Brains was our foundation female.

Brains was our foundation Newfoundland.  We had a Newf x Lab female that we had adopted from the Guelph Humane Society in May of 1988.  Large, black, and beautiful, we called her Beauty (with more than a passing nod to the horse of the same name) and loved her dearly.  When the time and opportunity arrived to get Beauty a companion, we bought a Newfoundland female from a local breeder.  Since Jimmy Buffet argues that the ideal woman should have beauty and brains, we called Jane's second black dog Brains.

In the summer of 2005, her hip was dislocated in an accident.  We had it surgically re-located and tried our best to keep her off it while it healed.  She refused to stay put, even with the leg bound up.  We found her one day head first in a ground-hog hole.  She seemed to be looking for a place to die in peace.  We removed the binding on the affected leg, but she still found it painful to move.  Eventually she simply stopped trying and lay at the front door neither moving nor eating.  Seeing her in such pain, we decided that the time had come to salvage her remaining dignity.  With sorrow, but with no misgivings, we took her to our vet and held her as she was euthanized.  When we had her cremated, we received, along with her ashes, the following card from the Ontario Pet Cremation Services folk.

Her ashes are buried under the apple tree, near the back-yard play centre, where she loved to lie when the grandchildren were playing there in the summer.

This page was last update

Saturday May 05, 2007