Pets

That's me, the one with less fluff, with our dog Blackie, whom we've taken to calling Andre Jefferson Blackwell the Thirst, for fun (seriously don't ask, we don't know why).

For most people owning a pet is a choice you make to have a small (usually) cuddly (mostly) animal that you wanna share a good few years of your life with. In the case of Blackie I got him by falling for Kata and moving in with her. He's a cute little fluff ball, a cockapoo (part cocker spaniel, part poodle, part stinky, all cute) and from the first day we met, he took to me. Kata got him when he was 6 years old and he'd either been abused or had serious problems with a previous owner. Anyway, he didn't like men when Kata got him and he didn't like it when people gesticulated (which reinforces the abuse aspect).

In the last 10 months, he's taken to me something crazy. He's turned from a mummy's boy to a total daddy's boy. He damn near follows me around any time I get up to do anything whatsoever, he's often right under my feet at just the right time to get kicked or punched entirely by accident. On one occasion as i was opening a flat pack furniture box, he was right beside me, interested to see what was in the box "is it for me daddy?" he was asking (in his own doggy way). He was also right there when the tape that i was pulling hard on snapped and my hand flew back to hit him on the head. He's been hit in the head by a Wii controller, which traumatised him for a few months (Kata's parents bought a Wii after visiting us after we got ours, we had left Blackie with them when we went to Ottawa for a friend's birthday and when we got back we were told that Blackie didn't like going in the basement. Kata asked, "when you go in the basement what do you guys do?" Her mother told her "oh we go down there and play Wii").

Before moving in with Kata, back in the old country, I'd not had a pet since I lived with my parents, we had a dog then and she was a sweet thing, relatively self sufficient and not too much of a hassle, but none of us much liked taking her for walks, not that dad could (disability) and mum would take her out at times, but technically when we got her she was "my dog" so you know, I guess I shirked my part of the deal. When she died (after her second run in with a car) we were all broken up about it, dad had been in hospital at the time and we broke the news to him not long before he was discharged as we didn't want to make him feel worse when he was recovering. We didn't get another pet and when I lived alone even though I'd considered getting a pet I didn't feel it was right to leave a pet alone in the house for hours at a time (I'm not judging those who do) and even when I was off work for a few years with a chronic knee injury, I still didn't think to get a pet, I'd become used to being alone (not that I was a recluse, but really the Internet doesn't count as "company").

Now I have a dog, who I care about and for, he's an ever present companion (see above) and more than that when I go to sit or lay on the couch, he almost always gets there first and is waiting for me to sit down (he's not furniture trained). I take him for about a 30 min walk in the morning and a 10min walk at night, I clean up after him, recycling the plastic bags we get in every day life (I've used everything from magazine postal bags to bread or cereal bags to clean up his poop) and I make sure he's fed and watered (as does Kata). The one compromise we made with him, is he has his own dog bed to sleep in and for the most part, he sleeps in it every night and when I wake up in the morning, there he is.

The point of this post wasn't just to go on about Blackie, rather I was going to talk about the Canadian and I presume North American penchant for hybrid dog, so I guess I should get onto that.

Blackie as I said is a cockapoo, a recognised hybrid dog, with a great personality, good with kids and hypo allergenic (in so much as a dog can be) since they don't shed and they have very little in the way of dander (dandruff if you're a human) or a particularly strong odour (although Blackie has a stinky mouth). What struck me though is the amount of bizarre cross breeds (hybrids) that there are these days. I assume that many of them are "happy little accidents", labradoodles (Labrador retriever with poodle), golden doodles (Golden retriever and poodle) and cockapoos aren't too much of a stretch, but seriously, who looked at a Yorkshire terrier and thought "now what if we crossed that with a poodle?". I kid you not, yorkipoos and the hilariously named schnoodles (Schnauzer and poodle). Poodle crosses all have the lack of shedding and the lack of dander, so they more or less make sense, also poodles are smart, though all the poodles I've seen look dumb, but still, the crosses seem sensible, cockapoos for example live something like 15 to 18 years making them a really long lived pet which is a bonus.

It gets worse though, how about a Jack Russell crossed with a Pug, know as a Jug, or a Boston terrier with a Pekingese, known as a Bostinese, how about a Chihuahua with a poodle, the chi-poo. If you want to see a load more of them here's a link, my favourite so far is the Bagle Hound, beagle crossed with a basset hound, mostly cos I can't read that without thinking its a small round dog with a hole in the middle.

The days of the mongrel are gone, sorry mutts but you are surplus to requirement. Not that mutts are being euthanised (British spelling and I'm not changing it for any spell checker!) in the streets, but nowadays they're all given names to make them appear legitimate and not just the result of casual canine copulation. I guess in this more label conscious era its just not cool to have a mutt any more...