Brian and I have had a very turbulent 2 years what
with family problems, work hassles and moving house 4
times in 25 months. Most people would have slashed
their wrists in despair, but what do we do, get a dog!!!!!
Huh like that is going to make things easier.
Brian has had Staffies before and found
them to be loyal, caring and great fun so we set about
looking for our own purebred English Staffordshire.
Victorian breeders didn’t return our queries so
we visited a breeder north of Adelaide, picked our little
“stripe” out of the litter before he had laid
eyes on us. When we picked him up at 8 weeks, with
his eyes wide open he loved us, unconditionally and faithfully.
Little were we to know how much we would come to
adore that little fellow. He filled our lives
with the laughter that had been missing for so long.
Maximus (large, powerful leader) was highly intelligent,
playful, loyal and a delight to be around. His favourite
pastimes were playing hide and seek, chasey (us, rocks
mainly but balls were OK too), pop the bubbles (the more
the merrier), sniffing and weeing and sniffing and weeing
some more AND visiting the vet!!!! Got Horsham Vet
to thank for that, they adored him and fluffed about all
over him spoiling him whenever he visited – Thanks. 
At the last house we were at he developed diarrhoea,
it didn’t go away after a reasonable time so visits
to the vet started. To this day believe that they
did not take me seriously soon enough. The outcome
may have been different – but we will never know
now. He finally had surgical biopsies late January
08, results inconclusive, internal bleeding 2 weeks later
and internal haemorrhaging today. Many thanks to
Darren Merritt of Animal Emergency, Sam Snelling of Advanced
Vet Care and Ellen Mucha of Building Health Naturopathy.
He passed away peacefully, with the help of Ballarat
Family PetCare (different vet to earlier). Thank
you Sharon and Libby for being so caring. We took
our beautiful Maximus home and spent some time with him
before Pets at Peace (cremation service) collected him.
Thank you for coming out especially on Sunday.
To those of you who know what we have been through you
will understand our grief and extreme sadness. Unfortunately
the callous comments of one person about pet owners who
treat their pets like family only adds to the distress.
How can animal lovers support someone who clearly thinks
so little of the bonds between pet and owner?
Take the time to have a look at the photos of our beautiful
Maximus Cezar and help us remember the wonderful nature
that was his. It is any wonder that the more people
we meet the more we prefer animals.
Four months ago we found a companion for Maximus, a white
and black English Staffie called Maddie. They hit
it off straight away and it was great to see them playing
together. We were concerned about how much weight
Maximus was losing and Maddie was putting on weight as
fast as Maximus was losing it. That is, until we
realised that somehow, Maximus had done “the deed”.
Well
Thursday night Maddie had an emergency caesarean, she
came home Friday evening with 7 little puppies.
And Maximus was the doting dad – he helped Maddie
clean the pups and wanted to be with her and them in the
whelping box.
We are so glad that he got to spend a day with them
– none of them have his colouring which is probably
for the best. Isn’t he a fine looking dog??
In loving memory of Maximus Cezar
