Welcome to BensMutts.com

This is a place where I can share photos and such of my two precious mutts, Priscilla and Copper, with all of my family and friends who might not otherwise get to see their goofy shenanigans.

If you don't know much about my mutts yet, I recommend you start by reading the Synopsis.  This is where I begin the tale.  News will be posted below as it develops and images to the right.

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News - Friday, 2/3/2006:

Here's the first mutts story for the new year... actually an update first:  Copper was terribly sick during the first week of January.  I was starting to come down with some sort of cold or flu or something after the holidays, and one day I got home from work when Copper started vomiting all over the place.  Like seriously every half-hour he was gagging or yakking up goo.  I kept trying to get him to drink some water, but he'd puke it all up.  So he spent a lot of time outside that evening.  Unfortunately, he was up all night continuing to vomit, resulting in me being up constantly to rush him outside and clean up what he couldn't keep down before he got out there.  Once it almost turned out really bad because I had the mutts up on the bed and Copper had not thrown up in a few hours, so I thought he was getting better.  But then he started walking around on the bed, pacing, so I grabbed him and started petting him to make him feel better.  Well, while he was sitting, facing me, he started breathing heavily and had a very odd look on his face.  I realized he was probably about to hurl again, so I tried to tell him to get down off the bed, and he wouldn't move.  So I pushed him away and he moved to the edge of the bed when suddenly a projectile stream of snotty looking liquid shot from his mouth.  I basically kicked him the rest of the way off the bed (not hard! just to shove him off) so the puke only got on the bed a little and mostly on the floor.

So I was up most of the night dealing with that and by the morning I was wasted with flu-like symptoms.  I ended up staying home the next 3 days, which turned out to be a good thing because I was able to stay close to Copper and make sure he didn't get worse.  Which he didn't.  He still threw up some that next day, but not as bad.  On the third day, he started to eat a little bit and kept it down, so he started to recover.  Poor little Copper-head... he was so miserable, shaking and scared and throwing up all the time.

But now he's fine and did something that I thought was quite amusing yesterday.  Both Copper and Priscilla didn't eat their food on Wednesday, and on Thursday morning Priscilla ate hers but Copper still would not.  So, not wanting him to continue to starve himself for whatever reason, I put his dish in his cage with him when I left for work.  I figured he would give in at some point and eat (which has worked in the past).  Well, Copper has a "bed" that consists of an old beach town that I put in his cage for him so he wouldn't have to lay on the hard plastic, but it didn't take very long for this towel to be completely shredded to a pile of cotton ribbon-strips.  That's fine, I gave him the towel to make him comfortable and if he wanted it in little pieces, then he can do that... just as long as that's ALL he shreds.

Ok, back to the food... I get home from work and discover a very neat pile of towel-strips piled in one corner of Copper's cage.  The same corner where I put the food dish.  I let him out and pull the towel-strips away to discover an uneaten bowl of food.  The little stinker didn't want it so badly that he decided to "bury" it!  And it was so neatly covered... completely, even the sides that were against the cage.  He very literally buried this bowl of food that he didn't want.

He finally ate it later in the evening though, so I guess he finally got hungry enough.  I guess it's time to switch dog food brands again...

 

News - Wednesday, 12/28/2005:

Well, the site isn't defunct... I've just not spent any time keeping up with it.  So what's to tell about the mutts?  We had an interesting time during Hurricane Rita back in September.  I rode in the truck with them for 8 hours, they were miserable and freaked out, and I'm sure my frustration with the traffic and idiots on the road wasn't making them feel any better.  Copper had an accident in the car that made most of the ride very smelly, and one of them knocked over a Coke can that turned the cup holder into a puddle.  Then they had to deal with the rain and wind that sounded like it was going to destroy our refuge.  At least we made it back home to an intact house.  The fence was blown over and I've been very lax about repairing it (it's almost done, I swear!) so I need to be careful about leaving the mutts outside since they occasionally wander off into the field beyond the fence.  But I'm going to try to finish it up today while I'm on "vacation."

One other interesting tidbit:  not long ago, they were outside barking at some squirrels that live up in the trees.  Well, the squirrels race back and forth along part of the fence (not the part that was blown over) to get from tree to tree, and the mutts go crazy since they can't reach that high.  But this one time, I happened to catch the mutts jumping up against the fence, trying very hard to get up high enough to reach the squirrels.  What I saw made me grab my video camera and film this acrobatic display... Priscilla was jumping up high enough to get a foot on the middle support beam of the fence and lunge herself almost up to the top, and then on her decent, would do what I call a "wall ride," taking a step along the fence and pushing off of it back to the ground.  Poor little Copper, he's not much of a jumper so he couldn't do what she was doing, and at times looked like he was trying to intercept her takeoff, possibly because he was jealous?  Take a look at the video clip on the right... sorry it's so big (13MB).

 

News - Saturday, 05/14/2005:

So I've had another long lull in the Mutts news updates, and I was thinking the other day about a story I told a friend which would be perfect to put up here...

The mutts stay in the bedroom at night with me so as to not allow them any capability to roam through the house, and thus get into trouble.. which they are good at (another story for another late night to write).  So, what with their idiosyncratic behavior, this nighttime arrangement has had to develop, or evolve, over the course of the last half-a-year or so that they've been nocturnally quarantined.  One of the best examples of this is the nighttime potty break.  Sometimes when the mutts are restless at night, they'll pace around the bedroom while I'm trying to fall asleep, which is irritating on it's own.  But then there is the occasion where someone will have to, and I mean have to, go outside to pee in the middle of the night, which requires waking me up so I can let them out... because they still haven't figured out how to open the door!!

Now the first few times these potty emergencies came about, getting me up was not happening because I, in my groggy state, assumed that the pacing dog was a restless dog who had just dreamed about chasing a rabbit or squirrel around the back yard and felt it was absolutely mandatory to go out right now to investigate any potential rodential intrusion.  So leaving them to pace about and returning to sleep, I would wake up the next morning to either see a heap of dog business or step in a cold wet spot on the carpet... and I always stepped on the cold wet spot, there's just no avoiding it.

After these few incidents, I decided it was better to get up in the middle of the night when they woke me rather than take my chances in the morning.  And the mutts have developed ways of waking me up now depending on how deep of a sleep I am in.  The first is the pacing:  feet padding around the carpet, dog tags jingling lightly.  This sometimes wakes me up, but for the deeper sleep, Priscilla has developed the shake:  she knows that by doing the violent dog head shake, the flapping of her ears against her head is loud enough to usually wake me up... and it does, usually.  But there was one instance where I must have really been out, because I remember coming out of a dream from low barking sounds, "woo woo woo... woo woo woo..." and realizing when I was fully awake that she was doing it:  a very low, quiet barking, almost like someone softly speaking one's name to gently wake them up, "Ben... Ben... wake up, please, I really have to pee..."

Then I've also had to start to remember to close the closet door every night before bed too... and also during the rest of the day just to be safe.  There was one morning I woke up to get ready for work, and in the midst of getting some shoes out of the closet, I noticed the lingering smell of dog urine.  So in looking around to fine the source, I notice that the light from overhead was reflecting from the bottom of the inside of one of my sneakers, in a rather yellowish tint.  Well, apparently little Copper, and I say Copper because only he is mischievous enough to aim directly into my shoe, decided in the middle of the night that instead of waking me up, would rather go find a discrete place to hide his water so I wouldn't have to step on a wet spot on the carpet and get angry with them.  Hey you gotta give him credit.

... although it's possible he was just really "pissed" at me and thought he would give me what for.

So that's my Mutts story.  Nothing important to report on the little guys, they're still very well.  I'll be back to give you more Mutts stories another day.

 

News - Monday, 03/14/2005:

In case you didn't notice, I've just updated the site with a little cleaner look and without so many frames.  I'm home from work sick today and of course the mutts are keeping me company... that is when they're not begging to be outside because it's beautiful out there.  So other than sleeping and getting up frequently to let them in or out, I thought I would spend a little time here.

I added a little (2 second, 0.2 meg) video clip to the Images column over to the right.  This was during Xmas vacation, I was putting the dogs up on the playset and trying to get them to slide down.  Copper and Skunker were going down without much coercing and seemed to actually start to like it, but Pris wanted nothing to do with it.  She would just jump off the side of the playset.  Oh well, I have this video of Copper... it was cute.

 

News - Tuesday, 03/01/2005:

So... I've been out of the updating for a while.  But then, there's not been a whole lot to report.  The mutts are doing really well.  Copper just disemboweled his Christmas Santa squeaky chew-toy.  He brought me some of the stuffing as I was sitting in front of the computer... probably hoping to get me to toss the Santa down the hall again.  My reaction was of course "uh oh, what did you tear up?"  He got scared that I was going to be mad at him for tearing up something, so he went and hid under my bed.  So I went to see what had been destroyed this time, and in the other room I found a gruesome sight:  Santa with his belly torn open and fluffy white stuffing in piles on the living room rug.  Oh well, it was his toy to destroy as he saw fit, so I just chunked Santa and his guts into the trash and told Copper I wasn't mad and gave his belly a good scratching.

I stopped by my local Petsmart last week and spoke with some of the HPPL volunteers.  They told me Skunker was adopted again... I said "what??"  Then one of the ladies said "oh, you didn't know, did you?"  She then explained to me that the family that adopted him started having problems between him and their other dog.  So they started bringing him in for adoption, and within two weeks, he was taken by another family and reportedly doing well.  That's good to know.  He was such a happy little dog and he deserves to be in a good place. 

Nothing else is new... no new pics.  Well, there may be some on my camera, but I haven't looked through them in a while, so there might be something to put up here later.

News - Sunday, 01/09/2005:

Skunker got adopted!!

Yesterday was the 3rd time I had taken Skunker to the Homeless Pet Placement League at my local Petsmart.  Prior to that, I took him there the first 2 Saturdays in December, and even though lots of people fawned over him, nobody wanted to adopt him then.  Which is probably better anyway because everyone was acting all crazy with the holiday shopping and the wrong person may have ended up taking him home.

Each of those first 2 times I spent a couple of hours at the Petsmart with Skunker to make sure he didn't have any problems while "on display" in his cage (freaking out or biting off people's fingers).  Although that may have made it more stressful for him because if I was standing there in his view, he would whimper a little and stare at me... he had definitely started to get attached to me.  But otherwise, he was always the most adoptable dog there because he never barked while in his cage and was always friendly to anyone who came over to see him.  Even the adoption volunteers were all saying he was going to get adopted quickly.

So yesterday I took him back in (after being stuck with him at home for 3 weeks!) and from the moment I got there, people were falling in love with him.  I was only there for about 30 minutes before having to leave, but while I was, there was a young girl who was practically eating him up and begging her mom to take him home, and the mom liked him too.  So I have a feeling it was they who adopted him... But it could have been anyone because he's just so lovable and cute.

I got a call a couple of hours later and it was one of the volunteers wanting to tell me that Skunker had been adopted.  I asked if the people were still there or if they had left with him already (because it was about 5 minutes away from my house, and I thought I would run over to say goodbye and meet the adopter), but she said that they had already gone.

Well I actually felt a little sad because I was probably never going to get to see him again.  I guess I had gotten a little attached to him as well.

Skunker, wherever you are, I hope you are with a great person or family who is going to take care of you and give you all the love you want... and I hope they change your name to something less embarrassing than "Skunker."  I thought you would be a good "Chester" or "Weasel Face," you little weasel face.

News - Sunday, 12/26/2004:

Well here I am again after another 2-month hiatus.  I've been telling so many people about Ben's Mutts during the holidays that I decided to do another update.  I guess the biggest thing to happen in this time is I have taken in another dog, just to foster, mind you.  I have no intention on adding a third mutt to the roster.  I have enough trouble with just my two, as you have read below...

So this new mutt is a stray my ex-wife found.  She asked me to take him in until she (or really, I) could get him adopted, and me being the old softy for stupid helpless mutts agreed to take him in.  He was filthy and smelled of skunk spray, but was just so damn eager to get some attention, it was actually quite pathetic.  My ex gave him the nickname of "Skunker" for obvious reasons, but I've been calling him everything from Skunker to Shorty, Stumpy, Stinky, Stinker, Copper (by accident of course), and Weasel Face (because he has a weasel face).  I really hope a good person or family adopts him because he's so affectionate and just dying for love.  He's been having fun playing with Copper and Pris, but sometimes gets a little carried away.  He's smaller in height than they are, but he's got the weight advantage so he can throw down pretty hard.  He'll even get a little too possessive of a treat or bone and bite the other dogs if they attempt to take it from him.  They just want to play keep-away, but if Skunker just wants to spend some quality chew-time with that fresh rawhide or marinated beef-bone, he'll lose his playful mood pretty quickly.

TONS of new pics over there on the right from the last couple of months, so check them out!

New News!! - Sunday, 10/10/2004:

I know it's been a LONG time since I've updated the site (yeah, almost 2 months!), but I've been very busy with other stuff going on... but here we are again!

One of the first things to mention is that shortly after my last post, I started having more trouble with Copper not only escaping from his kennel, but hurting himself in the process.  Check out the new photos to the right:  if you look at the before and after photos of the destruction that little mutt did to his kennel, you can see how he could hurt himself (see the photo of the big cut on his nose).  But you also have to realize that I didn't just put him in a cage, I locked him in a heavily weighed down cage!  You can see from one of the photos that I strung two 20-lb weights over the cage to keep him from tipping it over and escaping through the larger holes in the bottom.  He still managed to move the cage a good ways away from where it is supposed to be and get out!  Also check out the close-up of the cage where the metal "bars" are deformed from him tearing at them.

Now keep in mind that this is a scrappy little 20-lb puppy.  He put so much effort into escaping that he moved a 10-lb cage and 40-lbs worth of anchors across the carpet, forcing the plastic tray out from under it, and tipping the cage up to wriggle out through the bottom... now that's a dog that don't wanna be penned up!

Thankfully, when I started putting him in Priscilla's cage, which is heavier and stronger, he wasn't able to get out and quickly stopped trying so hard.  His nose is even healed up all the way now and the scar is covered up once again by fuzzy little puppy fur.

But other than that... I took the mutts to another dog party and they mostly had fun.  There's one picture of Priscilla with my friends' puppy, Star.  Star is quite a bit bigger than my mutts, but they loved playing with him.  There were some other dogs there who weren't very friendly and were actually being mean to Pris and Copper, who were just trying to be sociable and play with everyone, but it was a fun time otherwise.

Lots of other little things have been going on, but I think this is enough for now.  And I'll try not to take as long to have some more pics and stories to put up here next time!

News - Monday, 08/16/2004:

Had my first dog party with both mutts this weekend!  I had a few friends from work bring their dogs over (and kids, in Shayne’s case), and we let them all play together in my back yard.  It was a lot of fun and the mutts had a pretty good time... I say "pretty good" because Pris was a bit scared sometimes when all of the dogs would get riled up and start running around.  She tried to participate some in the play, but the boy dogs would chase after her and she would get overwhelmed.  It’s ok though because the next time we all get together, she’ll be that much more used to the other dogs and will do better.  Considering how much she has improved since I got Copper, I would be surprised if she wasn’t more comfortable next time.

Copper had a great time.  He is the most outgoing dog I’ve ever seen.  He got along well with every dog and played with each, from the biggest to the smallest… well, he was the smallest, so that would be the biggest to the smallest after him.

Other notables would be: 

Check out the pics to the right.  See ya!

News - Monday, 08/09/2004:

I got my camera today!!  After spending about 2 hours reading through the manual and pushing all of the buttons and switches and gizmos, I took a few pics of the mutts and posted them in the Images column to your right.  Since it was a very tiresome day, I left it at the few I got and I'll get more in the next few days when I have more daylight to burn.

One bit of interest though to make this entry worth while:  I discovered this weekend that, even though I haven't seen it, Copper is more mischievous than I thought... One day when Priscilla had not finished her morning meal, I put her bowl up on the kitchen table to keep Copper from eating it while I was out.  Well, when I got back later, I caught a glimpse of the bowl but didn't really notice the food was gone.  Later, when I was walking through the kitchen, I actually looked at the bowl this time and realized the food was gone.... wait a minute, wasn't there--... but he can't--...how in the?!  The table was covered with papers and mail and other fodder that has accumulated since I last cleaned, yet none of them was disturbed in any way that I could tell.  And the only chair that was not pulled all the way up to the table, and the part of the table that it was facing, both had items situated thereon which could have easily been knocked off by the slightest errant dog leg kicking as it propelled it's owner up from the chair onto the table.  I know it wasn't Priscilla, for she is too scared to jump up on any chair that does not look big and cushy.

Now, I ask you:  is this stocky little 7 month old pup who can barely jump up onto my bed that agile as to be able to perform this type of stealthy acrobatic feat?  I reiterate, "how in the?!"

I may have to set up a home surveillance system to get more dynamic mutts action and catch them in the act.

Keep checking back for more of my mutts!

News - Friday, 08/06/2004:

I started this page this evening.  Whadda ya think?  I have a digital camcorder/camera in the mail right now.  It is going to be the primary tool for most of what will be on this page.  I'm expecting it to arrive next Tuesday or Wednesday.  Once I get that in, I'll start shooting pics of the dogs.  I'll be able to post pics right away, but movies will take some time because I have to get some more computer hardware that will allow me to transfer video to my PC and do editing.  And being that I'm broke right now after dropping a wad on Copper's adoption fee, more pet supplies, a vet visit, and the aforementioned camcorder, it may be a while before I can get some mutts videos to you.

Other than that, not much "news" to report.  It'll trickle in from time to time, and I'll be working on improving this site in between all the other stuff I have to work on.

Cheers!