Falling in Love Again…
Ah but why? This isn’t even a matter of (in)fidelity, darlings. My soulmate and I acquired a pair of dogs, both sweet, both mutts, both with issues. We’ve never done the mutt thing before in our many years together. Nine greyhounds, veterans of the track with tattooed ears and automatic submission to the occasionally necessary, always temporary, muzzle. Some of them needed to learn how not to eat your dinner before you had a stab at it. My dear. We even had two giants. Scottish deerhounds, every bit as lordly and unkempt and flowing in motion as we’d been led to believe. They were gods, just as the greys were angels. Then we had to face a truth Poe pointed out in his piquant way close to 170 years ago:
“But he grew old, this knight so bold, and o’er his heart a shadow fell, as he found no spot of ground that looked like El Dorado.”
We’ve graduated from El Dorado. We grew old. So we rescued Scotties. And then a cairn. Always moving smaller. Then the two mutts. We weren’t being snobs. We saw something in the pictures posted by their fosters. Eyes. Attitude. Vitality. They were seven. The average age of our previous terrier rescues was twelve. A year, two years, is not enough. So we gambled on hybrid vigor. Too much with the purebreds we thought. We need some chaos!
The genetic characterization of the new guys was, well, ambiguous, even loose. The dark guy was called Toby in the first picture, the white/tan guy Joey. Okay. Then we got an email update. It was the other way around. Whereupon I had a hissy fit, as women are wont to do, and I demanded renaming both because I’m too old to juggle name switches ever since Philly’s NBC news became CBS News and vice versa. Which my mate could understand because we’ve been making the same mistake for 30 years. Channel 3 is Channel 10, and Channel 10 is Channel 3.
New names. Tommy (the dark one) and Zippy (the white/tan one). The downstairs fortyish daughter refused to accept the new names, and puppy discipline went all to hell.
Tommy had the early easy going. Everybody loved him. Zippy not so much. He was more and more obviously not a terrier mix but something else.
Well, you girls know me. Always was a snob. If we had mutts I wanted to know who the bitch was and who the stud. We were certain, in a day or two, that we had two mismatched, very recently neutered males who didn’t like each other much at all, and who, given a single instance of jealousy could leap at each other’s throats. The first refugee was the daughter downstairs, who thought she wanted Zippy, whom she insisted was Toby and maybe a Chihuahua mix.
She much preferred Zippy, whom she knew as Joey, until the tiny terror attacked ALL her cats in one day, never landing a blow (because cats always know how to jump higher than toy dogs, duh), but she lost her temper and locked herself in her room.
The next day, Zippy, having been exiled from his newest, closest foster mom, went all in against Tommy over a stuffed toy. They were both going for blood. At each other’s necks. I stopped them with a roll of paper towels. Nobody got hurt. But I realized nobody had told us who they were. No, we needed to know at least what they were so we could get right-sized muzzles. Cats terrified downstairs, two recently neutered males at jealous war with one another over their TWO new moms, and, dear hearts, the only cool head in the game was mine.
I looked at their pictures again. These two had been put together not long ago. Two bad eggs thrown into a single basket to be rid of. What if they weren’t mutts at all? What if we — agèd greyhound and purebred terrier fanciers — were just easy targets for purebreds gone wrong? 11, 12, 13 rescues… Hit’em again. Actually, I’d call that poetic justice, sweethearts.
Pictures. Sizing muzzles. For Tommy we had one too long and one too small, then a recommendation of a size for ‘Border Terrier.’ Lo and behold. He just might be one. Right face, right coat, right weight, right personality. Nobody we found could tell us he wasn’t.
Zippy was obviously a wild card. Until I hit on the idea of looking at a site he might have genetic relations to. Papillons. Those ears.
Looked at a rescue site. They don’t all look like Westminster spinnaker ears. Right size, right temperament, right ears. I posted at a Papillon site looking for advice about a right-sized muzzle. So far, they’re all over his picture. Nobody’s intimated he isn’t a Papillon. And nobody’s said they’re that easy to live with. Their muzzle advice is looking spot on.
Call it the Westminster curse. Which might just look like this…
This is the time when a TG such as myself should take credit for knowing the difference between male and female. But I can’t. I keep trying to call Zippy ‘she.’ He’s a man in every respect but size and dartiness. Can you say the same?
“Over the mountains of the moon, down the valley of the shadow, ride boldly ride, the shade replied, if you seek for El Dorado..”
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