Meic and Holly

After a respectful time mourning our dear old Benny, Karen and I decided that the house was too empty and too quiet. We began a search for a new dog, which may or may not have been such a clever idea. In any event, we now have a border collie and a shih poo, both of them black and white, neither yet three months old. Certainly what we now lack in sleep we make up in exercise.

I’m grateful to Karen for permitting another border collie in the house. Having previously owned two of the beasts, we know well the old adage, “You can have an immaculate house, or you can have a border collie, but you can’t have both.” BCs are bright and funny and companionable and all kinds of good things, but in just one week an average-sized border collie can shed fifty kilograms of hair, and all of it ends up under the furniture or tumbles down the hallway like a country song. Especially if you have guests.

Karen’s quid for my quo was that she would get a shih tzu or a shih tzu wannabe. A tiny little black and white shih poo princess joined our family two weeks ago and now owns our hearts.

Like children, dogs need two names for those stern occasions when you have to read the Riot Act. Hence Karen’s dog became Holly Berry and mine Rhydian Meical. Holly and Meic when they’re well-behaved, which is most of the time.

Puppies have two speeds– asleep and supersonic. They spend about half their daylight hours in each state.

After a nap, it’s typically Holly who wakens first to see Meic’s tail right in front of her nose. A big, fat, twitching tail. Seriously, what’s a girl to do? Well, what would you do if you had a mouth full of needle-sharp fangs needing a workout? Of course– you’d sink them into that tail!

Meic, thus unceremoniously awakened, calls Holly a female dog, or a word that means the same thing, and seeks revenge. For the next hour or two, a shape-shifting bundle of black and white fur yips, yelps, and roars back and forth across the floor, tumbling this way and that, until finally a truce is called. They then share a drink, and collapse together into a corner, the picture of puppy bliss, a last nap before dinner.

Wanting everything to be perfect, Karen made personalized dinner bowls– Holly’s with, of course, her name and a holly sprig, and Meic’s with his name and Y Ddraig Goch, the Welsh dragon. If ever two dogs should know which dish belongs to whom, it would be our puppies. But it doesn’t work like that.

It’s an article of faith amongst dogs that the choicest food is always in somebody else’s dish, so the holly leaves and the red dragon only signal to the dogs where the good stuff is. Before the bowls hit the floor, Holly is crowding in on the dragon and Meic is headed straight for the festive leaves. Looking smug, each wolfs down every illicit kibble. Trust me, nothing improves a dog’s appetite like stolen food.

Over the next months and years as our dogs learn all the basic doggie stuff, and maybe some agility and flyball, with lots of hikes with Dad, I’ll continue to study human nature as displayed by our canine friends. Dogs show all the love and fear and loyalty and curiosity of humans, and they’re driven by all the same motivations. They frankly teach us so much about ourselves.

But it’s easier to study dogs, because unlike humans, what you see is what you get.