From the time I was born, to the time I was about 16, my
family always had at least one dog in the home. I’ve talked about Suki
the Pug, but my family had two other dogs at various times, and sometimes
overlapping. Katie, a Shetland
Sheepdog, which is more commonly known a “Sheltie” or “Miniature Collie”,
because they look just like a standard Collie, but are about half the weight.
I used to joke that
she was about 25 pounds, and about half of that was fur. In later years, my
family had a dog that was Yellow Lab and Chow, named Rose. She looked almost
exactly like a lab, but acted like a Chow, which is a bad combination.
She was 75 pounds (I have noticed that when other large
breed dogs are crossed with a Chow, the resulting dog ends up becoming larger),
was very tall, if you measured her height when she was standing on her back
legs, she would have been somewhere between 4’6 to 4’9
She was a massive dog, larger than an average Lab, which
most people assumed she was fully Lab, and when she would jump up on the fence
facing the sidewalk (my parents still live in that house on the corner), the 4
foot fence would only come up to her chest, and she would let her legs dangle
over the fence. When people would walk by, she would bark, and wag her tail,
and when people would see her sheer size, and hear that deep bark, they would
walk across the street, rather than pass by her.
The cruel irony of it (at least for Rose), was that she
enjoyed having random people pet her, but very few people were willing to do
so. She loved people, especially children, but with having a typical
Chow personality, she was very territorial, I remember my neighboring having
a pit bull that both he and his now ex-wife pampered, she was the happiest dog
around, and Rose returning her high pitched pit bull yelp with a vicious
growling that convinced me that she would kill her if ever given the
opportunity.
She could also get violent if you tried to force her to do
something she didn’t want to do (which is why my family ended up giving her
away, we warned the new owners about that), or when she would get scared.
