Hullo all. My name is Elliot and I'm currently living in Central Kansas with my partner and our animals. One of them is a cat, named Smokey, but he's totally my partner's kid (even though I'm growing on him, finally, after more than a year of living here). My favorite little fuzzball is our three year old WestiePoodle, Rufus Valentine. He came with the name Rufus when we picked him up from a small apartment and paid his previous owners $100 for him, and since we got him two days before Valentine's Day 2008, we decided to give him the middle name Valentine (we're big believers in giving animals middle names, just as one would a human child, because our pets are our kids, too!)
Rufus is pretty much a miracle puppy, because, just a few short weeks after we adopted him, he nearly died following a botched neutering at a spay and neuter clinic for low-income animal lovers. Not only did he quickly develop a massive infection in his incision not even a full day after being home, but, when we picked him back up from our local humane society after they saved his life and gave him back to us when we otherwise wouldn't have been able to pay for his medical treatment (we paid a fee through the reclaim program offered through the Kansas Humane Society), we were informed that his severe symptoms were most likely caused by an allergic reaction he had to an ingredient in the anaesthesia that was used during his surgery. So, needless to say, we are lucky he is still with us. (As an aside, our tortoiseshell kitten Entropy, who at the time was 10 months old and went in to be spayed the same day as Rufus, did not have as positive an outcome following her surgery - a few days following the procedure, we came home to find her sitting in her cat bed, crying, underneath the bathroom sink, with her stomach and other internal organs hanging out of her. When they had sewn her back together at the clinic, they had only sewn the outside layer of her skin, and not the inside to hold everything in there. We had her euthanized less than an hour after finding her.)
But, today, Rufus is a very happy little dog (and, as I write this, sighing, in what appears to be a very peaceful sleep) who loves to meet other people and dogs. His major challenges are that he has separation anxiety, mainly manifesting in a mess of poop and pee on our bathroom floor when we get home if we are gone for any length of time (it's easier to wash the bathroom floor than cleaning a stinky dog and sanitizing a kennel each day), and some nervousness around small children that he exhibits by turning from them as they try to pet him and pulling away (if he is on a leash) or running behind furniture or into his kennel if he is off-leash at our home or someone else's. I would like some advice as to how to work on helping him get past these issues, please, by the way.
Anyway, to end this post, I read many introduction posts as I was waiting for my account to be verified, and I see that a main portion of the intro that everyone asks about are pictures of our lovely puppies. So, here is one of my little Ru (I would post more beneath it, but I can't figure out how to do so without the photos being right next to each other, and, thus, one of them being cut off in the middle):
