Our daughter gave the name Sweetie to the six-week-old black lab pup we bought in April, 1996. The dog lives up to the name pretty well, though she has spells of wild beast. That's when we let her run crazy in the backyard. We're lucky to have a backyard big enough for the craziest dogruns.
Sweetie's been neutered so we don't have to worry about accidental litters. Her biggest problem is canine epilepsy. When Sweetie was six months old, she had a couple seizures that were scary to see. The dog probably didn't enjoy them, either.
The vets put her on phenobarbitol, which stopped the seizures. Sweetie was a little loggy from the medication at first, but she's reacquired her congenital friskiness since. Sometimes she will friskily upchuck the socks she eats. She seems to like a sock diet, so we try to keep our footwear out of canine reach.
Once a sock got stuck in Sweetie's intestines. Major surgery and a five-day hospital stay later, she survived and our checking account suffered. So far we've seen no bad after-effects, and even the four-inch surgical scar has long since disappeared. Do labs have a constitutional right to eat ANYTHING?
Sweetie's seizures sent me to the Alta Vista search engine to scour the Web for info on canine epilepsy. Back came this terrific link, which told us all we needed to know...
On top of everything else, Sweetie ruptured the anterior cruciate ligament in her left back leg. Labs seem particularly prone to this injury, which is also much in vogue among human athletes. Back to the vet we went for surgery, and out came our checkbook once more. Sweetie has recovered completely and regained full use of the leg. But wouldn't you know, Sweetie then went and ruptured the ACL in her RIGHT back leg. More surgery, another check. I'm going to start calling her MP (money pit, not military police).
For a while I subscribed to the LABRADOR-L mailing list, but I just couldn't handle 100+ Kbytes of mail each day on labs and more labs. But if you're game for dogs (?) this list might be interesting. I've also included a link to the Labrador Retriever web site on my hobbies and interests page.
For even more cute stuff, try these other pages on this top 5% site (well, it's in the top 5% of all the Web sites I've ever done).