This whole life without Pete circus isn‘t just about keeping children functioning, our family has four legged members in it that have been impacted by the loss of him, too.
Because life wasn’t busy enough at the start of this year with juggling kids and school holidays and hospital visits for Pete, we added a puppy to the mix.
Murphy - the Jack Russell puppy with the corkscrew tail - arrived on my birthday in January.
He was a replacement for a Jack Russell puppy we had received the previous January, called Rooster.
Rooster was part of a succession planning exercise Pete and I were undertaking for the benefit of the children.
We have a very old mini foxy-Jack Russell calked Hugo who was our first ’fur child’ even before we were married. He went everywhere with me and had a ball with Pete’s work dogs.
But Pete’s last work dog died 2 years ago and Hugo spent a very long cold winter by himself for the first time in 14 years.
We decided he needed a mate to keep him company. And, at 14, we knew there could be an end in sight, so to ease the burden of that death on the children and to allow a puppy to learn the good habits of the old dog, we decided on a puppy - enter, Rooster.
Rooster was every bit the arrogant Jack Russell which both annoyed and impressed Pete’s dog training brain immensely. But that arrogance went too far on Mother’s Day when Rooster thought it was a great joke to run away from our pleading calls to come across a busy street and straight under a car.
Pete blamed himself a lot for Rooster’s death because he felt he hadn’t put enough time into his training - he had never owned dog that didn’t come when it was called, and he had never watched one go under the wheels of a car as a result.
The wonderful lady who bred Rooster completely understood - as an owner of Jack Russells for many years, she had known many terriers to take on a vehicle and lose and offered a replacement puppy to us.
When the offer came in November, Pete and I did ponder the sanity of it, having just committed to a giant kitten.
But when January arrived and we had dealt with 2018, and we were presented with a carry cage full of puppies to choose from, it was absolutely the band aid our family needed.
The whole family was involved with the choice of Murphy. Initially, I had told the breeder I wanted one like Rooster, a broken-coated puppy. But when presented with four puppies to choose from, we struggled to choose between the one we thought we would get and the one we would eventually get.
In the end, it was Pete‘s choice.
He assessed both carefully, holding them up and when pushed he chose the puppy that would become Murphy on the following assessment:
”If it was a work dog, it would be this one - he’s got a good head on him, good markings, he’s alert and got a bit of go about him...”
And so Murphy and his funny little bent/corkscrew tail was the perfectly imperfect addition to our house to help the children begin a new year, and give Pete a project (and ease the wound of Rooster for all of us).
He is everything Pete loved in what he would call a ‘loaf of bread dog’ (As in, they are the size of a loaf of bread). He had spunk and attitude and cleverness. And very quickly we knew he would fit right in.
But now the responsibility of training Murph falls on me.
Pete’s dogs would have walked over broken glass if he’d told them to. He could put fresh meat on the nose of one of them and they wouldn’t touch it until he told them to. He had one that he would simulate shearing on - dragging it on its back, rolling it around, doing the long blows then once it was pushed out through his legs, would dance around him barking excitedly - he even had one that he could make bark at different decibels (from ‘speak up’ to ‘gentle’ to ‘little one’ depending on how big his hand gestures were).
Right now, Murphy thinks that coming when he’s called is purely dependent on whether he thinks its a good idea. And any lurch towards him is cue for racing away barking happily. Pete would be mortified.
But Murphy also sits quietly with crying children. He curled up on the couch with them or onto their bed as they talk to him. And when he bounces around on our bed I can’t help but tell him how much Pete would have loved him.
So while Hugo‘s hearing has deteriorated to the point of requiring hand signals to get him to do anything so the likelihood of him teaching Murphy any social skills have been lost, the company they provide one another and the children is perfect.
The local vet is also doing quite well out of the whole legacy animal debacle as well.
When the kitten and the puppy needed vaccinating in February, all three animals took a trip there.
I walked in and simply said:
”I need a puppy and a kitten vaccinated... and I don’t care what it costs, but this one cannot die in the next 6 months, so you give it and sell me whatever it needs to keep it alive. We cannot have another death to deal with.”
Turns out, the now 16yo dog is in fine health for his age.
留言