Tucker vs. The Cactus

Tucker is a hunter. In fact, when Butterfinger and I were first considering what to name our little cow-dog it was a toss up between Tucker and Hunter. He loves to chase anything fitting three basic criteria – small, fast, and furry. This has lead to many unpleasant incidents in the past, including one escape attempt that landed the boys in “doggy prison” for a night, a number of unpleasant word exchanges at the dog park, one vicious rat attack (yes, they actually caught one), and laying my dad out flat on an ice patch in a futile attempt to murder a squirrel; just to name a few. Most of the time I like this quality about Tucker, I can feel safe at night knowing a massive bug is not going to find its way into my nasal passages, nor is a rat going to tickle my toes while I dream of bacon wrapped hot dogs.

Despite Tucky’s massive, mushy and goofy exterior, he is pretty agile, especially for a dog that had knee surgery a few short months ago. He can often be found in the new backyard perfecting his canine tightrope skills by walking across a thin stretch of cinder blocks with the greatest of ease. He even once managed to get himself up on a 5 inch wide fence at a friend’s house (undoubtedly trying to eat his cat) where he got stranded and proceeded to cry until Butterfinger came out to his aid. He is very acrobatic, but he is also very naughty, and slightly thick brained, as he never seems to learn lessons from the times he actually injures himself in hot pursuit of small prey.

Cacti are no exception to this, and last night Tucker proved that he either has no recollection of his past brushes with cacti, or that he simply places hunting above any sort of physical pain inflicted by attempting to catch his subject. After the famous fence escape and 2 mile run that Guapo and Tucker went on after our first few days in the house, I am a freak about being able to see the dogs in the backyard at all times. Well, last night, as is true to form, Tucker wandered into a part of the yard where I could not easily see him. So, what do you know, I go out back to find him trying to scale a 6 foot cinder wall in hot pursuit of his latest find.

Normally this would not be a big issue, I would just call him over or physically remove him from the wall, but this time he decided to try to scale a wall which had a large cactus at the base. Let me clarify what exactly I mean by large, get the idea of a drug store souvenir cactus out of your head, and instead imagine a plant that is so large and spiny that it looks like it could actually kill you – this is the kind of plant I am referring to. As soon as I went out to scream at him, it was as if he realized where he was, and he was very careful and scared as he was coming out from the cactus. I did a quick visual inspection of his misbehaving butt outside with no remarkable findings, so I sent him inside to lay down, and spend the rest of his evening staring into the corner.

As soon as we came in he was itching his eye and throwing his face all around like a banshee. Ok, I thought, he must have a spike somewhere on his face that I missed outside. I found a few tiny, needle-like pickers around his nose and flappy lips and removed them quickly, before he could further freak out and work them further into his face. Then I noticed the most disturbing of the pickers – there was a small needle sticking out of his eye, not poking right into his eye, but right along the bottom of his eyelid! I did not even have time to freak out before I just grabbed the barbed picker and yanked it out. I felt reassured that a major crisis had been averted, but he was still itching, we figured it was from the picker irritating his eye and decided to wait until morning to see how he was doing.

Fast forward to this morning, he was still fiddling with his eye and also was having trouble opening it all the way. The tissue around the eyeball was inflamed and upon even closer inspection, Butterfinger and I noticed he had a few more, tiny, microscopic cactus spines along his eyelid. I can only imagine that these must have somehow broken off from the larger spear I removed the evening before, so we proceeded to hold our canine patient down and remove the foreign bodies with some tweezers. With the precision of a brain surgeon, Butterfinger was able to successfully spot and remove each of the remaining eye irritants, and we followed the successful surgery with a healthy dose of saline irrigation for good measure.

For right now we are still keeping an eye on his recovery, but he has already started to open his eye and the redness is significantly better, even from a few hours ago. I am confident that he will make a full recovery, and who knows, maybe his traumatic experience of being held down with tweezers in his face will deter him from future matches with desert plants. Here is the current scoreboard – Tucker 0 : Cactus 4