Small But Mighty

Rhennie

(P's Raising Cain - AY's Dana)

July 9, 1997 - November 12, 2008

About ten and a half years ago, a local racing Greyhound breeder called me about a puppy who needed a home. The puppy had been less than half normal size at birth, and the breeders had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep her alive even though they knew she could never race. Now, at ten months of age, it was obvious the little dog was going to stay too small and fragile to stay on the Greyhound farm. I agreed to take her.

About the size of a tall Whippet and weighing less than twenty-five pounds when her littermates grew to weigh in the eighties, she was a very large dog in a tiny package. So the name that suited her the best, of Celtic origin, was "Rhennie" meaning "Small but mighty."

Dwarfism is essentially undocumented in the racing Greyhound since most breeders cull them at birth. She had structural abnormalities but never let them slow her down. We had doubts about how long she might survive, but she had her own ideas.

Life with Rhennie was never boring. When she was younger, she loved to chase feet, trying to grab your ankles with her front paws. Her bone structure was abnormal, and she once snapped a front leg like a carrot just stepping out of the back seat of the car. She was too fragile for a conventional cast so external fixation was recommended. Nothing a board-certified orthopedic surgeon and about $1,600 couldn't fix.

She ran around the house for four months with a tinkertoy on her leg, healed flawlessly, and I never let her go up or down anything remotely resembling a step under her own power ever again.

Rhennie remained oblivious to her congenital defects, helping herself to anything I was foolish enough to try to eat while sitting on the couch, and sleeping on my feet every night. She would only play with raw food, but loved Merrick's many flavors of gourmet canned dog diets. She ate from two to four cans a day without ever gaining an ounce. We joked at the vet's office that if they could bottle her metabolism and sell it, they'd be millionaires.

Her spinal structure was never normal, and over the last few months she developed a severely calcified disc in her lower back. Medication kept her hindquarters more or less working, but last weekend she got much worse. The verdict at the vet on Monday was a probable stroke.

I took her home and we spent Tuesday on the couch together, wrapped up in a comforter, watching DVD's: Rhennie's very favorite activity. She had all her favorite foods, roast chicken, poached salmon, boiled shrimp. When she needed her litter box, I carried her over and held her until she was done. It was increasingly difficult to move her at all without pain.

Then Wednesday morning, I wrapped her in Godiva's blanket from Circle Of Grey and took her in to the vet so she could be free of the body that had become a prison.

Goddess-speed, Rhennie, until we meet again.