Welcome to Auntie Awesome’s blog about all things cats and dogs. What makes this different from the other pet blogs out there?
Well Auntie Awesome has a whole lifetime of personal experience with the things she’s talking about. In this blog, she shares that experience and the substantial knowledge she’s gained, with wit and humour, sarcasm and occasional disrespect for conventional wisdom.
The fact is, Auntie knows such a large percentage of just about everything there is to know about dog and cats, Auntie could have called herself Professor Know-It-All. But Auntie Awesome sounds so much more, well, awesome.
Auntie knows that being a pet owner can sometimes be hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking. Sometimes our pets are a great comfort to us and sometimes they are just an enormous pain in the ass. Occasionally owning a dog or cat means dealing with seemingly intractable problems.
Need advice? Auntie has it. Need understanding when it seems like you’re failing? Auntie knows how it feels. Love heartwarming stories about dogs and cats, or funny ones, or sad ones? You’ll find them on this blog.
Auntie grew up in the country, where she lived with cats and kittens, dogs and ponies, pigs, chickens, and ducks. Auntie has been a telemarketer, a summa cum laude university graduate, a civil servant in charge of equal opportunities of women and a trial lawyer in a big international law firm. The one constant for her through it all has been animals.
In 1998, Auntie and her long suffering husband The General left their lucrative and prestigious law partnerships and started an upscale boarding resort for dogs and cats.
In the course of over 16 years of hand-on operations, they managed over 5,000 dogs and 1,000 cats on visits lasting from a night to a year and a half. They encountered just about every size, shape, breed and age of dog or cat that you could imagine. They dealt with the shy ones, the aggressive ones; the happy-go-lucky ones, the sad ones; the energetic ones and the couch potatoes; the smart ones and the ones who were as dumb as a bag of hammers. They knew hundreds of dogs and cats from the time they were puppies or kittens, to when they became senior citizens. They dealt with sicknesses from allergies to diabetes, epilepsy to bloat, arthritis to Cushing’s disease.
They even solved the problem of the dog whose penis wouldn’t retract.
They dealt with three legged dogs and cats, blind cats and eyeless dogs. They administered pills, gave injections and put puffers on the faces of asthmatic dogs. They romped with puppies and carried dogs outside to pee who were too old and wobbly to stand on their own. They know the grief of a dog or cat dying or having to be put down, or just wandering away, never to be seen again.
They saw every kind of collar, harness, anti-bark mechanism, training technique and food fad, and how those all worked out. They saw breeds rise and fall in popularity.
Auntie Awesome took her own dog through purebred conformation dog shows to gain his Championship title.
She did obedience trials and herding instinct tests with her dogs. She helped deliver kittens and fed others by hand before they could eat on their own. She walks her cat to this day.
She’s been on the Board of Directors of the Humane Society of a major city, and a section of the Belgian Sheepdog Club of Canada. She and The General have dealt with feral and abandoned cats showing up on their door, finding homes for over 30 of them. They kept dozens of dogs and cats for women in battered women’s shelters.
Auntie housesat dogs and cats in eight countries all over the world from England to Australia to Ecuador. She’s faced behaviour problems in dogs from housebreaking failures to aggression.
If it has to do with a dog or cat, Auntie’s probably been there and done that and written a funny story about it too. And – lucky you – she’s sharing all that on this blog.