The Nose Knows What the Eyes Don’t See
July Six Word Photo Story Challenge: “Cute Creatures”
That “let’s hunt some food” look
Anyone who has visited Villa Montalvo, the home of California’s first governor, knows the story of Califia. She was the mythical queen of the Island of California who appeared in an epic novel of chivalry written around 1510 by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo. The earliest European explorers of the West coast of the “New World” incorrectly identified the Baja Peninsula as an Island and named it California. This island persisted in maps created as late as 1677.
My wife wanted a dog for years, and finally, we found one on a rescue site in Marin County. She was a ruby King Charles Spaniel rescued off the street in LA where her owner had abandoned her. It was love at first site. Since finding the right dog had seemed like such a mythical quest, we decided to name her Califia or Cali for short.
We wondered why such a gentle, playful, and energetic dog (she loved to chase squirrels) could be abandoned. We found out one day when she tore out the back door after a squirrel and slammed into the trunk of a massive Valley Oak that had been there for more than 160 years. We had known that she was blind in one eye when we adopted her and that there was a significant risk of King Charles Spaniels going blind. Although we were able to restore some of her sight for a couple of years, glaucoma eventually blinded her for good.
Dogs who go blind after birth can get around quite nicely in familiar environments where they can use their other senses to navigate. I was eating lunch at our kitchen counter one day after Cali had gone blind, and I flicked a morsel of food off the counter and onto the floor. Cali went straight to the spot where the food had hit the floor and sniffed around until she found it and ate it. Then she gave me a look that said: “That was fun, let’s do it again”.
We played hunt some food almost every day until she moved on to doggie heaven.
