(Wtf) Pre-Halloween picspam: Masks and Pitbulls

[black_sluggard]

We're very much a dog household. In recent years, after rescuing an abused dog next door, we've become a very pit bull household. We've had a few extra around, and since I've been toying around with my new phone, I've taken a couple of pictures.

This is "Boy", "Boy-Dog" or "Papas". I don't know which of those is really his name, or if his proper name is something else entirely. He belongs to a friend of ours, who was between homes for a while, and needed a place for his baby to stay. Papas wound up staying in our front yard during the day, and sleeping with my sister and night (I hear he's all kind of snuggly, because pit bulls are basically like lightly furred hot water bottles). This picture was captured as I was coming home one day, and found Papas being treated to...a bath, or a drink. I'm not sure which, but he and his daddy were certainly having a lot of fun doing it. He was gloshing around like a happy little hippo until he slipped on the flagstones at one point and did a perfect somersault. He was okay, but that was about when his tiredness caught up with him.

This is a dog we're currently fostering until another friend can take her in. She's currently known as "Praline" or "Little Girl", depending on who is talking about her. She's a lovely baby, but she makes me very sad. She's still a puppy now, just a big one that's all legs. Back when she was tiny, she belonged to some people down the street, and I used to see her when I came home in the afternoons. They'd let her run around on their lawn, and I think sometimes she got out on her own. One afternoon, a few months ago, she was out there without her people, and I said hi to her, and she tried to follow me home. The neighbor of her former owners was out watering, and he told her to go back to her yard, and I was glad, because I really didn't need the trouble.

A few weeks ago, we found her running around on the street near our house. God she was skinny. We took her in, because pit bulls get the worst in shelters, and unless we could hand her off to a rescue or a foster, she probably would have been killed. She's crashing in our garage at the moment, sometimes the front lawn, now that Papas and his dad have a place to stay. Soon, she'll be moving in with another friend, and her two little kids.

This tragic little girl is Gaia. She's ours (well, my housemate, Adrienne's). She belonged to a group of people who used to live next door to us. They were involved in dog fighting. They had a "champion" dog whom they were proud of, and likely intended our girl to be bred by him, or she may have wound up as bait. They "moved out", however, though they left their two dogs behind when they did (which shows how much their "champion" really meant to them). Adrienne broke out a board in our fence to go through and get her. She was kept tied up on a three-foot long length of logging chain. Each link is about two inches long and an inch wide of steel or iron. Imagine this little girl (tinier then) having to drag that around over the small distance it allowed her to move. It breaks my heart. The other dog was eventually taken, by animal control I think. Given the temperament nursed by fighting, it was likely killed.

Don't let the sob story fool you, though, because she's a pretty happy girl now. The pathos on display here is pure drama. Gaia's so attached to her people, Adrienne and another friend who lives with us, Leeanne. Whenever they leave the house, she mopes so hopelessly that you'd think she was about to expire from sorrow. These were taken a few days ago, when she got all excited when she thought they were home. It turned out to be a cruel false alarm. She was so pathetic afterwards that I had to go out and give her hugs, and that was when I shot these.

Poor baby.

This is the mask I got at the Goodwill, now repainted a solid white. Unintentionally, this picture also captured the warning label on the composition book in which I write my fic notes:

"Warning, may contain: Zombies, Nazis, xenophilia, angst, horror, bad writing or gay sex."

I'll probably take a picture of myself when I get dressed up, but the camera on my phone sucks (obviously), so I can't guarantee it'll be great.