Out of all the silly titles I have ever given my blogs, this one is probably one of the silliest and that's because it's named after a few of the silly names that I give to my silly little girl.
This blog has been morphing in my head as I've been trying to get to write it (it's been a whole process - do not judge) and I have to admit that I think I've written something close to being like this before but decided for whatever reason I was not going to publish it and I don't know if I actually deleted it or not, because when I searched the blog for Chai's name, precious little actually came back, but I did find this little gem from around 2021 (note to self, write reference to the thing first before closing the page the thing is on so you can go back and check dates etc)
"She came from a breeding farm, peed all over the carpets and crawled her way into my heart when I wasn't looking, but she's wonderful - except when she is barking at three o'clock in the morning, at which point, she's a lot less cute. She petrified of everything, but getting braver, meeting the family and starting to have a life that doesn't involved producing and looking after puppies, and I couldn't want any more for her."
I stand by almost every word of this, but the thing I can't stand by is the 'I couldn't want any more for her' because honestly, I want her to have a sibling, and there is a big reason for that.
This whole post has come about because I saw a beautiful and broken dog on the page of one of the rescues I really need to unfollow for the moment, because I know there are things I need to do before committing myself to getting another dog, and it's not fair to Chai, to me, or to any other dog to even think about rushing that because I've seen 'the perfect dog' on a Facebook page. This isn't going to make a lot of sense outside of my head, or has the potential not to anyway, but here goes nothing... there is no such thing as THE perfect dog, because every dog is the perfect dog, what there is such thing as is the perfect home for each dog. I know that Dogtor Chai (she was dressed up as a dogtor for Hallowe'en and it is still the funniest thing I have ever seen bar one video about flags in the Six Nations) and I would both love to have another dog living with us, and I also know both of our minds would be totally blown and worlds would be turned upside down when the new girl (because let's face it, we're probably going for another girl because we're an all girl household/ Coven of Bitches) arrived, but we have plenty of love, blankets and tuna to spare and I think we could help another traumatised girl to find herself again, but this time it might not be as hard as it was before.
What do I mean? Well, the topic of conversation which cropped up around aforementioned beautiful and broken dog was this "unfair" stipulation of having to have a resident dog to adopt dogs with certain backgrounds and issues, and how *IT'S NOT FAIR*. Firstly, any adulting using that phrase makes me want to sarcastically ask ARE YOU NEW? and secondly, that depends who you're trying to be fair to, and the rescues are trying to be fair to the dog, and that is the right thing to do. It might make you feel all happy and special to think, oh, I can nurse this dog back to whatever with all my love and affection, but there is a reason that they need another dog. I say this as someone who is one hundred percent a dog lover and not anything close to a dog or animal behaviour expert, but also someone with first hand experience with dogs who are shut down. If someone is saying 'must be homed with another dog' it's not to stop you owning a dog, it's not to be unfair to those without a dog and it's not discrimination, it's putting what the dog needs first and not producing a situation like Chai and I.
I'm not going to get too much into the circumstances Chai was in before I got her, because it's not fair for me to do that. I got a snapshot of her life, I don't think the people had her were bad people at all, but she was a part of a business and the product they were selling was her pups. Being a breeder does not make a person inherently bad; not by a long chalk. What I will say is that she was not lead trained, didn't wear a collar, wasn't socialised with people and she had had multiple litters of puppies.
I turned up to get her with a gorgeous new collar and lead (yellow and bees, a thousand percent me, definitely not something the dog gave a single sh!t about. She was running around the garden refusing to come near me or the person who who had just transferred her ownership chip to me, but eventually they got ahold of her and I clipped the collar on, and bingo, we're off to go home. Except we're not because it took her less than two seconds to slip the collar and go back to playing the game of Round and Round the Garden. So we try tightening the collar and go again. Same result. No dice. Thankfully, they had a spare harness, which despite a lot of wriggling in protect, Chai couldn't slip, but not for lack of trying, and at this point both the humans are thinking this is taking an age and we're getting nowhere, so she's carried to the car by them and then my mum drove me and Chai back to my place for the simple reason that I can't drive and when I said to my mum, she's nervous as hell, just don't engage with her, don't try and stroke her, just don't even look at her if you don't need to, because she's going to need time, my mum does just that. She drops us off and she leaves me to it.
It's mid August, but not the hot kind of mid August, and my house feels pretty cool, but this scruffy little ragamuffin is panting like she's being cooked and I know enough to know she's terrified, because she's in a new place with a new person and she doesn't know what's happening, so I just think, screw it, I'm going to sit on the floor in the same room, I'm going to put on some easy background noise (didn't think about the fact that she wasn't used to a TV) so Beauty and the Beast live action on, and I'm just talking to the air occasionally, calmly, quietly, just to let her get used to the sound of my voice. When I tried to take her outside to see if she might pee outside (I was trying to save the carpet - it didn't work) she found the dip in the grass (she says as though there is one single dip and not a multitude of them) and sat in it, and she didn't want to come out. If I had a jar that I had to pay every time I thought 'What the DUCK have I done?' for that first day, week, month, probably four months, I would be simultaneously rich and poor, because all of my money would be in it and I would have a heavy reliance on IOUs.
This was two and a half years ago, so the exact details of every day that happened between then and now is obviously not seared into my brain like the lines on a steak, but there were some highlights. She seems a bit more chilled so introduce her to the person who was my intro to the person I got her from. She's a woman, so not someone Chai will be immediately terrified of... except I then needed to get the sofa cleaned because she went from sat on one side of it to jumping across it and over the air to the floor, peeing all the way. She would hide behind the sofa if there was even a small gap for her to squeeze through, she peed all over me because a motorbike went past when we attempted a walk, she tried to get through the fence at the park to get away, she got away from me on a walk once and ran across every exit of a five exit roundabout and nearly got hit by two cars. I was screaming her name after her, crying my eyes out and I couldn't find her, so I called my mum devastated and not sure what to do. One of her best friends is decidedly not a dog person (both my dog and my mum's get called Mutley by this person and I'm not sure it's a compliment) but when I called my mum because I had found her - her lead got caught up in brambles that I cut my hands to ribbons getting her out of - was just about to drive my mother to me so they could both help me search and find her. I felt like the worst dog owner for losing her in the first place, and in my head it just meant that she didn't want to be with me and effectively saw me as her captor. I know that was daft, but I was spiralling.
There were times where I sat on the stairs with Chai in the living room, and I cried on the phone to my mum because I felt like I was failing her. I felt like the worst dog mum (and yes, I do call myself a dog mum) in the world and like everyone else was so put together and it was so easy, and here I was with this little fluff ball who thought I was the devil. I said a few times that if she had been from a rescue I would have taken her back. It wasn't a lack of love, because I did love her, but I just couldn't cope, I didn't know how, and neither did she. The big turn around, the part where I thought MAYBE I can get through this, maybe we can get through this, was having my mum's dog stay with me for two weeks.
All she wanted was to be close to him, to follow him, to do what he did, and although they both had accidents, during those two weeks, we got the hang of toilet training and there was a significant amount less p!ss on the living room carpet, and it felt like I could breath again. Not just because there wasn't the cloying smell of piss coming from a fresh puddle, but because there was light at the end of the tunnel. When Ted went home she did backslide a bit, but not so much with the toilet training, and honestly, I was thanking the gods because it got to me far more than I thought it would. When that carpet went, I wanted to throw it on a bonfire, but also felt like it should go into an incinerator for toxic waste because it was disgusting (I spot cleaned it thoroughly as things happened, but some things will never come off of a carpet, and I'm so glad I now have a solid floor there). As she's been out more, been to cafes and pubs and things, she's grown more used to people and noise and different smells, and whilst she isn't completely food motivated (giving her sausage won't make her like you, if she's scared, she won't eat it) she's started to understand that people aren't all bad, that noisy cafes might serves sausages and she can swim. She's been on holidays, she's ridden up front in the car (with the airbag turned off and appropriately restrained), she's been paddle boarding (wearing a life jacket and with me refusing to try and stand up so I don't knock her in without the ability to pull her out again) and there are a few things lined up for her to do this year which will mean she's done even more. It's a big life, but she would be more comfortable with another dog to share it with, because she is always happier when she has Teddy with her, and they spend A LOT of time together.
I'm glad I didn't give up on her, because it would have broken my heart to do it, but I also know that it very nearly broke me keeping her, more than once. She was a lot for one person, with no other dog, and she has learnt so much and become so brave, but when I think about how challenging it has been for me, I can't help but think what I put her through to be with me, and to an extent I do feel really guilty. She could have been homed with someone else with another dog or with a pack of shih tzus and whilst she wouldn't have the life she has with me, she would have maybe been calmer quicker, and maybe she wouldn't have needed to be learning to love pubs, like paddling and maybe more. She might never have had to get used to kids, which is the really challenging one at the moment. There are reasons why I decided I needed to take her and they were mostly good reasons mixed with maybe a little bit of selfishness and a lot of misunderstanding of what it was going to take to look after her and help her, but I would like to think she wouldn't trade me for anyone else, and I definitely wouldn't trade her, but if we can one day adopt another, and she can be a big sister to a girl who is recovering from what she went through, I will be glad, because for as long as dogs are treated this way, I would like to help, and I know now what it takes and how much it takes to do that.
So why did I write this? Because no one should feel entitled to rehome an ex-breeding dog, and because the thing to remember is it's not about you. I know when Chai and I are ready, there will be a dog out there who we can help, and that's what it's about. We can help them, not a we need them to come and live with us to help us be more of a family or whatever.
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