Must Love Dogs

So last night, E and I went to see Marly & Me. Cute movie. As we left the sparsly crowded theatre we saw a little boy, probably around 9, who was bawling his eyes out. Poor little guy. I will say, that movie gives you no recovery time!

A little background:

• My family loves dogs. When I say we love them, I mean love them. We spoil them rotten. Treat them like they're kings. It's actually pretty horrible how rotten our animals are. Sample one:
• 
• We're a bunch of crybabies. We take the loss of our animals hard. My little brother's beagle died this summer unexpectedly and it was horrible. See here for more about how pathetic I am.
• Our family German Shepard, Buck, is the best dog ever. We like to call him the million dollar dog. He has been through everything, and he's still the most loving, beautiful dog ever.
• What's he been through, you ask?
  

1. When he was a puppy we were playing baseball and he got hit in the eye (yes, they eyeball) with the baseball bat). Needless to say, he's never been able to see out of that eye since.
2. While recovering from the eye issue, he got Parvo at the vet.
3. A year or so later he got lime's disease.
4. Then I ran over him in the truck. I know, that sounds horrible! Here's the story though. We were hauling hay out to our new pond so we had a bunch of haybales stacked up in the back of the farm truck. Granddaddy and I were driving through the field very slowly because of said hay, and because the dogs were riding on top of the hay. Well, Buck decided to run off the haybales, onto the cab of the truck and then proceeded to keep going, running off the front of the truck...while I was driving! I felt horrible, but he ended up just limping a bit.

• I'm sure there's more, but you get the point. He's been through a lot.
• 
• Buck's getting old. Really old. His hips are failing him and he mainly just sits around these days in the garage. He's developed mange (or something, we're not sure what) because he sits so much. He's lost a lot of hair on his back end. The other day he tried getting up to come and get some lovin from me and it made me wanna cry.

So, basically my point here is...I'm a crybaby and I don't want Buck to get old. Which he has. I keep telling Mom they need to put him down. He's miserable. The problem is, we all love him so much. We've never had a dog long enough to put them to sleep. They've either been really healthy into their old age and just died peacefully one day, or they died tragically (see Sneaker story above). So I guess part of it is that we've never had to deal with it before. I must say though, I bawled in Marly & Me at the end. It's just so freakin sad! How do people do it?