Dogs at Lake Chapala

It's a dog's life, all right, as our sleeping Lola demonstrates here. She's the Rottweiler we got a year ago, at the age of about 6 months. We got her from a woman who had gotten her from one of the three animal rescue organizations (all foreign-run) in the Lake Chapala area, and then realized that three dogs was really enough for her!  We heard that Lola had been turned in to the Animal Shelter by the foreigners who had bred her, so she has never known life on the street. She is a total love, but her presence and deep bark do have a good deterrent effect on would-be ne'er-do-wells.

Many foreigners who live in this area adopt Mexican dogs, and it generally works out well. The main caveat would be to use your common sense about what size dog to get, relative to your ability to handle it and to give it enough exercise. Many of the dogs who have known hunger and the street life are immensely grateful to humans who adopt them. (It's hard to know sometimes if a dog is homeless or just belongs to a family that lets it run, but my impression is that while there are a lot of street dogs in this area, the shelters  and their spay/neuter programs have made inroads into the problem.) Many Mexicans are real dog-lovers too.

These dogs may come with some emotional baggage, so patience may be required. See another of my websites, training-dogs.com, for lots of information on training dogs with pain-free, positive methods.

Another bit of advice would be to take your dog to a good veterinarian for an exam. If you have other animals at home, you might do that even before taking your new friend home. In this area, we are fortunate to have quite a few very good vets who speak English.

If you are driving down, you can bring your dogs with you. We did this with LarryDog, our now-11 mixed breed from Colorado. Here, he's demonstrating a trick where he waits to eat the bits of dog food on his paws till he gets told "Okay!" He needed to be in good health and to have a vet's certificate saying so, plus he needed a very current rabies shot and paperwork to prove it, to get into Mexico. In typical Mexican-style bureaucratic fashion, you don't know if such paperwork is really going to be needed and in Larry's case, it wasn't. At the border, he was barking his head off, guarding our little motorhome from the uniformed Mexican official, and the man asked if the dog bit. Assured that he didn't normally, the man just asked if we had any drugs or guns, and when I said no, that was it for LarryDog's border formalities.

I've heard that going into the US is much the same. The requirements are pretty much the same, and as a middle-class Mexican friend of mine said, "It's easier for dogs and cats to get into the US than it is for people!" Quite a few foreigners have adopted dogs here and taken them north with little or no problems.

There are a variety of pet-sitting options here, from Doglandia, a boarding facility run by a very caring foreign woman, to in-house pet-sitters, to having a trusted maid or gardener either come by or stay in your home. The most popular sitters are often booked way in advance.

Flying with dogs internationally can be done, but I don't know anything about how easy it is. Neither of my darlings shown above would qualify for being squeezed under my seat in the cabin of a plane, and I would be very reluctant to subject them to a journey in a crate in the luggage bay.

You can get a decent array of dog foods and toys here, though I do miss the more holistic foods available up north, and I make part of our dog food. Interestingly, LarryDog suffered from a terrible itching problem in Colorado, no matter what we fed him, and that has gone away completely here!

Another time, I'll talk about cats.

To the USA Soon

Later this month Kelly and I will be driving our car (a VW Jetta) to Mazatlan, then going through Arizona and Utah to his old family home in Idaho. It went on the market recently and as you'd say in Spanish, sold itself. We're heading up for a family gathering, and then will be going to our town in Colorado, Crestone, and staying a while. Our route back will be through New Mexico, Chihuahua, and the central highlands of Mexico. We plan to be gone however long we want, at least a month, maybe two. Our departure date depends in part on when we get our renewed FM-3 visas (not to mention our passports) back from the Mexican government.

Our little Toyota RV will stay here. We thought about taking it but I'm not comfortable driving it, and we don't really need its facilities that much for this trip. The car will cost us about half as much in gasoline and in tolls on the Mexican four-lane highways we like to use. And -- an increasingly significant factor in personal decisions -- it's better for the environment to use less gas. Our car's nickname is Smoothie, and the trip will definitely be smoother in it. Virtually all of the northbound trip, and much of the southbound, will be on good 4-lane highways.

The Mexican segments of the trip should yield some good blogging material. We will likely go to Alamos, a charming small city I have long wanted to see, on our way north.

We decided that without the RV, our dear old dog is best off here at home. That made me a bit sad... hmm, he just came over and sat next to me at my desk. And it raised an ongoing concern of all animal-loving travelers:

Finding Petsitters in Mexico

In this area, with so many foreigners, there are quite a few who do petsitting. Last year, we used one and were completely happy with his services. Costs tend to run about ten dollars US per day for someone who lives in your home, or less for longer term. Sometimes more, sometimes less.

We wanted one or two people to live in our home, and one of my main concerns was that they be very conscious of keeping our two cats in the house. Another was that my much-beloved and timid Siamese cat be given affection, once he decides to come out from under the bed. Plus of course, LarryDog and our Mexican rescue kitty Misty need plenty of love!

I put the word out via email to a bunch of other foreigners, but actually something else turned up: some Mexicans we know in our neighborhood will likely stay here. I won't post details now, because they are coming over in a couple of days to confirm. But it feels good.

Another choice we used once is an excellent dog boarding facility in San Antonio Tlayacapan, called Doglandia. But with the three animals, we wanted them all to stay here.

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