closely with a trusted vet and animal behaviorist. I listen closely to both animals and people. Because we don’t always hear our animals as clearly as we would like, I tend to address what the animal would like its family to know.

For example, if you think your cat is peeing in the house, clean it up and consider things like cleanliness and medical issues that require veterinary care. You might want me to ask the cat about why it’s peeing, but your cat may really want to discuss something else. I will focus on what the cat has to say. Why? Because I can hear it, and that’s really why you came to me in the first place. Or to anyone who works as an animal communicator.

Helping Lost Animals Find Home

I also help find lost animals, which does not always mean they come home like we would wish. Sometimes they move on to other families, by choice or by accident. Sometimes they die. Sometimes we never find out.

One time it took me six days to get a lost dog to decide whether she was going to submit to animal control and come home. She had bitten an animal control officer and had run off. It was the officer’s fault, not hers, and it took me a long time to get her to understand, and believe, that she was not in trouble. But we had another complication: she was lost in deep snow and her life was at stake.

She wouldn’t talk with me but I knew she could hear me. So I told her how to stay safe while she decided whether to come home. I could also see and describe the place she was hiding, so I also told her I was telling the searchers where to look, because she was loved, wanted, and literally too upset to think straight. I don’t generally interfere in an animal’s choice like that; in this case, I knew she was listening and wanted to come home but wasn’t sure if she could, or would. So I pushed the issue a bit. I told her what I was doing, and assured her that if she really did not want to go back to her home I would still help her, but unless she clearly objected, I was helping people narrow the search for her. What I always got back from her in those sessions was that she was listening—and waiting.

The searchers did find her hiding spot exactly as I saw it, but she ran when they saw her, even though she listened to me when I told her to show herself, and where.

By this time I had no doubts that we had a frightened dog who wanted to come home but was too afraid to go to the people who were trying to help her. What else could I do?

The weather made up my mind for me. Another snowstorm moved into the area, one I knew she had little chance of surviving. Even though it had been six days and she had not spoken to me, I told her it was “do or die,” she simply had to choose. Come home or die.

Her response? “I want chicken,” she declared. “Chicken McNuggets.”

When you hear something bizarre like that, you have to know you actually did hear it. What a unique idea for a McDonald’s’ ad!

“I don’t bargain,” I said, trying not to laugh. “But I will tell your people that you want Chicken McNuggets.”

Shortly after that she quietly surrendered to animal control. And, sure enough, there was a McDonald’s nearby. The lost dog was happily reunited with her family. And on the way home they loaded up on Chicken McNuggets.

The thing I take away from this is that we all need to be patient and persistent. And to listen to what our animals have to say. We compromise to be in families. That’s just how it is. In working with families and lost animals, the discussion of what is going on and why is often a part of it.

Whether you’re convinced that animal communication is real or not, what one question would you ask a favorite animal? And what do you think it would say?

We Mean Dog Business at The Cantankerous Dog Lover

I’ve fired a lot of vets in the 12-1/2 years since I welcomed animals back into my life. Sometimes I think there isn’t a vet left in Seattle that I’ll talk to, let alone pay to take care of my kids.

That makes me The Cantankerous Dog Lover, standing up for better, more common sense relationships between vets, professional animal services providers, our multi-species families, and our culture. What works, what doesn’t, and why? How can we come together and create a compassionate, interdisciplinary multi-species community in our fast-paced, complex world?

Okay, clarification for those who think I’m cantankerous just to be … cantankery. We have some great vets in Seattle, and I use them. But our favorite is in Port Hadlock (on a good day it’s a 5-1/2 hour round trip via ferry and car), with backup from an emergency clinic and an acupuncturist/herbalist each 30 minutes away.

But that’s beside the point. For now.

The point is that my vets are my partners, not my bosses.

This, surprisingly, rules out a lot of them, just like that. Past time for that to stop.

I think vets trying to be in charge is cultural, affected by the exclusivity of specialty training (like most professions) and larger societal preconceptions. I think veterinary medicine is donkey years behind human medicine in how it treats its clients (but human medicine is only an ooch better, a real concern for all of us). Like specialists, vets are locked into a patriarchal structure where ‘father knows best.’ Surprisingly, the vets I’ve seen who are the worst about this have been female. Shocking, isn’t it? Shouldn’t women who have risen to the think about their cultural preconceptions? Or do the barriers they face create more?

This is a topic that covers a huge territory, which we’ll be doing here.

But for now, this is what I know.

I’m a pharmacist’s daughter. I worked with my dad in his store from age 12 through college. We were in a small farming community, so the first thing my dad taught me was that the farmers wouldn’t come in from their fields to go to the doctor. They’d come to my dad at the end of the day for supplies, and my job was to calmly look at a gaping wound and efficiently gather the things they needed to clean, treat, and bandage themselves until they could get to the doctor.

I learned the common sense things we sometimes don’t get when we treat our animals, because emotions and money and balance and species and what’s just plain right get confused. I learned the simple first aid things we can also use on our dogs, and I have (from upset tummies to cuts).

My dad believed in drugs, in Western medicine. But he also believed in vitamins and healthy eating. Today he’d be a compounding pharmacist with an herbalist’s bent.

I believe in drugs, too, when necessary, and at our house we use a combination of prescription, over-the-counter, herbal, and homeopathic remedies. I’m also a professional intuitive, so I can (sometimes) look at things and see how they work. I will always be grateful that, on a Sunday afternoon when my eldest dog was suddenly contorted in pain, I spread everything I had out on the counter, closed my eyes, asked for the best help, and picked a bottle of leftover Rimadyl. And no, I don’t do this for other people.

We keep Traumeel at our house, and it works, too. And we do massage, and chiropractic, and PT, and energy work, and anything else that makes sense and that experimentation proves works.

I believe in what works, and I keep finding out what does. And doesn’t.

I believe in science. When I was 9 my 14-year-old brother, Randy, was dying of leukemia. There was no hope for him, and my parents, shocked and grieving, agreed to one thing that proved both how brave and humane they were. They allowed the use of an experimental drug, hoping that some day it would help other people.

We buried Randy a few weeks later.

Fifteen or more years later, a friend developed leukemia, and lived. Years later, my dad developed rheumatoid arthritis, and they had a drug that helped him. Today that drug is helping a close friend with rhuematoid.

The drug is methotrexate. It was the drug they experimented with on Randy.

There are consequences to our actions. Methotrexate is one of them. I am proud of my family’s contribution to that research, and grateful that it has helped people I care about. And thousands, perhaps millions, more I will never know.

I am also a DES baby. My mother took diethylstilbestrol when she was pregnant with me and my brother, to help with morning sickness. Years later they learned the horrible things that DES could do to babies, something my mother felt guilty about until she died. My brother is fine. I had rare congenital reproductive health issues traced directly to DES, and had multiple surgeries, not children. Those DES babies like me who are still alive have uncertain futures, which everyone has, but ours are complicated by a bad drug. Period.

And, finally, I’ve been physically handicapped for over 20 years, after failed foot surgery. What happened then, and next, changed my life.

So did a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel who came to live with me in 1998. Murphy had so many issues that people told me to ‘get rid of her and get a real dog.’ When she was 2. I didn’t. I researched, I gave her opportunities, I experimented, and together we both got well, in ways I never expected. Today, Murphy is healthy, happy, a bit arthritis, and heart clear at 12-1/2. And there’s another healthy, heart clear Cavalier, my tri boy, Alki, who’s 9. And Grace the Cat, healthy and goofy at 7-1/2.

My multi-species family is thriving because I took charge of their care, and because I listened to professionals who knew what they were talking (or writing) about, from vets to holistic care providers. And because I resisted recommendations that didn’t make sense to me. But the things I have to keep learning to save us are astounding. The average person can’t learn that much about caring for a dog, and shouldn’t have to. It seems that all our amazing technological achievements have simply made life more complex, more difficult to live. Why is that?

I hope we can change that by talking about what we want and what it looks like in community. With our vets and all the other providers who really do care and want to be part of a team. Our team as families.

So here’s a long way of explaining how I became The Cantankerous Dog Lover. Really, so you don’t have to. Here are some of the things we’ll explore through the best medium out there: storytelling.

  • What happens in our multi-species families, what do we do, what we think
  • Common sense in veterinary care
  • How high tech helps—and hinders
  • Alternative care: supplements, holistic care, energy work, animal communication
  • What makes sense when, and why
  • How we establish a great partnership with our vets
  • How we explore alternatives
  • How we establish boundaries
  • How culture affects care, and what we can do
  • How we live with uncertainty
  • How we help our dogs live graceful old ages

So, to start. Our vets matter. What is your single best experience with a vet? Keep it short. What happened, and what do you think now?

(c) 2011 Robyn M Fritz