Dogs are Much Easier for Me to Understand Than People

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.

Good Childhood Memories: Suki

I know I usually have a rather dim view of my upbringing, but the blog gives me an opportunity to let out some things I don’t normally say publicly. To give the blog a little more positive beat, I’ve decided to talk about some of the bright spots of my childhood.

Whenever I see a pug, I always have to laugh. They really are such funny dogs, their generally jolly personality, the facial expressions on that wrinkled up face, the short, deep bark that they have (which is rather unusual for a small dog, most have a high pitch yap of some sort, which I find highly annoying), and the snorting noises like a pig that they make because of their nose shape.

I also laugh because it brings back memories of a pug my family had when I was a kid. My sister is over 9 years older than me, which means she left home for college in northern Indiana when I was about 9 years old. Before she left for college, as is typical for high school students in the Midwest, she had to take the ACT test. Because she didn’t schedule a test date until close to the deadline, she ended up taking it at a high school in Greenville, Illinois, a town about 50 miles east of our hometown.

My dad had been thinking about getting a dog for my mom for a while, and when he went with my sister to the appointment to take the ACT (she was 17 years old by this time, but as a teen, she could get lost very easily, she does somewhat better now, but she still isn’t good with directions), he asked some of the teachers there about animal shelters.

Not an actual picture of her, I don't think I have any

When they came back, he brought back a tan colored pug named Suki. The shelter had said that she had belonged to a military couple from Scott Air Force Base here in Southwestern Illinois. The couple had been transferred elsewhere and couldn’t take her wherever they were going to. She was already 9 years by this point, but still had some considerable energy to her. She was used to her former owners taking her for rides in their car, and for several months, she would run in circles at the front door like she was chasing her tail as a form of protest when someone would go out the front door without her.