The saga drags on

He followed us upstairs when we went to bed on Wednesday night and did not move significantly all day. Neither would he accept food or water. We have been squirting his meds dissolved in water to the back of his throat to ensure he swallows them in the hope that this fractionally improves the quality of his death, but it hasn't hastened anything and we have now reached that point. We go upstairs to check on him and he is lying on his side, as thin as a rake, the ribs barely rising and falling, but he senses our presence and manages to raise his head and get clearly focused eye-contact. Nothing more, nothing less, bright as a button but helpless.

The locum vet agrees that if nature doesn't take him tonight we shall take him to her surgery on Friday morning and she will end it kindly and swiftly for him.

But then, just after typing that, Homer came downstairs, took himself outside for a mooch, came back in and demolished several small bowls of cat food (bunny flavour) mixed with raw egg and then lay down on the sitting room floor as though nothing were out of the ordinary apart from his boniness! The only notable difference in procedure was that we gave him only the painkiller, not the antibiotic - we figured there was no point in the antibiotic if he was going to be put to sleep in the morning anyway. Can the antibiotic be the problem I wonder? Another call to the vet in the morning I think. This is playing merry hell with my emotions, that much I can promise.

Homer's Oddyssey
Homer never had an obedient bone in his body. You'd see him making his escape and you'd call and you'd whistle and he'd turn back to look at you with an expression that seemed to say “Look, I'm really sorry, but I have to do this OK!” before running off. He wouldn't “fetch” anything, so the only game you could ever play with him was called “Look! I've got two toys!” and then he would run up to you and jump after one or other of the toys (or sticks even, he loved sticks!) and you'd hide one behind your back and hurl the other as far as you could. He would run after it and race around for a bit until he spotted you waving the other one at him. And then he would run up to you and jump for what was in your hand and drop the one that had been in his mouth. So then you would hurl the toy in your hand as far as you could and while he was haring off after it you would stoop to pick up the one he had just dropped. It was a brilliant way to exhaust him whilst remaining on the spot. And remaining on the spot was an important part of this because he was impossible to take for a walk. Off the lead and he was over the hills and far away before you could say “jack-rabbit” and on the lead he would pull and tug until your shoulder was practically dislocated. So the first thing we had to do having adopted him was to fence off a compound for him to run around safely in without any of the local sheep-owners becoming upset about a dog loose in the countryside. There was no way we could afford to fence our entire perimeter so we let him have a section that was quite straightforward to fence and enclosed about a quarter of an acre. But while we were in the process of putting that up we gave him a running line so that he could wear himself out running up and down without dragging a heavy chain or getting himself tangled round trees.

The lads from the local gun club were really interested that we had a setter and wanted to know if Spousie would like to go hunting with them. When it was explained that Homer would be hopeless as a gun dog, the lads were able to explain what probably led to him being found at the lighthouse; If you have a gun dog which is no good at its job then you respect the breed enough not to kill the dog, but you don't want to keep it either. If you live on the mainland you can drive it somewhere and dump it and hope that it finds a new life in a new place, but if you live on a small island it will probably find its way home, so in that situation you put it into your boat and drop it off at another island. Homer was absolutely terrified of water and we suspect that he may well have been tipped out of a boat and made to swim for his life. That would explain why he was so weak and in such a remote location. He also had a perforated eardrum which we suspect was caused either by being hit very hard on the side of the head or having a gun fired very close to his ear.

So he was a disobedient but very loving boy who had a chronic ear infection. He was as good as gold with the kittens and the chickens too. He whimpered with love when we had brand new chicks and he wasn't able to get as close as he would have liked, and remarkably, was gently inquisitive around the sheep to the point that we have been able to raise our latest two to be mostly unafraid of him. He was a dogtor; if you had a cut or a scratch, anything that stung or itched, he would find it and lick it better. He even tried licking a tiny chick back to health, it didn't work but he tried ever so hard. He would have hated to live with someone who shot things dead. No, he never had an obedient bone in his body, but he never had a bad bone either.