Raggedcoyote - DOG DAYS

‘Free Luigi’ billboard has gone up in lower Manhattan the evening before his next court appearance.

They got her back in the middle of the turn up

Carl Rungius (1869 – 1959). For down in the hollows… Gouache on paper.

Coeur d’Alene Art Auction

I don’t think I’ve talked much about having a service dog on here, but maybe I should

Boom used to be my service dog, I got him the summer before my last year of high school bcuz I needed a nurse 24/7 to ensure I could eat/sleep/stay alive due to a recent very traumatizing event in my life and my mom came up with the service dog idea.

Getting him was hard. And expensive. No trainers were up to my standards. I, who could barely take care of myself, had to train my own dog. The problem is no matter how hard I worked, my own family or other trainers would ruin it all by messing up my commands, by letting my dog do things I had trained him not to do. It wasn’t training anymore, I ended up simply having breakdowns because everyone kept ruining my dog. People close to me thought they could be an exception to the rules I had taught my MEDICAL AID because surely my DOG would learn the difference between them and strangers.

Eventually I brought him to school. Printed papers explaining what a service dog was and how to behave around him and I plastered them all over the place.

People barked at him, petted him, tried to grab his attention.

His harness was hot pink, patches and signs on it that very clearly said “DO NOT TOUCH” and shit like that.

Someone defaced one of the papers.

Going to school was already hard, I could barely leave the house, my mom had to accompany me to the school doors every morning and then a social worker at school would greet me there and take care of me throughout the day.

I had my own locker at a floor mostly unoccupied so I wouldn’t see other people much and my dog wouldn’t be too distracted.

But it was still to much and I ended up dropping out four months before graduation.

I couldn’t leave the house. I had Boom but he wasn’t perfect yet. People kept ruining him.

But eventually I managed to leave the house. Go to a shopping mall from time to time with him to just walk and have fun.

Too many times people came up to me to tell me the gear I used was hurting my dog. Too many times people came up to me to tell me that their own dog died. Too many people came up to him and pet him without even acknowledging my presence. Too many people telling me they wished they could bring their pets anywhere. Too many people disrespecting me and my service dog.

I stopped going out. I stopped being with my dog.

All this stress and trauma drove a wedge between my dog and I. I consider him my mother’s dog now.

I had to learn to handle myself alone when I went out. It took me years to learn to go out by myself. Only last year I started doing that.

My dog doesn’t live in my room with me anymore.

Having a service dog did still save my life. But those around me ruined that. They made it about themselves. They prioritized my dog over me. My dog that LOVES working. If you tell him “do you want to go to work” chances are he’ll get so excited he will attempt to do a backflip.

We used to have a deep bond. That bond is now broken. People took that from us.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is:

Let people and their service dogs alone.

You are not an exception.

You are not special.

You are disrupting the dog’s training and distracting it.

You are endangering a human life because you can’t resist petting the cute dog.

This isn’t about you. This is about a disabled person trying to simply live their lives.

You don’t know what you’re talking about, your advice is unsolicited and lacks understanding of what the life of a working dog is.

Just leave us alone.

My Service Dog is suspected to be in early Heart Failure (AID REQUEST)

please reblog!

At a routine vet visit to check the progress of a course of antibiotics she was taking for a cold that's been taking all our city dogs by storm, my vet recognized that my 2 year old Labrador service dog, McCoy, had a jugular vein distention. Because this is not supposed to happen in healthy dogs, let alone in young healthy dogs, we chose to run a ProBNP blood test on her, which is used to measure heart health and check for potential damage or heart disease. The "normal" range is <900pmol/L, "suspected" damage is 900-1800pmol/L, and "abnormal" is >1800pmol/L. My dog came back with a result of 1300pmol/L.

We are currently being referred to the CVCA in Louisville, Kentucky, to have an echo performed on her heart to hopefully get a definitive answer on what is going on. However, this is all getting incredibly expensive, and I am a physically disabled student who was not expecting or prepared to suddenly be potentially losing my best friend and partner in everything that I do. I'm asking for any help with funding so we can keep on top of not only these sudden vet expenses, but any of the following expenses that may come due to her results as well as continuing to manage her day-to-day. We were doing just fine before this all happened, but the echocardiogram alone is expected to be a minimum of $400. I'm terrified and I don't know what to do. She's my everything. Any help that can be given, even if its just sharing, is appreciated.

my cashtag is $ikeohh

my ko-fi is tuptastic

i don't know what to do.

Btw, this is how conservatives keep getting to claim that trans people are a new thing no one has ever heard, because our history and existences have continually been erased or obscured systematically through out history.

The most famous example was 92 years when the Nazis raided the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the medical practice where the term transsexual was first coined and the first gender affirming surgery was performed in in 1931.

What did the Nazis do after raiding the library on May 6th, 1933? You may be familiar with these images

It is happening again.