So y’all keep blowing up my notes with the various Family Lore stories I’ve been telling, so I guess I should tell one on my parents now.
My Mother’s Father was part of the United Auto Worker’s Union, and during the 50′s and 60′s, was on strike a lot. My point is, grandpa got himself an entirely deserved reputation for being a sucker who loved animals, so people would dump thier pets on him. Hence, my mother grew up in a house with pets such as Picket the one-eyed tomcat, Tweety the Bald canary, Dummy the cat, Stupid Son of Dummy, Spooky Garbage Dog and Chiquita the Tarantula. Eventually Grandma put her foot down when Grandpa brought home Gerta the Saint Bernard.
I say all this because it provides some context for how the following occured.
Mom and Dad had just moved in together (my parents dated for six years and were engaged for 13 days, driving everyone on both sides insane), and unfortunately, My mother’s German Shepherd, Cops, has just passed away due to bone cancer. After mourning for a bit, Mom and Dad decided to get a dog together, as a couple.
For context, my father had never owned a dog in his life. His mother had ‘Pretty Bird” the budgie as a child but parrots are alien life forms, not pets.
So they go to the Palo Alto Animal shelter to adopt. The year was 1987, and at the time, Palo Alto was… not a great place. Lots of drugs, gangs and poor civic managment. Mom told me that she learned to identify different types of gunfire while living there. They get there, and mom explains that she’s always had a preference for Big Dogs, and the guy’s face lights up. Oh Yes, he says, We have a Big Dog. For expirienced owners, yep, adoptable today, here we’ll give you a discount even-
Somehow my parents were not suspicious about this.
They were shown to the Animal in question, a Gorgeous blue-sable beastie with pretty golden eyes who immediately pressed herself against the fence and gave them the best PUH-LEEEEEEASE TAKE ME HOME puppy eyes 100lbs of canine can do. Mom and Dad fall in love instantly. They sign all the paperwork and take her home for $10, and name her “Mazel” as in “Mazel Tov.”
Within the hour, it becomes clear that something is amiss.
Cops had lived with his kibble stored in a plastic garbage can in the garage for six years without incident. Mazel figured out how to open doors and got the locking lid off the can in six minutes, horking down about four pounds of the stuff before my mother notices that it’s been weirdly quiet. Most dogs bark at or chase squirrels. Mazel stalked and caught one the second day, presenting it to my mother like an offering. Mazel knew all her commands but would clearly stop to consider before obeying, and trained my dad to give her good treats within a week. The locks on the side-yard gate were undone, and she took a stroll around the neighborhood, but always retuned home for dinner.
After a week of gradually realizing that Mazel was smarter than most of the professors my mom worked with, they took her to the Vet for a routine checkup.
Dr. Hamada walked into the exam room, dropped the clip-board and said “Where the HELL did you get a Wolf?”
After a bit of prodding and a very-angry-dr.hamada-calling-the-pound, they determined Mazel was a high-content hybrid, probably with a husky, but was going to be a lil shit her entire life. OK, said Hamada, I don’t like destroying animals and you’ve got a lot of expirience with dogs, so I’m okay with letting you keep her, but you should keep her away from small children because her Prey Drive could kick in.
Two years later, mom got pregnant with me.
Mazel noticed instantly, and reacted by digging a large hole in the yard and catching even more squirrels for mom, because she needed the protein or something. That what you do when the Alpha Bitch is preggers, right? Dig a den and ply her with food? On the advice of my grandmother, my mom stayed overnight at the hospital once I was delivered, and dad went home with a shirt that had moms and my scent on it. Mazel spent the whole night puzzling over it.
The next morning, when mom came home with me, there was the sudden and instantaneous recognition of PUPPY!!!!!! :D:D:D!!!!! PUUUUUUUPPY!!!!!! and Mazel turned into the most aggressively maternal being I’ve ever met. Playing with me on the blanket, sitting under my chair at meals (I was a messy eater), sleeping under my crib, teaching me to walk by letting me hang onto her fur and shuffle around.
Dr. Hamada thought mom was a madwoman, until he saw me holding Mazel’s mouth open and sticking my face in so i could look at her teeth. He gave up when my mom announced she was pregnant with my sister.
I’m making living with a Wolfdog sound awesome, but it did come with some drawbacks:
- Mazel did have to be muzzled at the vets, because she had Opinions about having things stuck up her butt.
- HAIR. One of my chores growing up was to brush her out every week and I’d frequently end up with more hair than animal.
- the only way we could reliably get her to stay in the yard was with an overhead tether with a STEEL cable, which she chewed through anyway.
- Do you like waking up by being hit in the face with half a dead animal? No? Wolfdogs may not be for you.
- More than capable of opening the fridge and eating everything if you’re not watching
- Will get into everything if not otherwise occupied. Including eating your tax forms.
- Howls along with sirens at 4 AM.
PROS of growing up with a wolfdog, as a small child in the 90′s
- I was afforded a degree of freedom normally associated with a pokemon trianer. It was no big deal for me and my sister to walk three miles through my not-really-good neighborhood to the Froyo if I took Mazel with us. People tended to leave us alone when we had 100lbs of overprotective Apex Predator following us around.
- WINNING at Pet Day at school. There wasn’t actually a compettion but Billy’s hamster sucks in comparison to an animal that is perfectly willing to demonstrate how she can snap an oak branch in half on command.
- PTA moms losing their shit because Mazel would walk down the block by herself to come pick ups up from school.
- Grew up associating the word “Bitch” with teeth and the willingness to rip an asshole’s face off for being rude. Never changed the definition.
- Learned the I-Own-This Strut and Murder-Stare from the absolute best.
When she was 17, Mom and Dad decided to add another room on to the house. They rigged up the overhead tether so she could be outside but not underfoot for the contruction guys. One morning, mom came out to notice them all milling in the side yard entrance, muttering worriedly. When mom asked what was wrong, one of them explained that Carlos forgot to bring the Hamburger. What do you need a hamburger for? Asked mom, and they pointed down the side yard to where Mazel was sitting, doing her best Viscious Alpha Bitch Stare.
Apparently they’d never realized that she was on the VERY end of her tether there and couldn’t actually get to them, and had been scamming them for a big mac a day for a month. Mom had my six-year-old sister pull her away to show she wasn’t dangerous and tired her best not to laugh but kind of failed.
Mazel ended up living to be 19 and a half, and except for some minor arthritis, remarkably hale until the day she passed away in her hole in the back yard while taking a nap. I maintain that Death had to wait until she was sleeping to get a crack at her, or she would’ve taken his scythe for a chew toy.
@why-animals-do-the-thing, thought this would make you laugh and grimace in equal measure.
@kyidyl, that’s probably the most accurate tag you could have put on this story. It’s a great story and it’s funny and there’s so much unintentional misinformation in it and yet I kind of hate myself for wanting to ruin it.
So. This is one of those things that I’m going to comment on with the proviso of: it is entirely okay to love this story and think it is hilarious, because it is, and understanding what’s not right and what was problematic misinformation does not have to devalue that as a story, it’s pretty damn great. That being said, y’know, make sure if you share it or tell other people about it you take the grains of salt I’m going to offer and make sure they go along with it.
The misinformation this vet offered up is cringeworthy, and also unfortunately pretty on par for a lot of what people think about wolfdogs. Telling someone “hey don’t have kids your woofer might think they’re prey” is pretty shitty. Telling someone “hey this animal might have trouble around children because they run quickly and make squeaky noises and that might kick in prey drive instincts, so be sure to manage that if you have kids” is much more appropriate, and also very different from what that vet did.
This whole post is full of dominance theory nonsense that is honestly so painful to hear, because that is the absolute worst way to attempt to interact with higher content wolfdogs. They’re not nearly as forgiving and tractable when it comes to social dynamics as doggy dogs and if you try to dominate them once when it’s unreasonable they’ll remember it forever – you might get a fear reaction, you might get an aggressive reaction, they might just decide they want nothing to do with you, but it’s damn hard to come back from.
This doesn’t sound like a high-content wolfdog, simply because it was so comfortable in public after being in a shelter environment. True high-content wolfdogs, even ones that are incredibly well socialized as puppies, are notoriously neophytes and do not do well with lots of stimuli or new people. So stories of walking her around town no problem, or taking her to school for show and tell where she did things on cue are immediate red flags.
Also, who the fuck lets what they think is a high-content wolfdog wander around off-leash and unsupervised?!?! That’s egregiously irresponsible because of the whole “they can’t be vaccinated against rabies in the eyes of the law” and “they get put down for even looking sideways at people”, and also confirms that this animal couldn’t have been of significant content if it supposedly walked to school every day through the town to pick the kids up. Woofer have a mind of their own and generally do as they please, so I’m highly suspicious that any high content animal would have done that without getting distracted or killing neighborhood animals (because remember, it was described as having really high prey drive).
That being said, I don’t doubt it had some wolf content from the description – all of the “cons” sound like really typical wolfdog behavior.
I also have some issues about how freely it sounds like they let the baby bother what they thought was a high content wolfdog – there’s a reason it’s crucial to monitor even the most tolerant of doggy dogs when they interact with babies. The shift in behavior when the OP’s mom got pregnant is pretty typical, but it’s not really a dominance thing; the dog is aware something is changing, both from household routine and the smell of the mother’s hormones shifting.
So, yeah. Great story, but it describes a lot of misrepresentation and incredibly irresponsible behavior regarding the management of any content level of wolfdog (that, had the dog actually been high content, would have ended very differently and much worse). Sounds like she was a great dog – maybe a low content, maybe just a very smart and tenacious wolfy-looking dog of varying ancestry.
Hey,OP here. I just wanted to take a moment and thank you for all the good info!
I’m sorry if it wasn’t clear from the tone of the of the original post, but you should read this whole story as “HOLY SHIT HOW DID I MAKE IT OUT OF MY CHILDHOOD ALIVE???”
As far as Maze’s actual wolf content- her origin is a mystery, and we only had Dr. Hamada’s word on what she was. Looking at some more pictures and doing some reading, it seems more likely Mazel was mid-to-low content, but very lupine in appearance. When I get home in May, I’ll scan some of the old pictures I have of her, and I’d appreciate it if you wanted to take a look at them.
Mom always described training Mazel as an exercise in game theory, rather than operational conditioning. I use the term “Alpha Bitch” mostly as a joke, because that’s what mom called herself, but really training her was more about making her part of the family rather than any sort of pack dynamics Nonsense. Looking back, I’d definitely agree that mom was kind of lax in regards to certain aspects of her management, but some context: She never played with us as babies without at least one adult in the room, and my school was immediately across the street, so mom could watch Mazel come collect me from 50 feet away in the driveway. She was also about 12 when she started doing this.
But yeah, I got really, really lucky with her, we probably could have trained her better, and I would DEFINITELY NOT recommend wolfdogs as pets unless you really, really, really know what you’re doing- But It was a privilege to know her and I still love her very much.
So thank you for your time.
Hey, I’m glad I’m chimed back in. I definitely got that as the tone, it’s just my job to be a buzzkill. 🙂
I’d love to see photos when you do have the chance! And the extra information about management is great to have – I know it’s a hard balance between engaging storytelling and portraying things exactly as they were.
She sounds like she was quite an adventure to have grown up with. Definitely no need to apologize for valuing that!
Tag: personal stories
so id like to tell you something, like, in the context of cryptid sightings
specifically, id like to tell you some things about cattle
- they dont look like they move fast, but, in fact, they do. they move very fast, and theyre capable of doing so quietly
- if a cow is black and has white spots, or if it is white and has black spots, both the white and black bits come together in the approximate shape of a cow
- but in the dark, you cant see the black parts, and the white parts do NOT, form the approximate shape of a cow
what im saying is that i have at certain times been walking in the fields on a night with low visibility and i have, at certain times, seen an indistinct white shape zoom past me, and i am at least 95% sure it was a cow. and that if you see a white shape zoom past you in a field at night, it is also probably at least 95% of a cow
my name is cow
and wen its nite
and yu in fere
a cryptid site
be not afraide –
in mothmans sted
its only mein serch of bred
Mr. Martin the Chillest Teacher of all Time
I cannot get this poem out of my head. It haunts me. Joyously, it haunts me.
in another thread, this user writes:
my name is Dog,
and wen its tea,
i hope they giv
sum foode to me –
i hope they shair
befor its gon –
they never do.
i dont get non.😦
and then replies to their own comment:
my name is Cow,
and this is tru –
my caynine frend,
its up to yu.
so just be brayve
and smart insted –
and be like me.
i lik the bred.First of all how dare you
I thought about these poems a lot today
i picked up a new class of year sevens today and i was writing on the board (in very illegible overly loopy cursive) and one girl was like “miss rose, i think you’re a very similar person to your handwriting” and i was like “why do you think that sweetheart?” and she was like “it’s very pretty but a lot of it is just unnecessary”
and can i just say i don’t think i’ve ever been dragged that hard in my life let alone by an eleven year old
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: When you treat retail employees like shit, you become an instant joke. You are the story they tell over coffee to make their friends and family laugh at the idiot. You are the person they mimic in a squeaky voice.
Next time you want to yell at a retail employee, imagine them repeating what you are about to say in a squeaky voice. Because that will be your legacy.
Reminds me of a thing that happened me once.
So, I do three day LARP events in the U.K. Before we mostly transitioned to grudging and reluctant car owners, there used to be a whole bunch of us travelled over together from Ireland on Irish Ferries rail and sail ticket, Dublin to Derby return for about €90, which given train prices in Britain is a steal.
At the end of the event, we’d all be exhausted, unshowered, muddy, with traces of face paint or latex, looking ever so slightly post apocalyptic in our combat boots and occasional bits of armour or cloaks that didn’t fit in our backpacks.
So there I was on a train, unwashed, sunburned, greasy hair, wearing the grubby clothes I’d taken down my tent in. I wasn’t in the mood for other humans so I sat away from the rest of the LARPers and read my book.
Some fella gets on, asks if he can sit beside me. I vaguely register his presence and shrug, because it’s a free seat and a free country. (I didn’t realise there were loads of double seats free at the time. Train creep red flag there.)
So I’m reading my book and he starts talking, like
“Is that a good book?”
and I’m like “Yes.”
And I go back to reading it. After he makes a couple more attempts at a chat I say “Look, I’m sorry but I don’t really want to talk; I’d just like to read my book thanks.”
Well, the fucker is personally offended by the fact that I’m not riveted by his winning personality and he starts whinging, and I ignore him or give one syllable answers, and then he starts trying to annoy me. Like, singing Elvis songs at me. So I keep ignoring and he keeps being a petty little fuckmuppet, and eventually I snap at him to stop trying to talk to me.
And he says “Why, what are you going to do about it?”
Now, I will always regret that having been fed a straight line like that, I froze, a million comebacks coming to mind and then discarded. Do I say “It’s not me you need to worry about mate,” and ask all the LARPers to stand up? Does that imply I need other people to defend me?
So while I’m trying to work out what to say that will hurt his feelings the most, he huffs and says “oh, you’ll probably stab me or something, I’ll just go!”
And then he fucks off down the other end of the carriage, and I try to keep reading but my adrenaline is up now and I can’t, so I go down to the others and stand in the aisle, telling them about this pathetic fuckwit with no manners who thought he was entitled to my time and attention.
And as I start taking, I can see a reflection in the window near me. The fucker moved down this end of the carriage, and can hear every word I’m saying. I got to watch him cringe and try to burrow down inside his coat as I mocked him mercilessly to the eight to twelve people who all laughed at him with me.
And that was probably one of the most deeply emotionally satisfying moments of my life.
Just introduced a kid to her adoptive parents. They brought her a dozen roses. We met at a restaurant. I arrived early to get a private booth and told the waitstaff what was up. So all the servers were having a cry in the corner. I’m at a coffee shop a few miles away, giving them space and having my own cry.
Adoptive mom clarified to me later: roses were pink because pink means forever.
What’s more important than the roses, though, is they also brought her a luggage set so she wouldn’t be moving her things in garbage bags. The luggage matches theirs, cause it’s family luggage for family trips.
Violence, Abusers, and Protest
My grandfather was a generally peaceful man. He was a gardener, an EMT, a town selectman, and an all around fantastic person. He would give a friend – or a stranger – the shirt off his back if someone needed it. He also taught me some of the most important lessons I ever learned about violence, and why it needs to exist.
When I was five, my grandfather and grandmother discovered that my rear end and lower back were covered in purple striped bruises and wheals. They asked me why, and I told them that Tom, who was at that time my stepfather, had punished me. I don’t remember what he was punishing me for, but I remember the looks on their faces.
When my mother and stepfather arrived, my grandmother took my mother into the other room. Then my grandfather took my stepfather into the hallway. He was out of my eye line, but I saw through the crack in the door on the hinge side. He slammed my stepfather against the wall so hard that the sheet rock buckled, and told him in low terms that if he ever touched me again they would never find his body.
I absolutely believed that he would kill my stepfather, and I also believed that someone in the world thought my safety was worth killing for.
In the next few years, he gave me a few important tips and pointers for dealing with abusers and bullies. He taught me that if someone is bringing violence to you, give it back to them as harshly as you can so they know that the only response they get is pain. He taught me that guns are used as scare tactics, and if you aren’t willing to accept responsibility for mortally wounding someone, you should never own one. He told me that if I ever had a gun aimed at me, I should accept the possibility of being shot and rush the person, or run away in a zig-zag so they couldn’t pick me off. He taught me how to break someone’s knee, how to hold a knife, and how to tell if someone is holding a gun with intent to kill. He was absolutely right, and he was one of the most peaceful people I’ve ever met. He was never, to my knowledge, violent with anyone who didn’t threaten him or his family. Even those who had, he gave chances to, like my first stepfather.
When I was fourteen, a friend of mine was stalked by a mutual acquaintance. I was by far younger than anyone else in the social crowd; he was in his mid twenties, and the object of his “affection” was as well. Years before we had a term for “Nice Guy” bullshit, he did it all. He showed up at her house, he noted her comings and goings, he observed who she spent time with, and claimed that her niceness toward him was a sign that they were actually in a relationship.
This came to a head at a LARP event at the old NERO Ware site. He had been following her around, and felt that I was responsible for increased pressure from our mutual friends to leave her alone. He confronted me, her, and a handful of other friends in a private room and demanded that we stop saying nasty things about him. Two of our mutual friends countered and demanded that he leave the woman he was stalking alone.
Stalker-man threw a punch. Now, he said in the aftermath that he was aiming for the man who had confronted him, but he was looking at me when he did it. He had identified me as the agent of his problems and the person who had “turned everyone against him.” His eyes were on mine when the punch landed. He hit me hard enough to knock me clean off my feet and I slammed my head into a steel bedpost on the way down.
When I shook off the stunned confusion, I saw that two of our friends had tackled him. I learned that one had immediately grabbed him, and the other had rabbit-punched him in the face. I had a black eye around one eyebrow and inner socket, and he was bleeding from his lip.
At that time in my life, unbeknownst to anyone in the room, I was struggling with the fact that I had been molested repeatedly by someone who my mother had recently broken up with. He was gone, but I felt conflicted and worthless and in pain. I was still struggling, but I knew in that moment that I had a friend in the world who rabbit-punched a man for hitting me, and I felt a little more whole.
Later that year, I was bullied by a girl in my school. She took special joy in tormenting me during class, in attacking me in the hallways, in spreading lies and asserting things about me that were made up. She began following me to my locker, and while I watched the clock tick down, she would wait for me to open it and try to slam my hand in it. She succeeded a few times. I attempted to talk to counselors and teachers. No one did anything. Talking to them made it worse, since they turned and talked to her and she called me a “tattle” for doing it. I followed the system, and it didn’t work.
I remembered my friend socking someone in the face when he hit me. I recalled what my grandfather had taught me, and decided that the next time she tried, I would make sure it was the last. I slammed the door into her face, then shut her head in the base of my locker, warping the aluminum so badly that my locker no longer worked. She never bothered me again.
Violence is always a potential answer to a problem. I believe it should be a last answer – everything my grandfather taught me before his death last year had focused on that. He hadn’t built a bully or taught me to seek out violence; he taught me how to respond to it.
I’ve heard a lot of people talk recently about how, after the recent Nazi-punching incident, we are in more danger because they will escalate. That we will now see more violence and be under more threat because of it. I reject that. We are already under threat. We are already being attacked. We are being stripped of our rights, we are seeing our loved ones and our family reduced to “barely human” or equated with monsters because they are different.
To say that we are at more risk now than we were before a Nazi got punched in the face is to claim that abusers only hurt you if you fight back. Nazis didn’t need a reason to want to hurt people whom they have already called inhuman, base, monsters, thugs, retards, worthless, damaging to the gene pool, and worthy only of being removed from the world. They were already on board. The only difference that comes from fighting back is the intimate knowledge that we will not put up with their shit.
And I’m just fine with that.
This is fucking amazing
everytime I hear about children of the corn I think about the guy I met at comic con who actually lived in the town they filmed that movie at, and on the farm where they filmed in the corn.
he was a teenager at the time and him and his friends would get drunk on moonshine and rustle the corn and let the air out of the tires of the production team’s trailers and shit.
and now there’s Wikipedia pages about how the children of the corn set was haunted and they thought they angered god but it was really just drunk hillbilliesI don’t like adding to posts but I also have a funny story like this, so I was watching the movie the Blair witch which takes place in burkettsville maryland, which to me is so funny because that is were my grandfather lives and the town is literally just old people and cows with their main street consisting of a post office. Well anyway he told me that after it came out people were coming in like bus loads to the town to find the witch and my grandfather lives up in the Mountain area and people were up in his property trying to find the witch and it made him angry so he went out and hung up stick people and stacked rocks and it freaked the people out so they started thinking something was out there when really it was my 80 year old Italian grandpa who wanted people out of his woods.
We had ghost hunters come to a historic house in my town to film and if you think every high school kid in town respectfully stayed at home that night instead of going to fuck up that filming you’re dead wrong.
this is comforting, actually, sometimes paranormal things are just a bunch of bored people dicking around in the woods.
New favorite cryptid: locals
Bad News: Our boss locked the keys inside the building.
Good News: We didn’t have to wait around for a locksmith.
Bad News: My boss finds it very concerning that I know how to pick locks, and tried to unlock my Tragic Backstory™. I was too embarrassed to admit that the reason I learned was because, at thirteen, I figured that was the kind of skill that would impress cute girls.
Good News: A cute girl saw me do it.
Bad News: It was Maggie, and since she’s already seen me fall out of several trees, cry because I saw a fawn that was just too damn small, and knows I can ride a unicycle, she’ll never think I’m cool no matter what I do. It’s too late. She knows.
There are million dollar blockbuster movies that were less entertaining than the rollercoaster this post just took me on.
Steel Phoenix Studios 