Taking Care of Your Cats and Dogs in Korea

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Recently, our Spudgy dislocated his knee. It was a terrible experience: he lifted his leg to pee, and - being the gimpy dog that he is - fell over in agony. He was screaming and howling, and it broke our hearts. We hopped in a taxi and went to Seoul immediately. Now, we could have gone to a vet in Bucheon in a fraction of the time it took us to get to Seoul, but we knew that Spudgy would get the best care at Mari Animal Hospital. They're located in the Hongdae area, and we've been going to them from the beginning with Spudgy. Their English is great, which makes taking care of Spudgy so much better; they can tell us exactly what we need to know in order to take care of our dog properly. As well, they have a soft spot for dogs adopted at shelters, and we strongly advocate getting your dogs through shelters rather than through the puppy mills. Anyhow, for the many of you concerned with getting or bringing your pets in Korea, or taking care of one, this video's for you. Click on the picture above for our video on Taking Care of Your Cats and Dogs in Korea, or click the sidebar for different formats. As well, click here for their Business Card. Finally, Spudgy's doing ok now. He had knee surgery and now has a metal pin in his leg. He has to be in his cage for a few weeks and is not allowed to walk! Poor guy!

Spudgy's New Mohawk

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We were surprised our first summer here when we saw Korean dogs with really cool haircuts and bright hair dye. We've seen lots of dogs in Canada, but never have we seen any dogs as fashionable as a Korean dog. We knew that we'd have to make Spudgy feel at home here, and, luckily, with Spudgy we had the perfect canvas. His hair is white, and by the end of the winter it was excessively long. We can cut and style it as we wish! What's Spudgy's new dew look like? Click on the picture above to see Spudgy's New Mohawk, or check in the sidebar for different formats. As well, for those of you who view us on your iPod, we're exporting our videos in a new format that should be iPod compatible. Let us know if it works!

Adopting a Dog in Korea

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We have been receiving a lot of emails lately through our Contact page asking us about living with a dog in Korea. We realize now that we should have done a better job handling this topic through our FAQ Section - as these questions are being frequently asked. And so, we've updated the Korea FAQ with a section on Having a Dog in Korea. Of course, we're not experts on this, so we can't answer all of the nitty-gritty questions, but we can relate our experiences at least. We cover the initial costs for Spudgy, the vet fees for his surgery, how much we spend on him monthly, how much work he requires, and traveling around with Spudgy, be it either on our vacation or just on the subway. If you're interested in adopting a dog in Korea, then this section should be useful to you. If you're really set on adopting a dog, then we've included links in the FAQ to the dog shelter we adopted Spudgy from, as well as some links to Korean Dog Commands (because, after all, how cool is it to speak to your dog in Korean? Take him back home and he'll for sure listen to nobody but you).

Other than that, we're going to use this post as an opportunity to post more Spudgy-related material, since we haven't been doing that nearly as much as we'd like. We finally posted a Photo Page for Spudgy, which we oddly haven't put up before.

Rare Spudgy Bees in Bucheon

We haven't posted anything about Spudgy lately, as most of our posts have been about Korea and Bucheon and have been somewhat informative. Today we're going to snap out of that pattern. A while ago our brother-in-law Mark made a really pretty video about bees and sent it to Vimeo.com. He composed his own music for it as well (he's a music composer after all), and altogether the video has inspired us. We decided to make a similar video. We captured a very rare bee on film, the Spudgy Bee, which is native to Bucheon and Bucheon alone. We shot it at 60 fps and then slowed it down, and slapped on Mark's music. Here, for the first time on film, will you be able to see it for yourself! Click on the picture above for our video on Bucheon's own Spudgy Bee, or go over to YouTube and watch it there yourself.

Spudgy's Doggy Depression

Poor Spudgy! As you may know if you've been reading our Spudgy posts, we were taking him to the vet a lot lately (which happens to be out of Bucheon, unfortunately, and takes a big part of our day to get there and back), either to get his full check up or his teeth cleaned. During his full checkup the vet found that Spudgy had a bit of an ear infection, and so he prescribed some antifungal medicine for us to mix into Spudgy's food. That seemed to help out Spudgy's ears a bit, but it had a negative side effect: doggy depression!

We noticed (as many of you noticed, as well) that Spudgy was not very energetic, apart from when we came back home after being out for a long time. He would eat his food as quickly as possible (chewing only when absolutely necessary), and then would flatten himself on the floor and mope until the next meal. When we told the vet about Spudgy's behaviour he blamed the medicine for it, and told us about antifugal medicine's side effects. Now, thankfully, Spudgy is back to being normal. Sure, he's not energetic and peppy, but he's not laying flat on the floor all day, either. He's being curious again, sniffing around the house, and begging for attention.

We made a movie of Spudgy depressed and Spudgy normal. You'll see the big difference between the two. In the first video he's miserable; in the second he's silly. Really, we just wanted to splice these two clips together, because he's just so darn cute in both. Click on the picture above to see the video, or click here instead to see Spudgy's Doggy Depression.

Excited Spudgy

We’ve been receiving a few concerned emails and questions about how lazy our dog Spudgy seems. “Does Spudgy do anything?”, “Your dog sleeps all day”, “Why is it that your dog is always in bed when we’re on Skype together?”. Well to prove that Spudgy does have a silly and spunky side, and that not all Korean dogs are lazy lapdogs, we made a video clip. Sure he’s a bit gimpy from having broken hips, but that doesn’t stop him from doing weird and exciting things. The video is in two parts: the first shows him when we let him out of the cage. The second half of the video is a really ridiculous ritual he goes through after he eats. We’re not sure if it’s just a Pekingese dog thing, but it’s really quite hilarious. So click on the picture above to see the video, or see Spudgy Excited here. Oh, and thanks to the band Architecture in Helsinki for the perfect song called “The Owls Go”.

Spudgy's Car Accident

Today we took Spudgy to the vet to get him all fixed up. Last week the vet merely checked him over to see what we had to do for this week. And so, after the plan was set, Spudgy had a busy day set out for him today. He had hip x-rays, blood work, an eye exam (for his bad eye), his ear infection fixed, heartworm medicine, and vaccinations. We couldn’t get his teeth and gingivitis fixed today because it would have been too much to do for one day. We’re coming back next week for that. Then Spudgy should be 100%. We would have got most of this done last week, but we couldn’t. As you saw in the adoption video, Spudgy was shaking a lot because he was so scared. We took him into our home for a week and took good care of him, and made him far more comfortable around us. Today he was far less scared at the vet, though he got very scared near the end after having his eye prodded and his blood taken and his legs stretched out on an x-ray table, to name a few things that scared the poor little guy.

Anyhow, you can see just how comfortable the little guy is with us now in this video. We made a video to show how awesome the subways are here in Korea - way better than what we’re used to in Toronto. As well, we found some pretty awesome vending machines, so you’ll see those in the video as well.

The vet that we go to is a really great vet from what we heard. We’re just happy that he’s fluent in English. He understood us and we understood him, and so he explained everything that we needed to know about Spudgy to us. From the x-rays he took and the eye examination he gave his conclusion is that Spudgy was in a car accident. Spudgy’s hips were broken in a way that does not suggest abuse. And his left eye - his blind eye - was punctured, which rules out all but the cruellest animal abuse. His guess is that Spudgy was in a car accident, and the impact to the left of his hips and the left of his eye came from that accident. Spudgy’s eye is fine now - completely healed over, but scarred over as well, and so he can’t see out of it anymore. Nothing can be done for the eye now apart from giving him antibacterial eye drops twice a day.

As for the hip, if you check out the top of the page, you’ll see that where the arrow points to his broken hip a void, whereas on the other side the bone is solid. The vet said that we don’t have to worry about it; the bone there is not as important as the bone up top, which is all around solid. The rubbing femur head, though, might be a bit of an issue. It might cause him some soreness or pain, so if we see him limping or wincing we might have to give him painkillers for a while, but this would be later on when he’s older. For now, he’s trotting along happily. What we need to do is give him lots of exercise, because his hips are weak after the accident, and we need to build up some muscle around there.

The good news came when Spudgy’s bloodwork was done. If you click on the picture above you'll see the results; bad numbers are in red, good numbers are in blue. And, as you can see, Spudgy’s got blue numbers across the board. As well, Spudgy has enough antibodies against all of the major Korean diseases for dogs, so all that Spudgy needed for vaccination was a couple of minor vaccinations (for rabies and such) and he was good to go. Even though he’s got a bad eye and bad hip he’s a healthy pup, and we’re really happy to hear that.

By the end of the visit Spudgy was pretty strung out, nervous and shaking. We took him on the subway and back home and he collapsed into an exhausted heap. We’ll update again next week once he gets his dental work done.

Snorting Spudgy

Dogs usually wag their tails or shake their back legs when they’re happy. Spudgy does all of that, but he also does something special. What Spudgy does, ladies and gentlemen, is honk/snort. We don’t know why he does it, but it sounds like he’s asleep and snoring whenever he’s happy. Rub his ears for a bit, and he'll forget how to breathe properly, and start purring like a kitten. We made a video to prove it. Click the picture above or watch Spudgy’s Snorts here to see the video. And, yes, this isn't a very informative video, we know, but we just got a new dog and we're really happy about it, and want to show him off as much as we can.

Newest Member of the Stawski Family

Ladies and gentlemen, there’s someone new in our lives that we’d like to introduce to you. His name is Spudgy, and he is pictured here, above. He is our Pekingnese dog that we just adopted from a shelter. He doesn’t look Pekingese, we know, because his hair is so short, but it turns out that shaving your Pekingese dog is the Korean way. It's very hot in Summer, and Pekingese dogs grow absurdly long hair, so to prevent them from passing out from heat stroke, it's best to shave them down to cool them off. Unfortunately, Pekingese dogs aren't very cute when they're shaved. Anyhow, we made a couple of videos on him so far: the one in the left image below is on our getting Spudgy from the adoption shelter. The second on the right is on an intro to spudgy.

We arrived at Samsong station at around 12:20 this Sunday and met Ryan there. Ryan is a volunteer for the Korean shelters, and he’s the one who we spoke with on the phone and in email and who guided us to the shelter. He’s an American who has been living in Korea for around two years now, and he has done extensive work to help find homes for many, many animals. Bless his soul.

He told the taxi where to take us while he rode his motorcycle alongside us. In a few minutes we were at the shelter, which was in a very rural area. Ryan is also raising money to relocate the shelter into a better area, where the dogs will have more room and the neighbours will not be so pissy (after all, you’d be grumpy too if you had 220 dogs barking all the time). At the shelter we met the lady who was running it, and for the life of us we can’t remember her name. She takes really good care of the dogs, especially considering the huge amount of them she has, and also considering how severely understaffed she was. It was a surprise that the dogs were in any presentable condition whatsoever. She must never get a drop of rest.

The shelter was divided into two parts: most of the small dogs were in the house, while the big dogs were in the tented area. We first walked into the house to see the smaller dogs. We came to this shelter specifically because Martina saw a picture of a pug that we wanted. Unfortunately, by the time we got there he was gone; he was at the hospital that day because he was sick and very old. We were sad when we heard the news, but continued to walk around and look for a dog because there were so many sweet dogs there. Granted, it might not look that way when you see the video, as you’ll hear deafening dog barks, but that was just because the dogs are not used to having visitors. As well, the problem with having so many dogs together is that as soon as one starts barking the others follow suit, even if they don’t know what they’re barking at.

Martina saw one that especially caught her attention amid the many barking dogs. This was a sweet little shaved Pekingese dog who wasn’t barking at all. He just waddled up to Martina and stood up for her. Martina picked him up and he snuggled up to her. He was very still and quiet and sweet, and Martina instantly fell in love with him. When we asked about him we heard a couple of sad things; one - he’s blind in his left eye. It’s clouded over, and he can’t see objects but he can feel light. Secondly, he had hip surgery (you can see the scars from the incisions on his hip), and he doesn’t walk all too solidly. When Martina heard this she started to cry, and fell in love with him even more.

We walked around the tented part of the shelter afterwards to see the other dogs. There was one spunky dog that Simon happened to like, who climbed up his fence for you to pet him. We considered him or Spudgy, but after taking the spunky dog for a walk we realized that he might be too demanding for us, and Spudgy was so frail and sweet that we had to take him: the spunky dog could easily be adopted by someone else, while some people might be turned off by Spudgy’s eye and hips. So we adopted Spudgy, who was nothing but affectionate with us. We were waiting for a ride to the vet, and so we were sitting outside and eating watermelon. Spudgy sat on our legs the whole time.

We took him to the vet in Sinshon, and - from what Ryan told us - he’s the best vet in Korea. He gave Spudgy a quick look over to see if he was alright (and this was all while Spudgy was shaking and quivering in fear. So sad!). It turns out Spudgy needs some dental work, which isn’t surprising for a dog in a shelter. The woman running the shelter had 220 animals to take care of; she couldn’t be thorough in brushing everyone’s teeth. Anyhow, we’re going back to the vet next week to get Spudgy’s teeth cleaned, and to get some blood work and X-Rays to make sure everything’s alright. By then Spudgy should be more comfortable around us and not so scared that he’s shivering.

If you’re in Korea and reading this, please consider helping out with the shelter. If you can’t adopt a dog or take it into foster care, you could still volunteer to help. Dogs aren’t treated all too kindly around here, as many are run through the puppy mills to be genetically engineered like Paris Hiltons’ teacup dogs, or they’re abused otherwise. You always wanted a puppy when you were a kid. Now you’re old enough to get one.