Gretchen

Most of you never met her. When people hear that we have rottweilers they are almost always surprised, and yet, Allen and I have always had rotties, since we moved out to the country and could finally have a dog.
Gretchen was our third rottie. We were looking for a puppy after losing Della (Della Street and Perry Mason were our first) to cancer in 1999. We were still fairly ignorant about dogs generally but were lucky. We drove to a breeder in Wisconsin who was expecting puppies later that summer. As we chatted, a gorgeous four year old bitch met us and was immediately and earnestly committed to winning Allen over. I think it took about ten minutes. After an hour or so, the breeder said she’d let us purchase Gretchen if we’d consider an adult dog. We drove home, thought about, and drove back a week later to pick up Gretchen. We celebrated her 4th birthday on the fourth of July a few weeks later.
She was too heavily-built for agility and I didn’t know much about obedience at the time, which is a shame as she would have loved it, I think. They don’t come much smarter and more eager to please than she did. But she had never been socialized around cats, and was, we found later, a bit reactive (she and Maggie fought) so she didn’t get out much. After losing Mason, Stormy came to us as a re-homed dog from another breeder, and our two-pack continued. I’d certainly do things differently today, but at the time this was just more lessons about dogs.
“Pie” as Allen called her, was diagnosed with spondylosis in 2005 and that further curtailed her activities, but she enjoyed walking the trails on Mushtown for several years. One day she disappeared, then returned with an opossum in her mouth. I asked her to leave it and we finished our walk, then I went back to retrieve it so Allen could bury it. I carried it, by its tail, back to the barn and set the carcass down in the barn. Imagine Allen’s surprise when he opened the door to find it Very Much Alive and glaring at him.
We have coyotes in the woods and both Gretchen and Stormy howled right along with them. The “girls” alerted us to the UPS and FedEx trucks, and counted the agility students arriving here for class.
It was obvious this winter that Gretchen was starting to fail. She started to lose weight, regurgitated her meals, and was losing strength and balance.
Today, we made the decision to let her cross the bridge in search of Della, Mason, Precious (our foxhound), several cats, and that possum. Stormy said goodbye very somberly and I know she will be grieving with us. When I came back into the house, Maggie slowly flipped over for a belly rub as if to say goodbye in her own way, too. She and Winn have stuck close to me all afternoon.
We’ll miss her tons.
Praetor Gretchen V RCR, CGC
7/4/95-1/29/09