Rashers . . . gone

As well as working harder at the new job than I have worked for the last 20 years, we've suffered another huge change.  Rachel aka Rashers the Dog arrived into our lives as a puppy ten years ago one dark wet November night.  We'd put it about that younger-daughter (then aged 7) wanted a dog.  Indeed she wanted a dog so badly that she spend lots of time as a dog - gruffling, fawning, crawling about on all fours and eating weetabix off the kitchen floor.  So when our farrrming neighbour appeared with a dirty, smelly, black and white scrap that he'd taken from the local (unlicenced, seepy/grim) pound, he said he'd take her back the next morning if it didn't suit.  I think she went to the top of our local mountain (5km horizontal; 600m vertical) for the first time the following Easter: boing-etti-boinging up through heather higher than her ears so she looked like a terrestrial dolphin.  She was biddable, smart and mostly well-behaved although it must be said she and the postman seemed to have taken ag'in each other early on.  Anyway, 2012 saw her getting less fit - perhaps because elder-daughter had left home, so there was one less body to go for walkies - and more fat - perhaps because the Bean an Tí was giving her 'treats'.  She made her last couple of trips up the mountain in the late summer 2012 and was plainly hurtin' at the effort - although still game.  And as winter came in we put her on a diet.  Things went downhill rapidly after Christmas - she seemed to stop eating entirely - and early this last week she was admitted to the Vet Hospital for tests.  The tests came back showing kidney failure and other problems and the Vet suspected poison because the kidney failure had been so abrupt.  So Rashers came home on Thusday at lunchtime and the Vet came out at 8pm to finished her off with intra-muscular ketamine/lidocaine (veins too depleted by dehydration) followed by intracardiac phenobarb.  Younger-daughter had dug the grave that afternoon - up the top of the garden under some honey-suckle near the gate to the lane - and we buried her there at about 10pm,10th Jan 2013.  Bereft.