The largest number of dogs we owned at one time was three. After Annie, the last of these, died we were without a dog for the first time in many years.
John and I agreed that we would not get another dog. For one thing, every day at the pet resort, we already interacted with anywhere from ten to thirty dogs. For another, the requirements we had for an ideal dog were just too important to take a chance with.
We were housing seven cats at the time. Any dog we adopted would have to be extremely cat friendly.
Although we had four fenced yards at the kennel, we didn’t have a fenced yard adjacent to the house. Any dog we adopted couldn’t be a runner. Otherwise, I would have been agitating for a beagle.
Any dog we adopted would ideally get along really well with all kinds of other dogs, so we could take him or her to the kennel with us each day. Otherwise, we’d have to exercise our own dog separately, in addition to all the dogs were already exercising at the kennel.
Not long after we made this resolution, John drew my attention to the weekly ad placed in the little local paper by the Arnprior Humane Society. There was a black and white photo of a dog who strongly resembled a Corgi. The accompanying plea seemed to suggest that “Prisoner 1864” as he was described, was more than normally unhappy to be in the shelter and needed a rescuer very badly.
“Didn’t we agree, no more dogs?” I asked. We both knew I wasn’t really asking.
John pushed the paper towards me with a pleading look. I half expected him to cry, “But Mom!!!”
“Can’t we just go and look at him?”
Right. Last time we went to a shelter “just to look” at a cat, we came home with three.
Thirty minutes later, we were standing in the back of the shelter, watching a mutant Corgi run around, barking his head off.
“He seems kind of noisy,” I yelled.
“What?” John yelled back. “I can’t hear you. He’s really noisy.”
We retreated back to the office area. We reviewed the information on file for “Nomar” as he was named.
He was two years old. He had been turned in by a family on that time honoured excuse, “A family member is allergic.”
I accept that there are lots of people with allergies to dog and/or cat hair and dander. John has a cousin whose face swells up like a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, as soon as he sets foot in our house. It’s just that I know from my time on the Board of the Humane Society in Ottawa, that this is the most frequently used excuse for dumping an unwanted dog or cat there. Because saying, “He’s just become too much bother,” would make a person look bad, wouldn’t it?
Besides, in Nomar’s case, the people who turned him in had owned him for two years. Now, suddenly, somebody’s allergic? I wondered what behavioural problems had not been disclosed by the prior owners which had resulted in his sojourn at the shelter. My suspicions were raised further by the fact that since his arrival at the shelter he had already been adopted once, and returned after a couple of days.
Again, there was some specious reason given in the paperwork. “Changed my mind after I realised he had problems and how much work it would be to deal with them,” was likely the real reason.
By far and away, the number one reason dogs end up in a shelter is ‘behavioural problems’.
Now, those “behavioural problems” are for the most part things that are correctable with patient training, consistency and time. But dammit, we had agreed on no more dogs, and I really didn’t want to undertake a whole exercise in instilling civilized behaviour in this dog. And regardless of the fact that it was John who was pushing for the dog, I knew any training would fall to me.
John’s idea of training a dog to heel, is to shout “Quit pulling, dammit!” while being towed helplessly along the sidewalk.
Scrambling for any excuse not to take Nomar home that instant, I remembered that it was Friday, and we were having grandchildren to stay with us over the weekend. I reminded John of this, and said solicitously, that perhaps it would be better for the dog not to be introduced to a strange household when it was full of screaming children.
John turned to the lady in charge and asked if they would hold Nomar for us until Monday. Craftily, the lady put on an expression of profound regret and advised that if someone else came along who wanted him, they would have no choice but to adopt him out.
Right. This dog had been at the shelter for weeks if not months. He’d been adopted once and returned almost immediately. I searched in vain for the line up of eager customers pushing their way into the door to be first to take this guy home as soon as we left. They must have all been inexplicably delayed.
While I was thinking these uncharitable thoughts, John simply turned back to me with a pointed stare, and pulled out his wallet.
He paid up and before you could say “I thought we agreed no more dogs”, we were on our way home with Nomar, who favoured me with a smug look.
He knew that if it had been up to me, he’d still be waiting for adoption.
Bowing to the inevitable, I suggested we should rename him. The shelter lady had told us that “Nomar” was the name of some baseball player. It meant nothing to us, and furthermore, neither of us could remember it.
I came up with ‘Taffy’. That was his colour and since he looked more or less like a Pembroke Welsh Corgi, I thought it had a nice hidden passive-aggressive slur to it. There is an old rhyme –
“Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief,
Taffy came to my house and stole a leg of beef.
I went to Taffy’s house and Taffy was in bed;
So I picked up the jerry pot and hit him on the head.”
A jerry pot is another word for chamber pot.
The good news was that Taffy was totally uninterested in the cats. They loved him.
He was fully housebroken. He was not a chewer. He wasn’t interested in stealing food and was in fact very selective about which treats he would deign to accept. He discovered that the back stairs in the kitchen brought him to table top level near John’s place at the table.
He wasn’t at all interested in running away. When we first got home, we found a long lead to tie Taffy up outside, so he could do his business and not wander away. Taffy sat down beside the door and howled mournfully.
It quickly became apparent that the reason he wasn’t interested in running away was because he was devoted, heart and soul, to John.
From Day One, Taffy hated me.
This is not an exaggeration, but it was a totally new experience for me.
Generally our dogs had liked us both, or if anything, displayed some preference for me. Dogs in general loved me. Our last dog Annie, who had been afraid of every other living human on earth including John, felt safe only with me.
But the fact remained, Taffy hated me. Mostly he ignored me. Occasionally, if I were trying to get him to do something he didn’t particularly feel like doing, he growled at me. Sometimes he would even crawl into my lap to express his displeasure that the universe was still harbouring me
But the strongest indicator that I was not just unacceptable, but that John was his and his alone, was that any time I dared to approach my husband, a perfect frenzy of barking immediately broke out. If I tried to put my hands on my husband, or heavens forfend, hug him, Taffy rushed over and leapt on us, barking furiously.
He didn’t like the cats being too close to John, but he didn’t growl at them. He seemed to accept that they, especially Koko our Siamese, were higher in the pecking order.
He slept on a rug in John’s room. Thankfully, by this point we had separate bedrooms, so I didn’t need to fear being dog-murdered in my sleep.
He followed John everywhere. Every morning, when kennel duties were done, they jumped into the pickup and went into town to Tim Horton’s where John got his Double Double and Taffy ate one Old Fashion Plain doughnut. If John waited for what Taffy considered to be an unacceptably long time to give Taffy his doughnut, Taffy would politely make his own way into the bag and extract his (and only his) doughnut.
Occasionally Koko decided to join the expedition to Tim’s.
Both Taffy and John were afraid of him, so the truck wouldn’t get underway until Koko got bored and decided to move on.
It began to be clear why Taffy had lost his home. I guessed that he had ‘adopted’ one member of the family as his, and his growls and threatening behaviour had been a cause for alarm. In fairness to Taffy, he only actually bit me once. I had the temerity to put my hand on his collar to try to lead him away, when he ignored my command to come. He clearly felt justified, since I had ignored his growl.
Taffy was not as growly with other family members. He didn’t like John’s mother sharing the couch with him, but he accepted her presence as he knew that, unlike me, she would soon be leaving.
When we introduced him to the kennel, he was generally good with other dogs. He accompanied John on dog walks.
The cats who were boarding with us loved him as much as our cats did.
Generally he was not a big player, but he was pretty tolerant of the antics of others. If other dogs got too rambunctious around him, or otherwise did things he didn’t like, he would growl. The first time this happened, John pulled him away. But then we realised that none of the dogs was reacting to him.
Dogs are pretty good communicators. They understand each other’s body language and signals. A growl is usually taken as a serious warning to back off. The other dog’s response is generally to back off as requested, or to growl back, lift their lips and put on a display that shows they are ready to meet violence with violence. One of them will then usually back down.
The weird thing was that in Taffy’s case, pretty much without exception, they ignored him and went on with their play.
Obviously they took Taffy’s growling as merely the way he communicated. Despite the growling, they all loved him, so we stopped worrying about it.
Over the course of the next five years or so, Taffy and I reached a state of truce.
I left him to John’s care and he ignored me except when I attempted to hug my husband. He had no obedience commands, but that was okay, given that all he wanted to do was be where John was. We hardly ever walked him in public, but when we did, he stuck close to John anyway. If he pulled, John would do his “Quit pulling, dammit” routine, and Taffy would eventually leave off sniffing whatever had caught his attention and trot along.
John was happy. Taffy was happy. I was resigned. I knew that our situation was perfect for Taffy, and had we not adopted him, his growling would have meant a very long stay in the shelter.
I tried not to take it personally. But deep inside I wondered if there was something badly wrong with me. I kept remembering what Bill Murray said: “I’m suspicious of people who don’t like dogs. But I totally trust a dog when it doesn’t like a person.”
Yeah, well, screw you Bill Murray. Taffy wouldn’t have liked you either.