I was out walking Zoey one morning last week, when we found a critter wandering back and forth in the middle of the road. There were two cars backed up behind it — it’s really true, those who hold up traffic sure are turkeys, right? — and Zoey will chase pretty much any animal aside from a human. I of course didn’t let her go, but I did let her step out into the street a little closer to the beastie, and it decided that maybe it didn’t have to block traffic after all.
I spent last week dogsitting for Zoey, who I will post more pictures of shortly. But one of the nice things about taking Zoey for long walks twice a day for a week is that I get recharged on Caturday material, at least as long as I can keep Zoey from chasing said Caturday material. Which, surprisingly enough, she was a lot less insistent about this time around. Good girl, Zoey! And so here we have one of the kitties we ran across.
I’m not a huge fan of the militarization of the canine: training dogs to attack people isn’t something I’m happy with, and ‘drug sniffing dogs’ are often basically just used as an excuse to search people’s person, car, or home, after they have ‘alerted an officer’ by reacting not to a drug but to the officer wanting the dog to alert the officer.
I’ll make an exception for Elara, and those like her. She is trained to detect explosives, which I think we can all agree aren’t a great thing for folks to carry into concerts, conferences, airports, or my apartment building. This one was hanging around outside of a conference center in San Francisco, checking all the trucks dropping off stuff. She was also happy to greet all the truckers as long as they weren’t carrying hand grenades in their pants!
Blitz is a majestic pup, isn’t he? He’s only eight months old, and he’s still learning to trust people, but he’s getting there. And he is up for adoption at the Milo Foundation! Worth pondering indeed, although he looks like he’ll be eating you out of house and home: so skinny!
Join me in welcoming Pato (probably around 8) to the city! Pato’s mom was living in Colombia for a while, and adopted Pato while she was there, and just moved back to San Francisco about four weeks ago. Pato has settled in like he was born to be a San Franciscan.
I ran across Nola (a girl) just as her mom was getting into an uber, so I didn’t get a chance to ask many questions. Fortunately I got the important bit: she likes her bag, and she loves everybody.
I am totally down for this: keep the kids locked up and let the dogs run free!
I ran across Olive (6) when I was on my way home from Milwaukee, in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. But it turned out, when I chatted with her folks, that Olive was actually an official Dog of San Francisco: she’s lived here most of her life, and she was just on vacation, just like me!
By the way, I don’t mention this often enough, but if you’re visiting here looking for pictures of your pup, and I haven’t posted them yet, please feel free to leave a comment reminding me. I will treat your pup as a priority!
I have just discovered that not only did I take pictures of Jeviz, who is now 12 years old, almost exactly a year apart (August 30th, 2025, which were posted shortly thereafter, and August 25th, 2026, posted today), but I took pictures of him, and posted them, a little over eleven years before that, on July 30th of 2014, when he was five months old! He was dangerously cute as a puppy, and he grew up to be huuuuge (for a standard schnauzer) and dangerously handsome!
Violet’s (2 years old) folks said she was an ‘unknown mix’, but I am pretty sure there is some papillon in her ancestry. Look at those ears!
