thank you for the story about oscar and ozzie. The folks here have it right. I will never forget the time I was trading squirrel chasing stories with a fellow dog lover. She said she'd made the mistake of keeping a baby squirrel after he fell out of a tree, broke his leg, and was nursed back to health by her. the following spring she occasionally found him looking out the window with such longing that she decided to rehabilitate any animal she (if) ever rescued in the future. But "Rocky" had a good life while with her, although a sad end (not painful, just sudden).
She said that Rocky got along really well with her 2 huge golden retrievers since they had adopted him when he still had that new baby smell. Every morning, the retreivers would wait outside the bathroom (rocky had to sleep in the tub, of course) until he was let out every morning, when they could play. And did they play. Their favorite game was first in the AM "chase" me, which would be pell mell up and downstairs with everything but childish shrieks. Her favorite was "Rocky sez". Rocky would take a piece of dog kibble out of their food bowls, and go over to a dog who was sitting down. Rocky would pull on the dog's paw to tell the dog to lift it up, who would, and then carefully 'bury' the piece of kibble under the dog's paw, patting the dog's paw down over the kibble and then pretending to lose interest, at which the dog would let his paw fly, chase the kibble, and begin another game of chasing Rocky!
One sad day though, the house went silent suddenly one morning during 'chase'. She ran upstairs to the bedroom and when she saw the room empty except for the two dogs, she said sharply, "Where's Rock..." then saw him dead on the bed. As one dog had hit the waterbed, Rocky was flung up into the air, and obviously right into the path of a huge dog coming down from a jump because Rocky was pancaked.
She buried Rocky outside, but spent alot of days crying for not just Rocky, but for the dogs, who went to Rocky's bedroom for more than six months every morning, crying for their friend.