This is my friend Susan’s dog, Kinetic. Susan called her Miss K most of the time, except when they were running at their average speed of, I dunno, 7 yps? Then it was Kinetickinetickinetic. Gustavo runs fast, but Kinetic could smoke him every time, hands down. No question. Kinetic died the other day, she was only 3 years old.

We have had sad times in our agility community recently. Lisa P., who passed away last week, took this photo of Kinetic. They were all good friends.

Kinetic and Susan were ready for AKC tryouts next week, hoping to get a spot on the EO team. She was Susan’s most devoted companion, and a long time classmate of mine. Susan loved her like you hardly ever see somebody love a dog.

She died of water toxicity, this is the second dog I know who has died from this. I changed the way I let Otterpop play in the water after this happened to the first dog I knew, another young dog, another very sad story. Basically, if your dog is one of those wild water dogs who is attacking the stick and taking in a lot of water while they are having their most manic, fun thing ever, a game of swimstick, this could happen to them. That’s how Otterpop plays in the water, it’s the thing that takes her most over the top and that she loves more than anything, and when they are swimming and sticking and barking and biting the water, enough water can go in to dilute the body’s normal fluids, and long story short, swollen brain and death.

Otterpop would get the stick out of the creek for hours. All my dogs like to do swimstick. But she’s the one I worry about because her completely insane style of barking, swimming, biting the water could kill her. I did pull her out once a long time before I knew about this because she started acting really weird, and it was probably the first stage of this. It freaked us all out a lot, and since then, her swimstick time has been shortened and modified how insane it gets. It’s just how it has to be.

Here’s a link that tells about water toxicity: http://healthypets.mercola.com/sites/healthypets/archive/2013/10/28/water-intoxification.aspx

Some vets don’t recognize the signs right away is what I’ve heard. I know that you are supposed to get your dog to the vet IMMEDIATELY because you don’t have much time. If you just throw your stick sometimes on the shore so they aren’t only in the water, you can give them breaks and they aren’t taking in as much water. They still have fun. And not as scary.

I think Kinetic is up there somewhere with Lisa P. now, keeping her company. Kinetic will have a good deal of it, Lisa will carry her around and take her into whatever restaurants they have up in heaven. Lisa P. is going to have to do some pretty fast running or learn some mean distance skills. We sure will miss them both. Susan and Kraig are in everybody’s hearts right now, hoping they get through this hard time.