Well, our walk tonight was a long one, and went rather well. Near the beginning of it, we ran into a couple who was playing with their toddler in their driveway. The mom asked if Gizmo was a fox, and we stopped to talk to them for a while.
The little girl was fearless, and watching her and Gizmo was so cute. She kept on trying to "sneak up" on him and grab his tail, and he just grinned and tollerated it. She also kept picking up dried, dead leaves and offering them to him, and he would reach out and very gently take them from her, then set them down in the grass in front of him.
Gizmo loves kids, and it's a lot of fun to watch him play with them. When it was time for us to go, he kept on trying to drag us back over to their yard; he wasn't done yet.
We also passed the house with the lady who called the nice Sheriff on us the other night for having the nerve to walk down the sidewalk. Her dog ran to the door and started barking at us loudly, and she came to the door, gave us a big grin, and waved.
We declined to wave back at her.
Near the end of our walk, we ran into Teddy, Gabe, and their mom. Teddy is a golden-doodle, and Gabe's an eight-year-old. We talked with her for a long while about raw diets and home-made pet food. I recommended a few books for her to check out.
After we got home, I fed Gizmo his dinner and put him to bed in his crate, thinking I wouldn't be seeing him 'til morning...
....Only to hear him screaming bloody murder about half an hour later. I went downstairs to see what the problem was, and found my mom sitting on the couch and holding Gizmo, who was gekkering** and shrieking his little lungs out.
The little guy was REALLY upset, and trying to let the whole world know. It took quite a while to get him calmed back down, and mom says she has no idea what made him so angry. She just got him out of his crate to play a little more before bedtime, and he just had a meltdown.
**For those of you who have never had a fox, "gekkering" refers to a fairly specific noise they make when they are upset. YouTube has a nice video example of it handy, courtesy of thedeffox
The two foxes in the video are red foxes (Vulpes vulpes). They are a special color morph known as "marble". Gizmo's father was a marble fox.
Poor feela! I wonder what made him upset? :(
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