Category Archives: Dogs

Houdini, the wily Sharpei, is safe after a five-week rescue effort

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This is a feel-good dog tale, so far at least.

It took at least five weeks, but the male Sharpei that has been running back and forth between the windward Oahu communities of Punaluu and Kaaawa, was finally secured this weekend. He’s safe but tired out. He is comfortable with and happy to see other dogs, not sure yet about meeting new people. It took a caring community, and a number of deeply involved neighbors, to catch this guy. He’s been given the name, Houdini, because of his escape skills.

I’ve pieced together the story from a series of posts over the past month by the Kaaawa Community Association’s Facebook group.

The earliest mention I found is a Facebook post on May 23.


Loose dog
Kam Hwy near Kahana

ATTENTION DRIVERS:
LOOSE MALE SHARPI/MIX TAN/ BRINDLE RUNNING ON AND OFF THE ROAD RIGHT BY THE BEND GOING KAHUKU WAY BY THE PIER
BEEN TRYING TO SECURE FOR 2HRS NO LUCK

Monday, June 3, he was spotted on along Kam Highway on the Punaluu side of Kahana, then on the 4th back at Swanzy Beach Park in Kaaawa.

In a comment, David from Punaluu said:

I live out in Punaluu and I’ve been seeing the dog for the last 2 weeks running up and down the highway I tried to catch him or her a few times but she runs away. I just hope she doesn’t get hit by a car.

Many people commented that they had tried to help. Here’s an example.

We’ve seen and tried to catch him a couple of times in the last week or so. He’s very people shy, runs away, and won’t let anyone get close. This afternoon he ran up Huamalani St. We tried to trap him in a yard, but he pushed out under the fence. Poor baby wouldn’t even come for fresh food. We left him be as it was obvious we weren’t catching him on the loose and didn’t want to chase him back towards traffic.

“Da buggah is quick and afraid,” another person said.

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About those dogs and cats

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Here’s a Sunday “get ready to waste some time” post.

Someone asked me this week how long I’ve been taking photos of dogs on our early morning walks at dawn. I assumed he was talking about these Kahala dogs, and said I had started when we moved from our home in Kaaawa to the remodeled version of my parents’ home in Kahala. That answer was “about 9 years,” since we moved her in August and September 2015.

But then I thought about it, and the morning dogs actually go way farther back than that.

First, to be clear. We live in a feline-centric household. But we both love dogs, although introducing a dog into our world would be pure chaos, so we’ve avoided it. But it means that we’ve always enjoyed meeting and greeting other people’s dogs.

It’s complicated because I’ve been blogging here for more than 20 years. I registered the domain, iLind.net, on January 27, 2000, and shifted my small former site here soon afterwards.

To further complicate things, back then I was hand coding each day’s entry, and trying to manually provide ways to track back to prior posts.

Years later, I gave up and switched to using WordPress to do most of the heavy lifting.

Tracking back through posts done since the switch to WordPress is straightforward, although it can be time consuming, page by page.

Going back beyond that requires some digging through the original blog files that are kind of haphazardly organized.

Here is about the best I can do.

The earliest collection of dog photos I’ve found appeared here on June 11, 2001. Kamehameha Day. And the first dog in that first collection was Mr. Kolohe, who lived just at the end of our short street, where we had to walk past his house every morning.

And here’s what I wrote about Kolohe, the first dog pictured in that first collection 23 years ago. Click on his picture to see that first, long-ago collection of Kaaawa morning dogs.

Kolohe was the first dog. He lives just a half-block away, and would greet us every morning. Then I gave him a dog bone. Now he’s very polite about it, but he wants that bone. Every morning. His buddy & companion, Ricky, is gone. We haven’t wanted to ask what happened.

The rest is history.

I need an easier way to browse through the old collections of dog photos, but that will take some thought and quite a bit of work. Many of those early photos need an update using modern software to improve the quality.

For a period of years, I kept an updated list, which you can easily browse through using that link. That list included from the beginning of 2005 through early 2011. The photos didn’t stop then, but this path to finding them ended.

Same thing with cats. The photos of our cats also go way, way back, all the way to January 1998.

But that’s another story.