Canter Bridge

The Rhodesian Ridgeback, an African canine breed that was once used to hunt lions, is normally not associated with the phrase ‘like a little deer’. But Rosie, our five-year-old Ridgeback looks just like that as she sleeps, curled up on the rug she’s wrestled into just the right mound of folds and wrinkles that make it her bona fide napping place, looks just like that. (more…)

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The latest entry on my technological almost-too-good-to-be-true list is a service that links would be pet-adopters with dogs and cats desperately in need of a home like theirs. Check out www.1-800-save-a-pet.com.

You sign up to receive information about a specific kind of adoptable pet, say a Labrador Retriever. You also input your zip code on the assumption that you’d rather travel 7 miles to pick up little Fido than, say seventy-seven. After that, it’s simple. You receive emails with the name and description of adorable little guys and gals that very much need your love and stability. (more…)

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The English have a fine expression for dogs like Tucker and the people who resemble them. ‘He’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer’ is never spoken at the top of one’s voice. Rather, it is muttered quietly to another who has had the opportunity to observe the subject, and therefore to agree.

Tucker, it is true, was never endowed with spectacular intellect. Still, he is not entirely useless with a trick. My wife has trained him to exercise excruciating humility as he lies his little mixed-Labby frame down before his food dish, awaiting with impenetrable zeal the word ‘OK’, whereupon he leaps to his feet and dives in as though he never imagined anyone had invented anything quite as luscious as this dog food that’s been served to him this morning, perhaps oblivious to the rudimentary fact that he’s been eating the same dry stuff all his life. (more…)

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I love animals.

Proof of this comes in the two- and four-legged denizens of our home and the birds that have flocked to my backyard feeders on three continents.

Tucker is my dear, muttish Labrador Retriever. Like all Labbies, his intellect is overpowered by his instinct for giving and receiving affection. Tucker was the product of an unplanned mating on a Costa Rican farm four years ago.

During a four-year sojourn in a tiny, drafty apartment in Cambridge, England (1994-1998), we had promised our sons Christopher and Johnny that when we returned to Costa Rica-our adoptive country-we would have at least one dog and one cat.

When our friends on the farm informed us that a litter was unexpectedly on the way on their farm, we signed up. (more…)

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I love animals.

Proof of this comes in the two- and four-legged denizens of our home and the birds that have flocked to my backyard feeders on three continents.

Tucker is my dear, muttish Labrador Retriever. Like all Labbies, his intellect is overpowered by his instinct for giving and receiving affection. Tucker was the product of an unplanned mating on a Costa Rican farm four years ago.

During a four-year sojourn in a tiny, drafty apartment in Cambridge, England (1994-1998), we had promised our sons Christopher and Johnny that when we returned to Costa Rica—our adoptive country —we would have at least one dog and one cat.

(more…)

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