KC Casey, et al?

No.  You see, it really doesn’t work as a title.  I’m afraid we’ll just have to stick with the cats.

But yes, there is now a puppy in the house, too!

I'm the baby. Gotta love me!

Both my husband and I always had dogs while we were growing up.  But we couldn’t keep them in our dorms in college, and after we got married we lived in apartments without enough space for anything but a toy dog.  And we’re big dog people — think, German Shephards, Labrador Retrievers, Collies — so instead we just enjoyed having the cats.

Then we moved to Nepal.  Where we are, to our extreme confusion, immensely rich.

Our house has three floors and a ridiculous number of rooms.  It’s surrounded by a decent-sized yard, and the yard is surrounded by an indecently-sized fence.

It took us about three days after arrival before we started murmuring at each other, “You know, we could get a dog.”

We hesitated for many moons.  We’re well aware that someday we’ll board another plane for an excruciating series of continent and flight changes in order to return to the United States.  It was plenty fun enough trying to transport two kitties with us through all of that — adding a dog into the mix seemed like an invitation for mind-altering trauma.  Leading to insanity.

But, with time, the scars from our travel here have begun to fade.  In their place, the ridiculous amount of personal room we enjoy has seemed to get bigger and bigger.  And, correspondingly, Kathmandu’s population of street dogs has seemed to grow.  Every time we see one eating from a garbage pile, we cringe.  And a couple of months ago we started pointing out to each other all the time, “Aw, look at that dog — it’s so pretty!” and “Oh, this dog following us is so sweet.  I bet it would go home with us…”

But that didn’t really seem like the best way to do things.  Far from pampered American pets they may be, but most adult Kathmandu street dogs seem quite comfortable with their lives.  In general, they’re healthy, and they trot down the sides of the streets with their tails wagging.  They curl up on doorsteps to sleep, and I’ve never seen anyone chase them away.  In fact, when the Kathmandu Animal Treatment Centre started rounding up dogs to vaccinate and neuter them, they encountered suspicion in many areas, from people who lived in the same neighborhood they took the dogs from.  No individual would lay claim to any street dog.  Nevertheless, the reaction of the community at large was along the lines of, “Hey, what are you doing with our dogs?”

The volunteers and veterinarians explained they were helping to prevent diseases and unwanted litters, and they continue to assure locals in each neighborhood that once the dogs they sweep up are altered, vaccinated, and disease-free, they’ll be returned back to the exact same street they came from.

So Sean and I realized that grabbing a dog off the street here might have been only slightly less insulting than stealing a dog out of someone’s front yard in the US.  Of course, since we knew about the KAT Centre itself, we finally decided just to go look.  We hardly needed to work all October, anyway.  Most of Kathmandu shut down to celebrate Dasaiin and Tihar.  We had nothing to celebrate but Halloween, so we had plenty of extra time.

And, coincidentally, a litter of 5 puppies had just been dropped off at the KAT Centre the day before we first went.  The staff estimated the puppies were only about 4 weeks old, far too young to leave their mother.  But their mother was MIA, and though they weren’t sure how healthy the puppies were, the KAT Centre staff took on the job of caring for them.  And made certain to mention to us that actually it wouldn’t be very healthy for such young puppies to stay at the Centre long-term, what with strange adult dogs coming in all the time; they’d really be better off in a home.

This is, of course, the opposite of the situation at most shelters in the US.  There, the puppies and kittens rapidly get adopted, while the dogs and cats sit in cages for long days, until their time is up, and most are euthanized.  Here, the adults are considered strong enough to return to the streets only a few days after coming in, whereas little puppies would be much better off in the home of someone who would care for them.

We decided to think about it, and came back the next week.  That morning, two of the five puppies had been adopted.  We studied the other three — and when the little white one poked her nose over her sister’s back and peered up at me with baby-ish black eyes, very young and happy and interested in everything, I already knew I wanted to take her home.

So she is here, and has been with us about a week and a half.  She’s very tiny!  When we adopted her, the staff at the Centre reminded us she was only about 5 weeks old.  She’s had stomach trouble off and on — when we took her to be looked at by a vet today, they told us nothing very serious was wrong (no temperature, no sign of infectious disease or worms), just that we’d started feeding her kibble too early.  At the Centre, she and her sisters and all the other dogs had eaten rice mixed with water and shredded chicken; at home, I’d fed her rice mixed with water and kibble for a few days, and when she started ignoring the rice and focusing on the kibble, I stopped offering the rice.  Now, we’re trying to return her to mostly rice, made interesting with bits of chicken, for another few weeks before she tries Purina puppy kibble “weaning to three months” again.  If she had her mother still, she wouldn’t be weaned yet.  She needs very mild food.

The big question:  What’s her name?  Mostly, so far, we just call her puppy.  The day we got her, Alaska suggested itself — because of certain figures in the news, perhaps? — and because she’s such a snowy white, with only a bit of tan on her ears.  Then again, most people who adopt dogs here give them Nepali words for names, so Himal has suggested itself, too, as the word that literally means “snow-covered mountain.”  Lately, because we are weird, we are leaning toward giving our abandoned Kathmandu street puppy the luxurious name of “Alaskan Himal.”

Still, mostly, we call her puppy.  And, after all, L’orange got her excessively French name precisely because for the first few weeks we had her, we just called her, in English, “the orange one.”  So we’ll see.

The other big question:  How well does she get along with the cats?  See for yourself:

Hmm, what is that the cat is leaving behind?

It's colorful! It jingles! It must be meant for puppies! (Um, why are the cats staring at me like that?)

Either this is proof that Regina is promiscuous, and will sleep with anyone... or else she sorta likes the puppy.

In short, the puppy was in the house less than a day, with much staring of cats at closed doors, before the cats managed to gang up on a door and force it to open enough to look nose-to-nose at the puppy.  When she tried to chew on ears and tails, Regina swatted her twice to teach her manners… and then let the puppy curl up with her for a nap.  For several days, L’Orange mostly spent time staring at this totally new creature apparently unlike any she’d ever seen, and she’s recently started trying to figure out if it’s appropriate to play with the strange creature as if she’s a kitten.  With two interested cat mommies, she may just end up growing into a respectable cat one of these days.