My other baby

I got Bud in 2001 as a sprightly 7-year old from the Shenton Park Dog's Home, and let me put paid to the ridiculous rumour that you need to have a dog from puppy age for it to really truly love you. Bud loves me so much his world stops turning if he has to be apart from me for any reason, and he was well into middle age before we met. In fact, I think as far as canine love goes, the opposite is true: puppies are cute and all, but they are so fickle they will love anything and anyone; it's adult dogs (especially the ones from pounds and homes) who are the ones that really take time to get to know you and then make a decision as to whether or not they will make a lasting attachment.

Poor old Bud has had his life turned upside down and inside out, and he didn't even get to have a vote on whether a baby should or should not enter our household. (That's one of the many fabulous things about dog ownership, I've found; it's great for allowing a little bit of tyrannical rule to take place without anyone having to call any authorities). Buddy is an arthritic ball-obsessed 13 year old Staffy/Labrador cross and once upon a time, he was the absolute light of my life, the object of my slavish devotion, and (quite literally during a depressive episode a couple of years ago) the sole reason for me to get out of bed in the morning.

Then in early October last year, Anna was born and from Bud's point of view, everything went to shit.

Bear in mind that Bud still has a pretty terrific life, as far as your average dog goes. He gets walked at least once a day, without fail, which includes a park where he can run off his lead; his dinner biscuits get mixed up with a bit of warm water every night so they're not too dry for him (and when he was eating roo meat mixed in with it, that was microwaved so it was not too cold, being straight from the fridge); he sleeps on a double bed in my bedroom that he is kind enough to share with me (and recently, I bought an electric blanket and I lasted a whole week before I weakened and started turning his side on as well); he has his own Drizabone for the chilly weather. You get the picture: this is no strictly utilitarian biological alarm system we are talking about here. It's just that as Bud didn't think he was your average dog – he thought he was an average person – it has come as a bit of a shock to realise just where in fact he does sit on the food chain.

However, he is still my bestest furry pride and joy, and I would be lost without him even though Anna is here to fill my life to overflowing, and it has occurred to me that anyone reading this blog really would have no idea how big a part of my life he is. Hence, time to rectify the situation and declare publicly: I LOVE MY DOG! The fact that a few weeks ago he got very sick and stopped eating for days, and then threw up uber smelly stomach contents and so we had a panicked visit to the emergency vet hospital, and he underwent major surgery to remove a big lump of plastic (from a very expensive toy, grrr) from his bowel, and it was all very upsetting and teary because I thought he was going to die, and yet I wrote not one word about it on this blog, does not indicate a general give-a-shit factor of nil, it indicates that the whole thing was so very stressful I could not find any way of writing about it without descending into melodramatics and hysteria. It was bad enough that I was doing that in real life on my ever-patient family, let alone making a permanent record of it in a public arena for (potentially) everyone to see.

He has now made a full recovery, the only legacy being a very cool scar on his belly, a stern warning that he is not to eat any bits of plastic again, and a tremendously huge vet bill that I will be paying off until I am old.

One of the things that I have realised is that more than likely, unless Bud lives to be very old indeed, Anna will probably not remember him at all. And because he is such a fabulous dog and such an important part of my life, this makes me quite sad. The relationship between Bud and Anna has been thrown into relief lately due to two events: first, Buddy growled at Anna, and second, Buddy got between Anna and a stranger on the street trying to say hello to her and let it be known that he, stranger, had better not try any funny business otherwise he, Bud, would have something to say about it.

As strange as it sounds, I was quite happy about the growling thing. It means Bud is prepared to give warnings about when he is reaching the end of his tether, and I can teach Anna as she gets older about what growling means. In the meantime, of course, it's up to me to move her out of his face, or to tell him to shove off and get out of the way. And the growl in particular was not of the snarly listen-up-kid-back-off-before-I-eat-you kind, it was of the whiny oh-please-can't-you-just-leave-me-be? variety. It was also when Anna was grabbing his toes and I think that's just too much to ask any dog to have to put up with, so I can't really say as I blame him. The 'stranger getting too close' incident was a happy realisation on my part that despite the growling, and the almost constant interruptions of mine and Anna's floor play time by a wet nose and a slobbery ball, Bud has come to the conclusion that Anna is now a part of the family, and is prepared to make minor adjustments to reflect that.

So all I really need to do now is figure out some way to enable Buddy to live a very long time indeed. If there happen to be any practising genetic scientists out there who want to take a few molecular samples from something to practise growing something else from …… Well, anyway. Maybe I'll think of something else, just in case genetic cloning doesn't take off in a big way for household pets members.



As this post is dedicated to Buddy, and not Anna, I won't mention here that Anna got her third tooth through a little while ago. (Dead on the nine month mark; I think she has started reading my baby how-to manuals.) I will leave that news for some other time.