Meet our new puppy Kenzo

Sometimes people write articles or blog posts about “how do I make it in this particular line of work?” and their answer is “this is what I did, but honestly I can’t say that it’s likely that this will ever work for anybody else”.

Well, this is my entry for how to get a dog: “Wander around Gilshochill and Cadder in August until someone offers you one”.

During the first lockdown in 2020, Ella went up to a little girl in the street and licked her in the face; the little girl told us that they had a husky that they couldn’t care for properly anymore because Dad and eldest son both had new time commitments, and, long story short, that’s how we got Zoose.

And then six years later, a few months after Zoose died, two dog owner friends in a nearby street told us there was a Samoyed puppy that the owner couldn’t keep any more.

Alert readers will have noticed that it’s not August, and it turns out that it wasn’t that simple. The original owner had to go to hospital at least medium-term, and the friend they entrusted the puppy to initially despaired of being able to keep Kenzo; but a few days after we adopted him for the first time, he told us that he couldn’t sleep and had made a terrible mistake. He’d organised friends to help him care for the dog, and when he walked through our front door Kenzo went berserk with happiness, so sure, we gave him back.

Then the owner’s mum took a turn for the worse and he had to care for her as well, so he got back to us: would we still be interested?

And the thing is: if you’ve decided that “dog owner” is the lifestyle you want, you unfortunately need to think actuarially. Cutesy people on the Internet talk about their “furbabies”, where “fur” actually means “lesser”: unlike human children, your dog will never do you proud by e.g. inventing a startlingly-useful thing or becoming Prime Minister, but nor might they ever run the risk of doing something mortifying like e.g. burying a sequence of people underneath their back garden patio.

Also: you will almost certainly outlive your dog.

Ella is the best dog I have ever known, and I will be a complete emotional wreck when she eventually dies; but when that happens, I want the distraction of another dog that I have to take out into the cold and wet. It was bad when we had a three-year period when one dog died after another; it would be worse if our house was suddenly too quiet and too tidy, and we no longer had an excuse to walk around our neighbourhood.

We’d decided that we weren’t looking for puppies, or really any particular kind of dog (although we had considered Samoyeds): rather, we’d accept any dog that fortuitously landed in our lap. The most important thing was that Ella needed to be happy with New Dog.

Their first meeting was dubious, but it was really hot that day and Ella was grumpy; the next day, Ella and Kenzo got on a lot better, so Kenzo moved in, and the main problem was that the two dogs had too much fun that Ella was knackered. This time around we’ve limited the amount of romping so the hydrotherapists don’t tell us off; it also helps that Kenzo tried to take Ella’s treat the other day and she told him off in no uncertain terms, and since then he’s backed off and given her space. (They still play Teeth at dinner time, though.)

So, quite fortuitously, we have a seven-month-old puppy doing the usual puppy thing of apparently never sleeping, constantly jumping onto and off of things, and deciding that his favourite toys are your shoes. Except that, in a quite ridiculous surfeit of luck, he’s also a beautiful fluffy white thing born on Valentine’s Day, ffs, whose official pedigree name is Balu Charming.

It’s going to be a lot of fun.