Happy has got a job to do.

This morning, I brought Happy for a long easy walk as her left front leg has just recovered from a slight limp.  She probably strained her leg muscle jumping down from a high latch the other day while out on our walk.  After two leg massages, she is okay now! 

I put a dog backpack on her, simulating that she has a job to do, she loves it.   She carried her own water and mine as well hahaha... of course, to let her get used to carrying a load, I made it really light and just filled two small bottles with only 200ml of water each and put it on both side of her backpack to balance it out.  As the weather was not very hot and the walk quite easy, this small amount of water was sufficient for us.  She felt important wearing the backpack!  hahaha  Give the dog a job! 

The walk was really nice, most part of the path was shady and cool even though the sun was out.  There were some steep slopes along the way, great for conditioning my leg muscle!  :)  Oh I forgot to mention where we walked!  We took the path from Tung Chung to Tai O again, decent cemented path all the way.  This time round, I managed to walk till the look-out point near Hau Hok Wan (almost reaching Sha Lo Wan.)  It took us 40 minutes each way and 1 hour 20 minutes round trip.  At the look-out point, we were able to see aircraft take-off and landing, the whole landing strip and the airport!  Great view...  too bad I forgot about my camera today!  sigh!  Next time! 

Happy was complimented on how pretty she looked by two villagers and a hiker. She also received loads of attention from other hikers on how sharp she looked wearing her backpack!  One 'ignorant' lady commented about Happy wearing such a nice jacket!  I wanted to tell her that it is not a jacket, but a backpack, one must be raving mad to let a dog wear a jacket in this weather!!!  But I refrained from doing so...On the other hand, it got me thinking, will the backpack caused Happy to overheat?  I kept a vigilant eye on her and watched her carefully for any signs of heat exhaustion and also let her have as many water breaks as she needed.  She is fine and seemed to enjoy every minute of her 'working' trip! 

Below are some photos taken on a previous trip along the same way.

      

      

      

airport in the distance

     

     

Poor cows!

On our walk this evening, we bumped into the cows again!  :)  This time round, I got to walk right up to it to take some photos.  The brown cow seemed friendlier than the black one!  I was busy snapping away when we noticed a male villager came near and scolded some bad words at the cows!  He was upset with the cows for devouring his produce on a plot of land that he farmed.  He was shooing the cows away.  Hmm.. I hope he won't hurt them.  He told us these cows came from the southern side of the island.  While he was making all these commotion, I noticed Happy quietly and secretly sneaking a few mouthful from a fresh pile of cow poo 'delicacy' !!!!  (She knew she wasn't supposed to do that!)  Sometimes I think she just do it to see our frantic reactions!  I shouted at her and shooed her away from the poo, as we moved on, I turned around and saw Maria feasting on it too!!.  It is a well known though hardly openly-discussed fact that dogs love to eat poo, be it cows, horses, deers, rabbits, dogs, their own and some even human poo, but their all time favorite is cat poo!  Cat poo is the highest in protein due to the cat food they eat, dogs just love them!  Disgusting as it is, these habits exist!  hahahahaha..  they love to roll in smelly dead stuffs, and that includes poo poo too!  To them, it smells heavenly... and ingesting feces is a normal part of their lives, (in the wild, mother dogs will clean up their puppies feces etc) it is usually the human owners that have a problem with that!  hahahaha  Once a dog has a habit of eating feces, it is hard to break this habit, the only way is through management...leash the dogs or be very vigilant when out walking....or even prevent from going to areas with possible poo poo, well, this is pretty impossible around this rural area where there are so many animals around.  It could be possible in a more urban setting where there are no feral animals or stray dogs/cats.  I forgot to mention that we met a super-friendly dog on our walk today.  It is very very rare to meet friendly dogs around this area, most of them are either very territorial or very people-shy.  Not with this dog!  It amazed us by coming right up to us and licked D's hand, he wasn't afraid of us at all.  He didn't do so well with Happy and Maria though.. He was afraid and tried to get away from them.  Here are some photos of the cows (again) and the unusually friendly dog. 

North Great Phoenix Stream @ AFCD

It was late morning and I made an impromptu decision to take Happy for an additional walk.  I made it a short and simple 3km walk to the water catchment dam of North Great Phoenix Stream @ AFCD along Tung Chung Road.  Wow, despite the warm weather, the air at AFCD was so cool due to the underground Tung Chung Au water portal? This place is teeming with negative ion... good for health!  Here are some pics of the water catchment dam....

cows!!!

For the last few days, we had been bringing our camera along on our walks in the hopes that we could take some close-up shots of the feral cows I've mentioned before, but to no avail, we did not spot them anywhere in the vicinity. We almost gave up bringing our camera along this evening thinking that it might just be another futile effort. Thank God we decided that we will bring it along one last time this evening! Guess what! We spotted the two feral cows along the 2km path that we often walked!! :) We got to go really close to the feral cows and took some shots of Happy with them.

happy @ tung chung fort

We visited the Tung Chung Fort this evening, actually on the 10th evening, because by the time I posted this, it's a little past midnight. The last time we visited this place was over a year ago.  Nothing has changed except I thought the vegetation looked greener and lusher today!  Happy was exhilarated, she was dashing 'everywhere' and running all over the place.  Maria was pretty excited too, it was her first time here. What's with this place that got them so hyped up?? Hmm.....We climbed up those walls with huge uneven steps, the locals nicknamed this wall the 'mini great wall of china'!!  Here are a couple of photos that we have taken of the place.  (The actual reason for us to tote our camera along on this evening's walk was to take some close shots of the feral cows, yes, I'm still working on that.)  Too bad, the feral cows were deep in the field and we couldn't get any close up shots...have to try again the next time.

little happy and her first gigantic bone..

I was going through some of the photo files on the computer and came across this video footage of Happy taken when she was still a puppy. We bought a huge cow's femur bone for her and wanted to see her reaction to it... she approached this gigantic bone cautiously at first, but attacked it with fervour after awhile! At that time, we didn't know better and got her this 'super hard' femur bone which was bad for a dog's teeth...but thankfully, she was still having her puppy teeth, so, no damage was done to any of her permanent teeth, phew! After knowing that these femur bones have the potential to damage and crack a dog's teeth, we never gave her femur bones anymore! Instead, apart from her raw meaty bone diet, we still occasionally give her some softer big bones with lots of meat attached.

animal-lover-people-basher

I was just thinking about a blog that I have been following for the past few months. It is a blog about an animal rescue shelter. Some of the comments by these animal-lovers are rather extreme and made me feel uncomfortable... for instance, they love to bash people up verbally at the tiniest opportunity they get. I do agree that there are some really awful jerks out there who should be sued for animal cruelty and preferably be jailed for that! And there are these illegal breeders that locked their animals in cages 24/7 breeding for the sole purpose of $$ and cents...some of these animals are in really terrible conditions...these people too have to be dealt with severely. What I am uncomfortable with is that these animal-lovers lashes out at some ordinary people who, out of desperation or some other reasons have to surrender their pets to the shelters. I have known of people who, due to some unforeseen circumstances have to part with their pets unwillingly, these people are not animal abuser, but they are being treated like a criminal on death-row by these so-called animal-lovers! Even for people who, for some reason just couldn't keep their end of the bargain to keep their pets for life, be it irresponsibility, ignorance or even lack of commitment, these people shouldn't be in the 'condemned criminal' categories and being verbally abused! If that is the case, human beings who abandoned their human families for whatever reasons ought to be shot then!!! (On the other hand, come to think of it, indirectly these people who abandoned their pets gave these 'animal-lover cum people-basher' a 'life', to save animals and at the same time many happy hours of bitching about the human race, didn't they ?? hahahahaha) To be honest, on the other hand, I do understand that it is just soooo easy for these animal-lovers at the shelter to get to such a cynical stage, having witnessed so so so many cases of animal abandonment, day in day out, year in year out. What I am saying is that, not everyone who abandoned their pets deserved to be put on the electric chair! It just so happened that everyone has a different sets of values and priorities, live and let live. Please don't electrocute me, I haven't abandon my pet... YET! hahahahahaha

No close up shots.

Last evening, we brought our camera along for our evening walk, hoping that we might be able to take some really close-up pictures of the feral cows ... but the cows were far away in the field grazing ... the field was too overgrown for us to venture in, so I just took a few 'distance' shots of the  cows.. such a pity!

Yippee

We saw the feral cows again last evening! One of them, the black one was again grazing in the same field, while we met the other one (the brown one) really close-up on the path that we often walked Happy. Indeed, being a true city girl all my life (I was even afraid of cats and dogs till I moved to this rural area! And also, I couldn't even bear to look at a snake on TV without freaking out! Now, I have adapted to seeing snakes all the time during the summer months in this area. ), I was rather apprehensive of the close proximity to theferal cow, a little too close for my comfort! I was unsure of it's behaviour and potential reactions toward us, being just a mere 2 metres away from the animal! What if it charges at me? I wouldn't be able to outrun it!! So, I took my flight instinct and quickly passed the feral cow by and moved on...hahahaha... would have love to pet it instead! Maria the village dog aka Happy's best friend wouldn't give up on trying to chase the cow away! She was growling at the poor thing! We have to call her several times to leave the cow alone! Looks like I have to read up on feral cows behaviour in case I get another chance to be so close to the animal again. Next time round, I might not be wary of it again due to my ignorance about this animal! Ciao!

Feral cows

On our walk last evening, we spotted two feral cows grazing in the field near our house! This is such a rare occurrence these days though I heard it was a pretty common sight last time before we lived in these area. Since we moved here three years ago, we have never sighted any cows at all. This is such a real treat for us indeed. I guess these wild cows must have hiked a LONG way from the Southern part of Lantau Island to end up here on the northern part. Cow migration... hahaha... we can even tracked their path by looking at all the dung they left on the road! Happy's friends, Blackie, RJ and Maria were all hyped up by the presence of the feral cows yesterday. RJ was barking his head off at them and Blackie was trying to stare them down, Maria was prancing around cheering them on! hahaha.. the cows completely ignored them and continued grazing!

I guessed it must have been the dogs' first time encountering such 'huge' creatures in their territory! hahahaha.. As for Happy, she stayed by our side the whole time, I guessed she must have seen cows before in Sai Kung where we boarded her the last time (we saw a few around the area when we brought her there), so it wasn't a big deal for her. I wondered if the  cows are still around this evening... I hoped they are.....

build my own dog bed!

I was surfing on the internet the other day and stumbled upon a website that has instructions on how to make an elevated dog bed from PVC pipes. I thought, why not give it a try since Happy's current 'store-bought' elevated bed (also using PVC pipes) is almost 2 years old and I want to have an extra bed for her on the balcony. So, D & I went hunting for PVC pipes and fittings at hardware stores downtown. It turned out that the stores did not carry a type of fittings called a 3-ways connectors which was required to make the bed frame. What a pity!! BUT, I did not give up. I came home and started trawling the net again to see if I can get some ideas on how to modify the bed using some other more common pipe fittings such as the elbows and the T's joint. It worked! I managed to came up with a model that is just as good, albeit having to use more pipes and fittings! So, we went downtown again to procure the pipes and fittings. After building the frame of the bed, the next challenge was to get an appropriate fabric to nail onto the bed frame. I wanted a fabric that is tough and can be easily maintain. I settled for Cordura type fabric with at least 600D-1000D (Those fabric that luggages and haversacks are made of). So there I went again, this time to Sham Shui Po to hunt for the fabric. My goodness! I thought it was going to be an easy task because Sham Shui Po has these few streets that sells nothing but fabric, kind of like a wholesale place for fabrics! But alas! I walked down the whole street almost 2km and went into all the shops asking about cordura fabric and none of them knew what I was talking about! Gosh! If only I knew the name of the fabric in Cantonese! Thank God as I almost gave up searching, I went into another store and tried and described the fabric to a guy, he understood! He said he roughly knew what I wanted and said that no stores on this particular street carry this fabric! He went the extra mile and drew me a map of 2 possible stores that might have it and gave it to me. The stores were on another street about 3km away from where I was! Gosh! I was so tired already, but I pushed on and went ahead and looked for the stores he described. To cut a long story short, I managed, with some efforts to locate the stores and bought the fabric! hooray!

I managed to make the elevated bed for Happy (of course with some help from D to nail the fabric onto the bed frame tautly). But bad news! Happy didn't like it! Probably due to the differences in the tension and texture of the new fabric and possibly the height of the bed too. (I made it slightly higher than her current bed). Dogs are such creatures of habits! I was pretty upset about it! Sigh! After so much effort in procuring the materials! I dismantled the bed and later realised that I did not even take a photo of it first, so I can't post any pics of the bed here! Such a pity! This dog bed project sparked my interest in building things using pvc pipes (also on the ground that I do not want to waste the pvc pipes that I still have), which I'll post on my other blog when I get a chance. So long!

First time on the beach!

We brought Happy to Pui O beach on South Lantau on Christmas Day! It was her first visit to a beach and she simply LOVED it!! I played frisbee with her and enjoyed watching her running and catching the frisbee. She absolutely went wild digging on the beach too!! After a free romp on the beach, we visited our friend's new house in Mui Wo. It's a lovely 3 - storey village house with a huge garden. It is still under renovation though. Happy had a good time exploring and sniffing out the place and playing ball (actually the 'ball' is a baby pomelo) with our friend's 7 years old daughter! She is so sweet and took good care of Happy by bringing her natural 'mountain' water to drink and giving Happy blueberries as a treat! hahaha As for D & I, we stuffed ourselves on an entire box of chocolate while sitting in the garden!!! :( hmm... have to go easy on that one....Besides that, we all had a good time out there! :) (The photos didn't turned out very clear as there were heavy fog on the beach)

Happy's growing-up pics

Happy's photos when she was younger...

zzz..zzz...zzzz....

Santa dog is asleep..z z z z z z...z z.. z.. .z.......

So Relax..

caught something..

Gosh! Happy had diarrhea and vomiting for the last two days! She has recovered today, no more vomiting and stool is back to normal. Thank God! We were puzzled by her condition, she acted normal, her usual active and cheerful self, but had diarrhea and vomiting! Weird. She might have caught something while out on her walks or even from her usual 'walking gangs' (the village dogs)................

snake attack!

We walked Happy on our usual 2 km route uphill and back this evening. Buddy the rookie village dog came along with us. As Happy was having her potty in the bushes, Buddy ventured into a thick pile of vegetation about 3 metres away from where Happy was taking a dump. In a flash, I saw Buddy being attacked by a startled snake! Thank God Buddy's reaction was quick enough to avoid being bitten by the snake (He jerked backward as the snake attacked him.) The whole thing went by in a flash, the snake disappeared as fast as it appeared, even before I can identify it! We left that area quickly and continued the rest of our walk uneventfully. This area is teeming with snakes! Thank God no one was hurt!

Sha Lo Wan, Lantau Island

D & I brought Happy for a hike this morning.. it has been a long while since we last hiked with her. As the weather is getting better, it's time to start hiking again! :)

We hiked the Tung Chung - Tai O trail by the coast. We didn't hike the whole trail though, just to Sha Lo Wan and back, total distance about 9 km plus. It took us about 2 1/2 hrs to complete the whole trip. Happy enjoyed it so much! She had a good work-out this morning!  For photos, click here.