01 October 2015
Yeay Puppiiiees!!
The joys of family and new dog ownership.
by Serena Sinclair
Our family has always owned dogs. They are most definitely part of the family. The family living at home is now, however, sadly depleted, with children supposedly grown up and scattered. Well, they were for some years. It seems that I may have at least one of them back for a while as he reviews his life, work and relationships. What, I hear you ask, does this have to do with dogs? Well, my other half has a very large, lovely deerhound. He also used to have the most intelligent dog I have ever met, a collie who went simply by the name of Dog. Dog was fifteen and going strong when some idiot, driving too fast through country lanes, ran into him and killed him. Dear Hound (there is a great book of this name by the children’s author Jill Murphy, by the way) was left alone. That was two years ago and we have been threatening to get a companion for him for all that time. At first it was too soon; then there was the problem of suitability. The new companion had to be smaller than the deerhound (well, would you want two hairy dogs the size of small donkeys in your house?!) and yet large enough or feisty and robust enough to be able to play with a very large but gentle hound. We hoped the hound would agree with our choice. What on earth should we choose though?
Whippets were suggested, and as one of our neighbours has whippets we knew that the combination worked. The problem was that I am not that keen on whippets. They are lovely dogs, but they lack that ‘cuddleability’ factor which I, personally, look for in a dog (so does the deerhound of course, majestic and handsome as he is). They are usually skinny and long legged. I am not, which may of course be part of the problem. What about a Bedlington terrier crossed with a whippet? This is an extremely appealing combination and does have a lot going for it. However, good litters are not always easy to find and there was too much going on in our lives to want to scour the countryside for the right breeders. Some Vizsla puppies came up for sale locally, but the breeder wanted £1,000 each for them. This seemed a bit excessive, even though they are purebred dogs and not mongrels masquerading as ‘designer’ breeds, of which there do seem to be an awful lot around today. Still, yesterday’s mongrel, possibly today’s purebred, so today’s mongrel may well be tomorrow’s Kennel Club dog. How long before the Cockapoos and Labradoodles are being shown at Crufts?
Which brings us neatly to my newly acquired ‘Patadors’ or ‘Labradales’. I put them in the plural deliberately, as I have ended up, rather unintentionally, with two of them. One is supposed to belong to afore-mentioned son – except that he is still extricating himself from life abroad. Ours is male, to be the companion to Dear Hound. His is female, because… well, just because there were six bitches and only one male in the litter. We heard about them through the village grapevine and they are a cross between a cross (Labrador/Patterdale) and a working Labrador. Patterdales you may not have heard of, but they are very feisty little working terriers, bred in the Fells for on-foot fox hunting. Quite how they cross-breed with Labradors I am not really sure, as I would have thought there was a bit of a size issue, but, like most terriers, they clearly have aspirations.
We used to have a Patterdale. She was black with a rough, wiry coat and the wildest temperament I have ever encountered in a domestic dog (although at the end of a day’s hunting she would love to curl up on your lap). I wouldn’t even like to calculate the number of replacement guinea pigs, rabbits and chickens we had to buy for neighbours – not to mention the bottles of whisky! I guessed that maybe a cross between a Patterdale and a Labrador might, if one were to get the best of each rather than the worst, result in dogs that were not as overly anxious to please as Labs, but somewhat more controllable than Patterdales; that do not have the Lab tendency to run to fat, nor the terrier tendency to an over-inflated ego. Time will tell…
In the meantime, I have spent the last ten days being completely besotted and totally distracted by two really gorgeous, affectionate, playful little short-haired black puppies who seem to adore each other – and me. They are, of course, not yet house-trained, although that is coming along pretty well considering it is hard to know, unless you catch one of them ‘in flagrante’, who is responsible for that small yellowish puddle on the kitchen floor. They do sit before their food is put down in front of them and they seem to understand ‘Off!’ (the flowerbed mainly, but it might also be the Dear Hound’s food bowl) and ‘Bed!’ as well. I am slightly disappointed to see that they have the Lab tendency to greed, gobbling down their moistened puppy food as if they hadn’t eaten for days and the next meal might never come, rather than understanding that it is produced pretty regularly every three or four hours. At the moment I am attributing this behaviour to having had to fight with six other puppies every mealtime and hoping that there will come a day when they attain Dear Hound’s laid back attitude to his food – it is frequently sniffed, then ignored for hours or until some human food titbits are added which make it worth eating. The last few days of sunshine have been an absolute blessing as I am not sure they would have been quite as keen to go outside and expend massive amounts of energy racing round and round and round (and underneath and between) my least favourite dull, boring cotoneasters and laurels had it been as cold, wet and miserable as much of August and the earlier part of September. I have also had the added bonus of a family visit – my youngest daughter came back from Uni for a few days, not to see me of course, but to see puppies. Her WhatsApp message ran ‘Yeay Puppiiiees!!! See you at the weekend.’
