Aliy and Allen have shared most of their lives with multiple dogs and have loved every minute. The dogs have been loyal and loving and reminded us all what is good about the world. Unfortunately, as everyone who has ever owned a pet can attest, they just don’t live long enough.
WARNING: Our world can be quite depressing and sad these days so please don’t read this today if you are not up for some more sad news. ❤️
SPK suffered two immeasurable losses this summer that broke our hearts. Olivia and Tig passed away a few months ago, both from short but acute illness.
Olivia was an SP Kennel All Star – she was inducted to the hall of fame in January 2019. She was Wonder Woman incarnate and was a champion sled dog, a mother of champions and incredibly smart who was all business on the trail but very friendly off it. Both Aliy and Allen enjoyed some of their best mushing moments with Olivia on the team. She lived her retirement years with her long-time partner, Nacho. They enjoyed each others company like an old married couple and were together until the last day of Olivia’s life. Olivia passed away just shy of her 13th birthday.
Olivia started to look “thin” in May. Olivia, like many of us healthy women, never had that problem of “being too thin”. Many a Veterinarian at the Yukon Quest or Iditarod would politely ask us… “Uhhh. Is there a chance that this pretty girl is pregnant?” That would have been a rather embarrassing moment for many of us humans, but Olivia would perk up, smile, grab another dog biscuit and leave her humans standing there trying to justify the ‘extra’ couple pounds that their pretty blue-eyed lead dog was hefting around.
So when she started loosing weight, we knew there was something wrong. She was soon diagnosed with diabetes. We really don’t know why. Her twice daily injections of insulin were challenging at first. They became routine and we all did the best we could. (A big thank you to Padee.) However, her blood glucose monitoring continued to be sky high. No amount of insulin could seem to keep her blood glucose levels in check. We brought her in several times to North Pole Vet Hospital for various tests. The last one was the most hopeful: she was still an intact female so perhaps her progesterone levels were too high and thus affecting her insulin absorption. After lab analysis it turned out to be a dead end. Her progesterone level was actually low. Olivia began to have mini seizures at her final hospital visit. In the end, she was diagnosed with uncontrollable, insulin resistant diabetes. There will always be speculation of “what if this” and “what if that”. But, we believe Olivia lived large until her last day and she never regretted a moment of her life.
We buried Olivia on a pretty sunshine day. We had kept ashes from some of our dearest canine companions over the last 15 years. They were stored in a special spot in our custom handmade wooden trophy case. But… it seemed only right to bury Olivia with a dog team. So we buried her along with the ashes of five other dogs. The six dog team that now blesses the hill on the horizon off to the southwest of us is: Olivia, Quito, Schmoe, ChaCha, AJ and Pedro. Lots of memories, lots of smiles and lots of tears that day.
Tig was a summer dog; everything she loved to do happened in the summer! As a youngster, she and Aliy would compete in local field dog trials and she even travelled to Canada with son-in-law Scotty to gather ducks for the dinner table. Later she became a right-hand-dog – helping out, or at least hoping to help out, with everything: mail retrieval, puppy walks, scooping the yard (she would clean up any remaining kibble left behind before the ravens could get it) or watching football. She was comic relief, overtly affectionate and labrador smart.
Tig was having a great summer: running after sticks, barking at squirrels and swimming after salmon. She was also keeping a keen eye on Ziptie – her protege. One evening in July, she jumped down from the Lazy Boy recliner, fell to the ground and had a hard time getting up. We were soon at North Pole Vet Hospital doing tests. Dr. Lovely’s preliminary diagnosis was some form of leukemia. We did further blood draws for analysis at a Laboratory IDEXX in the Lower 48. There was still a chance that she might have had a treatable form of the disease. But, it wasn’t so. Tig’s body gave us the answer loud and clear. She left us even before we got the Lab results (which confirmed leukemia or acute lymphoblastic lymphoma.) Tig passed away just shy of her 12th birthday.
Both of these gorgeous ladies are much missed. We sincerely thank their sponsors and dog fans.
All of us know that it is so hard to be a dog lover. Every dog has a sweetness and sincerity that seeps way down into a human’s soul. There is an incredible sadness that permeates our entire body when this is torn away from us. But, in reality, it is unbelievable that we had such a beautiful thing in the first place. The only thing that equals the love for a dog is the love of a dog.
