Tara the protector

[SnrRog]

Back in 1980, I was adopted by a 7 week old Heinz 57 puppy, while working at a customers house. She was a ball of energy. We named her 'Tara-dactyl', as she pretty much was always jumping, and could jump really high. 
   Anyway, about 2 years later, we moved to a new house, from the apartment. I never thought of it until springtime hit that I needed a lawnmower. My father, who was a tinkerer, had just been given an electric lawn mower and asked if he could fix it. I called him to borrow it, so I picked it up, brought it home with a couple nice long extension cords, and set out to cut the grass, which was starting to look like a jungle, grass was half way to my up my shin.
   So, I'm out working on the yard, and Tara runs out about 40 feet directly in front of me and lays down, facing away from me, but nervously glancing back to me every couple of seconds. As I got closer, I could see she was shaking, but would not budge. When I got to about 6 feet from her, I shut the mower off and went up to her to get her out of the way, but here, with her body sort of wrapped around a small hole, was a bunch of baby bunnies! Once I saw those, she then got up and licked me. Of course I gave the bunnies a wide berth until the day they finally all left.
   I sometimes still think about what the mower would have done had she not been there to block me!
   She went on to live for 18 years, the best dog I've ever had, and I still have 2 dogs laying by my side as I type this.
  I would love to put a picture or two up, unfortunately most of my pictures were ruined in a basement flood years ago.

   SnrRog

Ohhh how sweet!

On another note,  I had to put down one of my dogs this morning, a lab/shepherd mix. He was a tad over 14, and went out this morning, and had some type of seizure, fell till the ground and lost the ability to breathe. Got him to the vet, and prognosis bad, so I said do it.
  This is the 4th time I've done this, and it  never gets easier.

  Goodbye, Maxie!