All About Didi

I got the impression from the three chows that they wanted people to know more about them. I will start with Didi as she is the oldest.

Didi, whose registered name is Mi-Pao's Black Deidra, was born at the Mi-Pao Kennel (www.mipao.com) in Ontario in 1995. Shortly after that Didi was flown to Alberta to live with a very nice lady named Audrey. Audrey ran a very nice kennel and Didi had a good life. After Didi came to Alberta she was very frightened and Audrey had to take apart here dog crate to coax her out. Didi tells me this is just because she was shy and the whole flying from Ontario thing was too much for her. In about 1999 there was an accident on Audrey's farm and Didi was no longer happy there. She need to go to another house where she could have some peace and quiet. That's when Didi came to live with us.

Didi was a fraidy-dog (she hates the term fraidy-cat) when she first came to live with us. She still is. The accident mentioned earlier created a lot of noise and Didi is still afraid of loud noises. She was shy and it took her some time to get accustomed to life at her new home. At the time we had two other chows Dudley and Cheeks. After they warmed up to Didi things were okay.

As time went on we lost first Cheeks then Dudley, and eventually Didi was alone in the yard. She can't say that she disliked being alone. There was no one bugging her and we paid a lot of attention to her. For a while life was bliss for our lone chow. Then we brought Honey home. (Honey’s story will be posted tomorrow). From Didi’s perspective this was not necessarily a good thing. This new dog jumped all over her, and bit her. Like I said yesterday Didi is the grande dam of the yard which in dog terms means she is the alpha bitch. Honey quickly learned her place and things went along very well. Then we brought Doc home. To this day he still bugs Didi, but as the alpha male she tolerates it but barely.

Recently Didi wasn’t feeling well. Actually she fainted after eating. We rushed her to the vet and left her there as a day patient. Let me tell you Didi was not happy with us for leaving her at the clinic. She doesn’t like to be away from home, she doesn’t particularly like strangers and doesn’t like to have people lay her down. She had x-rays (where they had to lay her down), gave blood samples and generally had a bad day. When all that was done it was discovered that Didi had an enlarged heart. She has breathing problems and they have helped cause this problem. After all of this the advice we were given, much to Didi’s delight was she was to sleep in the house (they are outside dogs), no longer go for walks (we can’t over-exert her heart), and her food was to be softened and put on a stool for her to eat (she fainted because she couldn’t breath well while eating). Yup Didi lives the life of a chow, lazy and gets special attention all day.

So that’s the story of Didi. She is the nicest dog, she’s quite docile, loves to get petted and loves cookies (of the dog variety). I will post a picture of her as soon as I remember, she is quite affronted that I didn’t have a picture to post today, but I told her I would look through my picture CDs to find the best one of her I can.

I will continue tomorrow with Honey’s story.