Animal Update at the Yuen Homestead

We had a warm spring this year and the trees started blooming all of a sudden.

The rabbits love to nibble on apple leaves.  When Elvin prunes his trees, he drops the branches in their pen so that they can dine on them.

They both eat the leaves first, and then the bark off of the branches.

Here they are snuggling together.  Starlight is the one facing the camera and Churro is facing away.  Even though sometimes they fight, most of the time they seek each other out and hang out together.

For the past couple of years, we have gotten mason bees from a friend at church.  They are different from honeybees in that they are solitary, live in tubes, and don't produce honey.  They emerge while it's much cooler in the spring and so are able to pollinate flowers while the honeybees are still dormant.  Also, they are very docile and almost never ever sting!

The chickens are doing well...Maggie, Chippy, and Lilly.  They favorite activity is scratching the ground and taking dust baths.

Elvin built a run for them so that they would stay contained and away from the dog.  Lucky has a fascination with the chickens and either wants to play with them or wring their necks.  Since we're not sure which, we keep them apart.

But Lucky still tries to get at them...

Recently, Maggie has become broody.  For whatever reason, she has decided that she needs to sit on the eggs to incubate them, although the eggs are obviously not fertilized since there is no rooster around.  She will sit there most of the day which is why we kick her out every once in a while so that she gets food and water.

Our coop has only one laying area, and since Maggie won't usually leave, when the other wants to lay an eggs, they have to squish together in the same spot.

We still get a fair amount of eggs, although less now that our broody hen is laying less often.

Our Lucky is still the center of attention in our house.  He is close to a year now and probably fully grown.  He is only about 21 pounds so just a little guy.

And he still likes to do naughty things, such as climb on places where he knows he's not allowed.

He likes to sniff around the counters and is just tall enough to lick stuff if it's close to the edge of the counter.  We have caught him licking the butter dish which is very gross.

He also thinks he's a person and likes to lounge on the kids' size reclining chair we have in the living room.  He's claimed it as his own and will go on there when we kick him off of the sofa.  This is the only chair we let him stay on.

The sofa, on the other hand, is very much off limits.  But....sometimes in the mornings we will come downstairs to find this situation happening.  He is like a cat in that he likes to climb and be in the highest place in the room.  He will perch on the back of the sofa and sleep there.

A couple months back, he also got surgery to get "fixed".  He was VERY unhappy about the cone, about the incision and about life in general.  He would cry and cry and cry and also be frantic about licking his incision.  He also learned to use the edge of the cone to rub on the incision, which of course was not ideal.  So we had to stay within arm's reach at all times to stop him.  And then he stopped eating very much, and stopped crying, and just sat there and every once in a while would go into a frantic phase.   That didn't seem right so we took him back in to the vet and they said his incision got infected.  He had to take antibiotics and also meds to calm him down.

It took a while but he finally got better and we were able to take his cone off after 14 days.  Phew!

When not inside, he plays outside.  It turns out that he likes to dig and makes holes in random places around the yard.  Because of this, Elvin has fenced off the raised beds with the vegetables to protect them from his furry paws.

And when the water is on, he wanders over to take a drink because water straight from the hose always tastes better apparently.

There is an area of the yard that is all bushes and ferns.  Lucky likes to go in there and disappear for a while.  All you can see is the tips of the leaves rustling back and forth as he walks around.  And eventually he emerges.

And like Gabe, Lucky also periodically needs a hair cut.  So Elvin bought a pair of dog fur clippers, watched a couple of videos online and...

It turns out that Lucky did not like the activity, which is not a surprise.  At least one of the girls needs to be there to help out by feeding him treats and holding him to make sure he doesn't slink away.

It's actually not a walk in the park for the humans involved in this activity either.  Because we are all in there for more than an hour, and because Lucky's fur is so fine, a lot of it starts floating around the air and then somehow starts getting into your nose.  It feels like someone is tickling your nose with a feather the whole time and eventually becomes very maddening!  Here is a picture showing Karina in mid-sneeze.

We cut his fur in preparation for warmer weather and lots of it came off!  We are glad we only have to do this about every 6 weeks.

Because we got Lucky during COVID, and because we almost never all leave the house, Lucky has almost never been left at home by himself.  He does not like it, is not used to it, and definitely gets anxious when we do it.  

And the last time we did this, we came back home to find that he tore a big hole in the baby gate.  This is the gate that separates our living room area with the front door and the stairs going upstairs.  Maybe he thought we were upstairs hiding and was frantic enough to break through and go look.

We were not upstairs and we came home to find him waiting for us by the front door.  Poor guy!  Our baby gate is now covered with cardboard and packing tape.  It's extremely attractive.

Lucky has also decided to go on a hunger strike against the dog kibble that we were feeding him.  He would go for over a day without eating, which doesn't seem healthy.  Elvin's co-worker also has a doodle and says that her dog does the same until she switches food.

We never thought we'd do this, but we started cooking his food.  Here is ground turkey...

With some mixed vegetables thrown in.

We mix this with oatmeal and on good days he will eat this.  But sometimes even this doesn't seem that appealing to him.  He is a strange dog!

And even when he brings himself to eat food, he will pick around the stuff he doesn't like.  Just like a picky two year old, he will often leave behind the veggies.  And in this case, also the oatmeal.

On Sundays we go to another family's house for church in their backyard.  They happen to have a miniature pug.  After the two got aquainted with each other, they became good friends and run around together, wrestle each other, and chase each other around.  This is his only dog friend so far.

And after Sunday mornings, because he has spent the morning getting more physical exercise than all week put together, he is usually pooped and sleeps the rest of the day.  In sometimes strange positions...

So that's our Lucky!