Dogs as Pets and Pet Dogs

by
Paul James

Mum, can I have a pet snake? Dad, mum won’t let me keep rats in the house! I dunno, kids and their animals. I remember having a pet mouse when I was a youngster (unbeknown to my parents), but it wasn’t really a pet as a pet is truly defined, as its home wasn’t a cage with a revolving wheel, a tray full of nibbles and a bunch of wood shavings, no, my mouse, Sniff, lived in a box at the bottom of the garden at night and the inside pocket of my school blazer during the day. Why? Well, I thought it would impress the girls. Ah well, we live in learn. I know now that all the lads with nice girlfriends had a family dog as their pet, and taking it for walks was a great way to meet up with their sweethearts of an evening.

Mum, dad, can I have a dog? I don't know why I kept asking as the answer was always a predictable NO each time the question was raised. Our neighbors had a dog called Trash and that’s exactly what it did. This mongrel bitch trashed everything she could during her conscious hours. Their furniture was torn to shreds, all the wooden doors were scored with scratch marks, the house reeked from top to bottom with doggy odors, including the fowl stench of pee, and the retched thing never stopped barking. I often wondered why they never gave it some kind of obedience dog training so that everyone, including them, would get a bit of peace and quiet into their lives. I used to despise the Smith family and always blamed them for my parent’s decision not to get a dog. That was until Elsa came into our lives one very cold, wet, and wintery day.

I remember returning home from the fish and chip shop one evening and hot on my heels was this floppy eared cross breed with a limp and a lop sided jaw. She’d obviously been out for a while as she was shivering and shaking with the cold. I felt so sorry for the poor little sod as this pooch was soaked through to the skin too. The young mutt appeared a little shy, even nervous perhaps, and I wondered if she’d attended some kind of dog training school at some point as she seemed to obediently walk by my side without any fuss whatsoever.

I allowed her to follow me home and that caused a right ole ruckus indoors. “You can take that filthy hound right back to where you found her”, screamed my mother. “Just look at the state of my lovely clean floor! Get that dopey dog out of the house NOW!” I was just about to guide this dripping dog back to the streets when she flopped herself onto the kitchen floor, rolled her big sad eyes up towards mum as if to say, “please misses, just let me stay for the night”.

Guess what? It worked! The lady of the house turned to me and said; “Don’t you think I’m going soft or anything, but we can’t really send her back out onto the streets on a cold winter’s night like tonight. We’ll clean her up a bit, give her a feed, and fist thing tomorrow morning, we’re taking her to the dog pound where her owners can collect her”. Of course, I was over the moon to have a dog in the house, even if was for just one night.

The following day, we took Elsa, as we had temporarily named her, to the dog compound. They said it was unlikely that anyone would come to collect her as it appeared she had been badly treated by the previous owners. They went on to say that they had most likely driven her miles from the family home and abandoned her onto the streets. They asked if we would mind looking after her for a couple weeks just to see if anyone did come for her. They explained that they were full to capacity and if she wasn’t collected and no one adopted her as a pet, it was very likely she would have to be put to sleep.

To cut a very long story short, she wasn’t collected, but she wasn’t returned to the dog compound for sudden death either. Over that fortnight, she won over the hearts of everyone in the house, including my anti-animal mother who went out and invested in some dog grooming supplies. She became a family pet for 13 long years and was permanently named Elsa. This much loved and pampered pooch really did live a dog’s life before she sadly passed away in the spring of 1986.

Paul James is a proficient webmaster and publisher of Pickingpets.com This is a brand new website which is to include all manor of pet related issues. His first pieces, including this one, are about pet dogs, taking them into the home, and the benefits of obedience dog training. Lots of new content to come in the weeks and months ahead.

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