The Dinosaur Bone

My friend has become very involved with animal welfare over here. She came into contact with a group called Lets Adopt and, via this group, with some community members fostering sick, injured and abandoned stray animals. For the past year she has fostered cats, but lately has expanded into taking in dogs. Benek 1 (Turkish for Spot) went to live in Germany about a month ago with her new family. Benek 2, Benek 1's replacement, was hit by a car in her recent past and her broken leg was never fixed properly. She walks mostly on her three good legs and can run, but her bad leg eventually trips her up.

The addition of Benek 2 into the community has also resulted in my friend making a lot of new friends. Young children, for whatever reason, are drawn to this dog. You cannot take her out without being followed by 2 or 3 of the local kids. Benek is incredibly tame and patient with the poking, prodding and dragging around by teams of 6 - 8 year olds.

A special attachment has been fostered with one of the little boys in our building, he's an only child and about 6. He has become the president of the Benek fan club. He goes over to my friends place every day at 5 for the evening walk. If she cannot take Benek out, he waits. A phone call yesterday about what to do when the 6 year old in your house has extended his welcome was an issue few 25 year olds deal with on a regular basis. "You're 25, he is 6"... "yes" ... "tell him to go home?" ... "nicely?"

The point of this story, aside from trying to remember this stuff before moving back to less communally minded Canada, was the gigantic bone in front of our house.

Benek loves bones. I think it must be part of the stray in her, because she loves garbage, especially bones. She fixates on her "treasure" unlike any dog I've met in Canada (because Canadian dogs have never seen  a cold and hungry night or met a nasty person ... for the most part). She eats the bones, they make her sick, she eats grass, she pukes. It's a nasty vicious cycle. If we keep her away from the bones she lies down and throws a temper tantrum - tantrum being she refuses to move and has to be picked up.

This problem has been amplified by the appearance of a gigantic bone in front of our house. Our 6 year old friend insists that it came from space and is a dinosaur bone. It looks like a cow bone. But how did a cow bone end up in the middle of a compound in the middle of a university?