[Dailydrool] Our Elsinore's Tenth

[Elizabeth Lindsey]

Well, here we are. A whole decade with our Elsinore Basset. It was ten years ago today that we met Meg Harris in a Cracker Barrel parking lot outside Huntsville, Alabama, and decided Alexis, as Elsinore was then being called, looked as if she’d be a worthy successor to our recently deceased Jane Basset (July 25, 2003). 

We were right. Elsinore has been an enthusiastic, energetic delight. She and I have become a good, solid team, and I don’t know what I’d do without her keeping an eye on me. Or alerting me to her various snack and meal times. Our Elsinore has a natural talent when it comes to being able to tell time.

At this her tenth anniversary with us, we’re guessing she’s now about twelve or thirteen, or perhaps a bit older. Her advancing age is showing more these days. She sleeps a lot, often so deeply that she doesn’t hear us coming in the door anymore. She also snores a lot and loudly. But when she’s awake, her zest for life is just as great as ever. I’ve been pleased that her hearing remains amazingly acute for a dog her age. Although her back legs are now prone to the slight tremors one often sees in older dogs, especially if she’s been going for awhile, she can still go on a fairly decent walk at a good clip. Until she comes across another interesting scent that needs to be examined, of course.

The cancerous tumor she had debulked last August hasn’t made a visible appearance yet. Last month when she was at the vet’s for a dental (she lost two small teeth to that), he felt the tumor site very thoroughly while she was still under and unable to put up a fight and said he felt nothing but perhaps a little scar tissue in that area. So we’re feeling as if our gamble has paid off, and we succeeded in buying her a good chunk of good time. 

And she really is enjoying this extra time. She loves the independence from me that her doggie door gives her, and each day she’s out in the backyard every couple of hours to check for the pieces of stale bread the squirrels sometimes drop on the ground. We don’t dance as much anymore, but that’s because I’ve been too busy, and I feel guilty about it. But I’m still playing the piano for her to sing to, and she and young Charlie do some lovely duets to “God Save the Queen” and a Beethoven sonatina that’s a particular favorite of hers.

We’ve been going to the dog park more lately because Elsinore and Charlie walk at such vastly different speeds now that it’s difficult to walk them together on leashes. They carefully check out the perimeter of the park, ignoring the other dogs, and then head to the center to schmooze with the humans. 

Elsinore continues to go to work as a pet therapist once a month at a nearby hospice. She loves her job so very much and has favorite staff members she likes to check in on in their offices. Every so often a grief group meets while we’re there, and she makes sure she reaches out to everyone in it. We do get some dancing done for the hospice residents who want to see but not pat a dog. She always wows her audience with her turns and weaves and paw lifts, her rolling over being the grand finale. She’s due for recertification testing before too much longer, and I don’t know how that’s going to work. She’s one of those who doesn’t test well at all but can do beautifully everything on the test when it’s not on the test. But we’ll give it a go because Elsinore’s showing no signs of wanting to retire, and I’d hate for her light to be hidden under a bushel.

Elsinore’s always been a rather intense personality, sometimes to the point where I’ve wondered if there isn’t a terrier trapped inside her. As people age, we tend to become more so of whatever it is we’ve been, and this is holding true for Elsinore. As she ages, she’s becoming more intense. This is manifesting as crate anxiety and bed licking, which fortunately hasn’t transferred to her feet or other body parts. As I write this, she’s snoring in her crate. But the door to it is wide open, and Ken and I are both home. Her objection is to being locked up inside it and left. She was getting herself so worked up over being left in her crate that we’d come home to spittle on the floor all around it and a dog who’d have to go outside immediately for five minutes of wandering loose poops in the yard. Then one day we came home and found she’d had stress-induced diarrhea in her crate.

So we’ve done some creative things with puppy gates that seem to be working. When we leave the house, we close off a small room with the gates, put her in her crate with a treat, and close the crate door without latching it. After we leave, she pushes the door open, walks three feet to her favorite bed (which is across the room from Charlie in his crate), and goes right to sleep. We’re guessing she feels as if she’s getting one over on us, escaping her crate like that, and she doesn’t feel being confined to a room is the same thing as being confined to a crate. Fortunately, Charlie doesn’t seem to mind being crated while Elsinore isn’t. We can trust Elsinore to go right to her bed and sleep the whole time we’re gone. Charlie, on the other hand, we can trust to gleefully dismantle the entire room in our absence. He’s a very young eight. 

Today Elsinore celebrated her special day with extra cuddles and some special treats that Charlie and I picked out for her (and him) at PetSmart yesterday. This weekend I’ll bake her anniversary cake for all of us to enjoy. And every night, as I’ve been doing since her cancer diagnosis, I tell her I love her very much and I hope I’ll see her in the morning. Thank you again, Basset Hound Rescue of Alabama, for entrusting her to us. Our Elsinore makes our lives very good indeed.

Elizabeth