That said, I think I’ve stumbled on a goldmine:

The Canine Call-girl Outfit®

Is your pup more tramp than lady? Is she man’s best friend with benefits? Does she know how to wag that piece of tail? Well then The Canine Call-girl Outfit® is exactly what she needs!

This full-body mesh is available in a multitude of monochromatic colours — from bowWOW black to innocent schoolpuppy white.

What’s more, The Canine Call-girl Outfit® is not just for the lassies. The slightly-torn mesh look will make your beefcake bitch the talk of the dog park.

Act now, supplies are unlimited! Only 8 easy payments of 6 jiao, and the The Canine Call-girl Outfit® can be yours!

So yeah… Button got spayed yesterday and came home in that mesh thing. Once I stopped laughing at her (on the inside, don’t want to give the pup a hard time after major surgery) I realized it’s a damn effective way to stop her from licking at the stitches. We have one of those satellite head cone things, but I was dreading using it — and with this mesh outfit, it seems like I might not need to.

We’ve been sweating about getting her spayed for a few weeks now. We’ve not had many confidence-building experiences with Suzhou vets, and I was a little nervous having to turn to one to cut open and remove bits of my dog. After weighing our options and considering going to Shanghai for the procedure, we decided to pay Vet Cao a visit downtown and at least have them run through everything with us.

The biggest thing going against the Shanghai vets, despite no doubt being more of a Western standard of care, is that there is no simple way to transport a dog to and from Shanghai. If we’re lucky enough to find a driver who won’t mind a big hair-shedding (and likely to puke) dog in their backseat, we’re looking at 250-300RMB per trip — tacking on an additional 1000-1200 RMB ($150-175) to the already expensive Shanghai/Western vet price.

Timing was also a factor in the decision. The vet we had been referred to in Shanghai is on holidays until the end of the month, which conflicts with our already-booked trip up to Dalian. Leaving Button to recover with friends wasn’t really our first choice (nor would it be theirs I’m sure!). The only other option would have been to wait until we got back from Dalian and just hope she didn’t go into heat before then.

After our previous dog, Addie, catching us off-guard (we’re no stranger to having this stage of our puppy’s life bring out the sexy garments) when she went into heat around this time last year, we were not looking to repeat the rather messy experience — that, and we’re all out of leopard-print undies.

Fortunately the trip to Vet Cao gave us the confidence we needed. They are one of the few vets in Suzhou that have gas anesthetics, their facility is clean and their vets seem competent. My one big black mark for Vet Cao is that they consistently get bad points for being cheats. Virtually every Chinese message board on the topic of vets in Suzhou complains of this, and as linked to above we’ve experienced this ourselves.

But whether or not they swindled us out of more money on unneeded tack-on costs, it was still going to run cheaper and be way more convenient than a trip to Shanghai. That was Sunday, appointment was yesterday — seven hours at the vet, and 1200 RMB, later and Button will remain baby-less from now on.

She seems to be recovering well; and whether it’s the mesh or her nature, she has not paid much attention to the large piece of gauze or the stitches underneath.

Of all the numerous things about living away from Canada I miss, trust is more poignant than them all. It is–more than family, friends, air quality or money–the thing that is most likely to cause me to eventually leave China.

When Addie contracted aflatoxin poisoning, it really forced front and centre a sense that I had only peripherally been exposed to through news articles and conversations with Chinese–trust is a commodity China is dangerously short on.

When you put this into the larger context of how much we rely on trust in our day to day lives, the gravity of its absence is frightening. Trust that the water coming out of your tap is clean, that the milk we drink is safe, that the meats we buy are fresh, that the cell phones we use wont explode, that the electrical wiring in our apartments wont electrocute us in the shower.

And further, extending this from the faceless products and constructions of daily life, to the “professionals” we rely on. Trusting the shopkeepers, the police, the vets, the journalists, the doctors — and when they all fail, the judges and the law.

Trust is required for all these things. Trust, faith really, is needed to be able to move about your day-to-day routine. Needed so that you aren’t paralyzed by the thought of what a lack of trust in any of those things might entail.

But my trust is gone. It was whittled thinner and thinner over my time here and then broke completely when a high-end imported dog food we trusted was left to spoil in a Guangdong warehouse.

The painful part is I understand it. I understand why it seems almost everyone in China is only looking out for themselves. Not necessarily pulling the trigger on things that will hurt others, but certainly complicit in evil actions so long as it doesn’t directly affect them or theirs. If no one is looking out for them, why should they look out for anyone else?

Call it history, culture, learned behavior. Tell me it’s not all-spanning, not everyone, not all things. Explain to me that development is everywhere, things are changing, just one more generation… Then rest your life, or the lives of those you care about on that ideal.

I often use the analogy of a single drop of oil in a barrel of water when explaining to Maggie why she can’t trust the Chinese news she reads. It doesn’t matter if 99% of that barrel is water, if there is just one drop of oil, it’s spoiled.

Living in China is like playing the Windows classic Mindsweeper on the “easy” setting. You can click and click and click and most of the time you’ll be fine – but that one random time you’re not — game over.

So, our new dog, Button, is sick. Again, we are forced into a position of hoping we can trust experts telling us what is wrong and what we need to do. We trusted the vet we bought her from that we needed to give her the medicine she suggested to solve the problem. When that didn’t work we trusted a second vet (the most lauded one in Suzhou) that he really had never seen anything like this problem, and trusted that we actually required the litany of expensive tests he prescribed. We trusted that he, one of the truly “qualified” veterinarians in Suzhou, was actually dumbfounded and had no idea what was wrong with her. And maybe he didn’t.

But after digging for just a few minutes online, after our trust in the experts had worn out, we learned that her symptoms fit a perfectly normal and common problem with female puppies and that it was nothing to worry about and rarely something to treat.

So… do we trust that the doctors were both clueless? Trust that they just didn’t tell us the details? Or trust that they, like so many others, simply had their own agendas, and not the health of our dog or the peace-of-mind of her owners, when giving their diagnosis? Trust that maybe they just wanted to string out an otherwise inexpensive problem as long as they could.

And this is “just a dog”. These problems certainly extend to human medicine as well. Doctor’s prescribing unneeded drugs is the norm, not the unethical exception — ordering costly procedures and tests under the guise of caution all in an effort to bump up the bill at a patient’s most vulnerable hour.

In any Western country my thoughts about this would be considered overly cautious at best, and paranoid at worst. But this is China. Whatever wonderful gifts this country has to give, trust simply isn’t one of them.

http://petcharts.purina.com/Default.aspx?day=2009-4-13

UPDATE 04/14: Button’s picture hit #1 for the day, and is only a handful of votes away from being #1 for the week! Lets see if we can get her to #1 for the month!

This is the pic (had I known anyone was going to look at it, I totally would have cropped it better):

Button @ 2.5 Months

Here are a few new photos of Button the Brave (Butt for short):

Button

As mentioned, we recently got a new puppy named Button. Now having had a few days to get to know our newest family member, it’s neat to see her personality shining through.

Addie was the first time I ever raised a puppy, and so everything was new. I had no way of knowing what was “puppy behavior” and what was “Addie behavior” – but now with a new puppy, and armed with fresh puppy-rearing experience, the differences are more easily seen.

Whereas Addie was a friendly but shy puppy, Button is all about adventure. She gets into, under and on top of everything. We have a small set of stairs in our apartment (just three steps), and despite moving in here when Addie was 6 months old, she had trouble figuring them out for about the first week we lived here. Button, at 2.5 months, had them nailed her first day.

She’s now applying this knowledge to get on the ledge where we keep our turtle tank, to get at things on the coffee table and she’s half way to scaling the sofa and our bed.

Button on a Ball

She’s also not quiet. Well, for a puppy at least. She’s not found her bark yet, but that doesn’t stop her from trying. She lets out little whines and yelps whenever she’s lonely, has to pee, has to poop or just bored. This is in sharp contrast to the once a month bark that Addie would let out (startling herself as much as us).

The third difference is a bit of a godsend. Button came pre-installed with Paper Training v1.0. I am guessing the vet we bought her from had something to do with that, and I couldn’t be more grateful.

When we got Addie we lived in a 3rd floor apartment, and there’s just no practical way to house-train a dog by running down 3 flights of stairs. We tried our best to get her to go on paper, but she just never seemed to pick it up – causing us endless cleanups and wet socks. However, after moving into our current place, that has a backyard, she house broke herself in no time.

Because Button hasn’t had all her shots yet, we’re not able to let her wander around the backyard. I was initially nervous that she’d also ignore the carefully laid paper and just go wherever, but her first night here she illustrated she understood that the paper was the proper place to go. She still has little accidents, as puppies do, but she gets it right about 70% of the time – and for a dog that pisses and poops her body weight a day, that’s a decent percentage.

Button on Flickr

A Sleeping Button

It’s been two and a half months now since our dog Addie died, and though it’s rare a day goes by that we don’t think of her and miss her terribly, we’ve started to feel there just wasn’t enough dog hair all over everything.

So, about a week and a half ago we contacted the vet that was so helpful when Addie was sick (she made house-calls everyday to help with giving medication and to check on her condition). When she was here helping us with Addie she off-handedly mentioned she also had a golden and it was about to give birth to a litter. Calling her up we were thrilled to discover that she still had one puppy left and it was ours if we wanted her. Yup, another girl.

I wanted another girl dog for all the reasons we got a girl dog last time – namely, better temperament (read: less barking) and smaller size, two things that are key when you live in an apartment. Maggie would have preferred a boy dog, but you can’t argue with fate – particularly when it rules in my favour.

After visiting the vet’s house, in a rather ancient looking part of town, we agreed we’d take the yet to be named stinky bundle of fur. The fact that she lives in a small pen with a couple of her brothers and sisters and that puppies can’t have soap and water bathes until they’ve had all their shots combines for a rather smelly puppy.

The vet said that we’d have to wait a couple days to take her home as she had just had a shot and they didn’t want to risk the shock that changing the environment can have on a puppy. As a plus though, she said her boyfriend would deliver the dog to us. I get delivery pizza, delivery groceries (incl. delivery beer); delivery doggie – why the hell not?

A couple days passed and we hurriedly called the vet. She said that our pup had developed a slight cough. It was likely nothing, but knowing intimately what we went through with Addie, she knew we weren’t looking to pickup where we left off and get a sick dog. So we waited, and waited and waited. What was just over a week felt like forever, and we had all but given up hope that we’d be getting the new dog.

Maggie holding Button

Then the vet called last night! Were we home? Could she bring the puppy by? Yes! Yes!

And so I’m happy to say we are the proud caretakers of a healthy and beautiful (but still stinky) new golden retriever puppy. We had been stuck on a name, as we wanted to avoid anything too similar to “Addie” and the golden cliches (honey, goldie, etc.). After thinking about it a little while we settled on “Button”, as in “as cute as a ……”

We’ve scrubbed clean Addie’s old bed and a few of her toys we didn’t give away for Button to use. It’s a bit strange seeing another dog in her bed, and impossible not to think about her when we do. But her things, much like our emotions about what happened, have sat since her death in a sort of stasis. Now they can be brought out, dusted off and used/remembered in a positive way.

So now we start again. The hours and hours of training. The cleanups. The endless sweeping. It’s hard starting again, especially after spending so much time doing so and having it end very badly. But at the same time I am thrilled to see what this extremely inquisitive little pup turns into. I’m curious to learn how our life with Button compares and contrasts with the relatively short time we had with Addie.

But right now, I’m mostly curious how I can cuddle my new pup without a nose plug.