WHAT DOG PEOPLE DO BEST C all the Cavalry! Dog people are there to help! I was struggling to come up with an idea for this month’s column. I read what very happy with the quality and con- dition of the eight puppies. I kept four and sent the other four back homewith Joe and Gert. Special Thanks and a huge hug to the following for showing up on short notice. The Cavalry: Gert Peneboom, Karen Ritter, Sue Green and son, Michael Finnegan, Jen Amundsen & Lis De Sousa by Jacquelyn Fogel
Joe also has a history of health issues and he tries to take good care of him- self. He’s diabetic and has some he- reditary issues that he does not dwell upon. He sees doctors when he needs to and had just had cataract surgery so he could begin to drive at night again. He was sure he was not hav- ing heart problems because none of the doctors he’d seen in the previous two weeks had said anything about his heart, it had always been strong. So he did what a lot of people do, he guessed that the symptoms he was feeling—the tiredness, the inability to focus, indigestion were all symptoms of other minor ailments or side effects of the cataract surgery. They weren’t. They were symptoms of a major heart attack, and it hit him hard on the Tuesday morning after we evaluated our litter. For the second time in two months relatively young Bedlington friends of mine were having heart attacks. We had just lost Nancy Kosteleba to a sudden heart attack during a barn hunt last month, now Joe was in the cardiac care unit of the UW hospital battling for his life. His family con- verged around him, but there was only Gert to look after the dogs. Fortunately Gert was there when Joe’s family realized what was hap- pening to him. I was her first call. She was clear and calm, but obvi- ously starting to panic as she realized she was going to be responsible for Joe’s 11 dogs, and that was part of the friendship she had not signed up for. At that point we did not know Joe’s prognosis, so I suggested we get the
other people were writing, and I sur- veyed what I was doing with my dogs this month. Nothing was entering my consciousness as worthy of writing about. I started to write about the art of selling puppies, since I have been doing a lot of that lately. I was not feeling inspired. Part way through the column I got a really disturbing phone call. My Bedlington co-breed- er in Madison had just been admit- ted to the UW hospital with a major heart attack, and the call was fromhis neighbor, Gert, who didn’t know what to do with his dogs. Gert is an amazing woman. She’s 76 years old, sharp as a tack, funny, re- sourceful and always willing to help a person or animal in need. She’d been helping Joe with our nine week old Bedlington litter because Joe had just had cataract surgery, and he hadn’t felt well for a couple of weeks. In hindsight, I am guessing he had more than cata- racts going wrong, but he was not iden- tifying the symptoms of heart failure. Thankfully, Gert was there to help. She came to his house at least twice every day to feed and clean-up the puppies and let the older dogs out for potty breaks. Joe had three adult Old English Sheepdogs, two adult Welsh Terriers, two adult Bedlingtons and eight puppies when she began assist- ing. He’s also a landscape contractor, so having puppies in Spring made life very busy for him. We had just split up the litter three days earlier, and I was
Joe is 46 and lives alone with his dogs. He’s a hard-working small busi- ness operator who just loves to breed dogs. He’s good at it—has one or two litters every year, carefully checks out the stud dogs he uses, does all the health testing breeders recommend and takes advice and correction well. He will drive halfway across the coun- try to breed to the right dog, and come back to a full work schedule. He does not show the OES or Welsh Terriers, though they are all purebred, but I have always shown the Bedlingtons for him, so his Bedlington foundation stock is all titled. I love to work with Joe because he is straight-forward, honest as the day is long, reliable and has no patience for small talk. His motto has always been, “Say what you mean, and mean what you say.” Prom- ises mean something to him—he keeps them, and he honors them. He some- times complains that he can’t find good reliable landscape workers or that he doesn’t havemuchof a social life, but he never complains about the dogs. I have, on occasion, suggested to him that he spend a little more time in social are- nas where he can make some human friends, but he usually says he has no time for that frivolity. And he really en- joys the company of his dogs. I think he just doesn’t have patience for the small talk and flirtyness required to start friendships. He’s too no-nonsense in a social world that likes fluffy, light talk and selfies.
24 • T op N otch T oys , J uly 2019
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