Those of you who have been with PvP from the beginning remember stories of my basset hound Kirby. Kirby was born in the year that PvP started and he’s been a part of the strip and its culture until he died in 2009. He was a special dog, unique for a basset.
Kirby was a problem child. He had a tendency to try to eat things too big for his digestive tract. Once, he swallowed a tube sock whole and it got lodged in his intestines. He was young, it was my sock, and I felt responsible. So we ponied up the money of course to have the obstruction surgically removed and we never made the mistake of leaving things Kirby could swallow out again.
It was difficult losing Kirby, as it is with all great pets, but we moved on and adopted a new set of basset hounds. Angela wanted to get a pair and I have to admit that her logic was sound. Adopting a brother and sister from the same litter has produced more well rounded dogs with less attachment issues. We couldn’t be happier with Bella and Butler.
But it turns out our new bassets are just as unique as our old one. It seems that they were born with a very odd genetic abnormality that is unseen externally. My dogs have sticky-guts.
Normally, a dogs intestines are free floating. Meaning a vet could open one up and pull all the intestines out if he or she needed to. My dogs have a strange adhesion all throughout their intestines. It was described to me as a ball of yarn that has had glue poured all over and through it. So their intestines can not stretch and move and adjust. And it makes passing foreign bodies much more difficult if they get too big for the intestines.
We discovered this abnormality in our boy, Butler, because last week he ate something that his sticky guts could not handle. Any normal dog would have passed the object, but not Butler. And so as I am flying from Seattle to Dallas for a stop over prior to my weekend at the New York Comicon, I discover my boy is in surgery.
He’s going to be fine. And he will have a wonderful scar that matches the one his older deceased brother, Kirby once had. Maybe it’s some horrible (expensive) right of passage for basset hounds. Maybe I’m just cursed to always own unique dogs. Maybe pets are a huge pain in the ass, who’s to say?
Regardless, Butler’s prognosis is good, we’ve had quite an adventure and everyone has learned something about genetics.
I like to think that this is some harbinger of good things. A sacrifice made on behalf of an animal spirit. Kirby’s sock incident was a galvanizing event in the early days of PvP. Maybe Butler is just setting us up proper for another decade of success.
Yes. Let’s look at it that way, shall we?
