My first Brittany and longest tenured hunting buddy died in 2013, the fall after we bought the house the wife and I are still in. He hunted with me for ten short years, but he was a machine. Birdiest damned dog I've ever seen and the best protector or my wife and kids I could ever ask for.
When he died, the wife didn’t want to cremate him and we have a large piece of property, so we buried him behind the garden. Didn’t get him home from the vet until about midnight and I had to be back on a project two hours away by 7 the next morning. I lit a Coleman lantern, cracked a beer and started digging. I finished the whole 12 pack and for years tried to convince myself the alcohol is what made me emotional. I cried when he died, cried for the three hours it took to bury him, cried the next Christmas when my dad died and a couple of years later when my mother passed away.
I’ll choke up when I walk past his grave still to this day. I get misty eyed when I walk a field hunting pheasants, though I can no longer work over a dog.
The Brittany we bought about a year after he died isn’t going to be with us a whole lot longer. He’ll turn 12 in February. He instantly become my wife’s buddy and I never hunted a field together, so we don’t have that connection, but he might as well be one of my kids and I’m sure it’ll hit me hard. It will be harder on the wife. He’s been her constant companion while I’m always somewhere else.
They are something else.
Anytime I hear someone say they don’t like dogs, I’m instantly convinced they’re either a fucking idiot or just a horrible human being.
Definitely one of my regrets was not making my lab a hunting dog. It wasn't a big thing for me at the time, as I was dead set on making it into atleast semi-pro baseball or better, so that's where a lot of my time was spent if not at home. I got him at 19, and he was just with me through every stage of growing up in life through young adulthood into a family man. He traveled with my dad quite a few times on baseball road trips, me moving back home once the baseball dream ended, getting engaged, getting marred, my daughter being born. He was just there ready to hang out at any point during the day that it was. So many walks. He used to drive me insane whenever he got loose without a leash because he was just impossible to catch when he was young, so I would just walk and yell and hoped he got tired sooner than later lol I'm sure people around me hated it but I never cared. He loved everyone. As he got older and slowed down some, I stopped chasing him and just stood outside and waited for him to come back. He always came back exhausted. I live in a neighborhood. I'm sure the neighbors didn't love it exactly, but I honestly didn't care. I loved him more than I cared what they thought. He is cremated in an urn above my side of the bed. The vet made a pawprint in some clay. They sent me a nice official note. I had a giant fleece blanket made off a website for a couple hundred bucks with a nice phrase and his picture.
I would say at this point in time, what probably hurts me the most, a year and some change later, is when I look at pictures of him with my daughter, I don't say it out loud, but my wife was right for the last few months, he just looked old and tired and beat down from father time. He ate just fine but looked skinny, just like an old man that was God was ready to call home. I did my best to stall to just not lose him, but his body was ready. Mind was sharp as could be for 12, but his body was ready. I had a hard time accepting that, because I knew what he once was.
What was really strange was how my other dog reacted going into the groomer. She started shaking and I had to drag her in. It was the first time since her brother died. The groomer got down on the floor and played with her and she was fine.
Funny, not funny, my wife's dog, Doodle, actually is horrified of going to the groomer in general. She is absolutely horrific to take and drop off there, and will essentially run and jump at us when it's time to leave lol nothing they do, she just actually is horrified of the blow dryer, and knows what's happening when it's time to go there.
Same dog, when my big dog passed, she was really really really sad for a while, it was completely evident, absolute wreck. My wife got her in Kansas when she was a very young puppy, and so my dog was all she'd really ever known. She was a wreck. I put on a brave face when my wife was talking about possibly rescuing another dog, wouldn't say I was ready but I knew it had to happen, and she found a small doodle that needed rescued from a puppy mill that was a only 2, and pulled the trigger for a few hundred bucks, and it was like waking my wife's dog back up from depression, within probably 15 minutes of them going outside and playing she was lively again. It was cool to see, but it was also tough to see, because it wasn't my dog that she was having fun with, but it needed to happen for her sake.
