Howard was the biggest puppy out of his litter.  He immediately became the instigator as well as the clown out of of all of them.  Despite his size and overwhelming strength Howard is a very loving and emotional dog.  After bringing Howard home, he became best friends with Archie and his very favorite thing to do next to eating of course is to play and wrestle with Archie.  Even though Howard is much bigger than Archie, he is able to play very well with him.  He does have a tendency to get too rough at times but Archie does a very good job of setting him straight.  Howard knows that Archie is the boss still when it comes down to it.

Howard's next favorite thing to do is to chase our cat Tux around the house.  Tux knows his game though and I think he enjoys the chase a little.  Howard very rarely catches him though and when he does, he doesn't know what to do.

Howard's next favorite thing is to ride in the car.  He loves to go for rides.  Any time we open the car door and Howard is there, he jumps right in.  There is no stopping him.  He really loves riding in the convertible.  He sticks his head way up high into the wind but when he gets tired he lays his big head on my shoulder or on the back of my head rest.  He turns heads everywhere we go.  

This was a rough day for Howard.  We had just picked him up from having surgery.  He was neutered and he had his back dew claws removed.  Because of this, he had to wear a cone for almost 2 weeks.  As you can tell from the picture it was about 3 feet wide.  Howard ran into everything with it but it didn't stop him from going anywhere or doing anything that he was used to doing.  He would run into me and Karla all the time and just about knock us down.  After about a week, I had to go out and buy 3 inch industrial Velcro straps to reinforce the cone.  The cone was eventually destroyed from Howard running into everything with it.  Thank god he doesn't have to wear it any more.  It was driving us more crazy than it was him.

I took Howard to Dave and Susan's on Mother's Day so he could play with the other dogs.  Unfortunately, none of the other dogs wanted to play with Howard.  I think they felt that he was the baby out of all of them and they wanted nothing to do with him.  Either that or they were just plain intimidated by his size.  Either way, Howard had a great time anyway as he ran and jumped all through the back yard.  He eventually found a muddy stream to roll around and splash in.  I found him dunking his head into the stream and lifting mud up out of the stream onto himself.  He was having a blast.  It took me 2 hours to bath him when I got home.

Howard discovered the swimming pool over Labor Day Weekend and he found that he really loves to swim.  He had a hard time with the steps going into the pool at first but after a few times of going in, he got the hang of it pretty well and eventually started jumping into the pool from the second to the top step.  He was not real graceful at first as he was pawing the water but he got the hang of it pretty fast and turned out being a very good swimmer by the end of the day.  Unfortunately, the pool will be closed for the winter soon so he'll have to wait until next year to go swimming again.  He will definitely have something to look forward to though next year.

Our beloved big lug, "Howard" met his untimely demise on October 23, 2009 at around 2:30pm as we had to put him down due to a bone cancer called "Osteosarcoma".  It attacked his front left leg around the ankle area but because this type of cancer is so aggressive it would only have been weeks to a couple months before it would have taken over major organs resulting in a terribly painful death.  They say once you see the first warning sign of this cancer that it is too late and that it has already spread to the rest of the body.  We loved on Howard as much as possible and fed him anything he wanted between finding out about his illness and the day that we put him down.   He will be missed greatly!