Bella came to us rather suddenly as a 7 month old. I had been looking at litters since before she was born but the rules in my home town are very strict. By chance, last summer I read about a new ruling on these rules that meant I was finally free to get a dog without needing the approval of a bank in my building.
Another chance was that a colleague told me the day after about one bitch being left in a litter born December 2009 that I had been following at that time. I ended up calling the owner and asking about her. Turns out Bella was born one eyed and it likely contributed to her not being sold. Since born that way we decided to have a look at her and see how it'd go.
We quicklyfell in love with Bella and ended up taking her into our home permanently.
When I was younger I was in love with big breeds. I was infatuated with Rottweilers specifically. A year ago when I was looking into perhaps getting a dog I was shocked when I read about the state of the Rottweiler breed in Iceland and promptly decided 'not a chance'. I was also not really prepared to take on such a big powerful breed as a first dog.
As a child I was also, for some reason, very turned off when it came to terriers. Now what happened was that after reading about the state of the Rottweilers I somehow ended up watching the documentary Pedigree Dogs Exposed. That lead me to terrierman's blog where I suddenly saw terriers in a whole new light. Pretty much the last year I've been reading about pedigree dogs and also been wondering a lot about working dogs. In the end, I was most interested in some kind of a mixed breed or a sturdy terrier that I could do things with. I should also add that my fiancé had his say in this, he wanted a small dog.
Not sure if I wanted to pay the premium amounts for a purebred dog that I wasn't even sure was worth the price tag, I looked at mutts. In Iceland -by far- the most common mix of breeds is either a Border Collie mix, Icelandic Sheepdog mix or a mix of the two breeds. I really wanted to go the mixed breed route for a while but eventually gave up as I just never found a dog fitting what we were looking for.
Our interest in Border Terriers started initially after we took two or three breed surveys which rated the breed high. As a result we arranged to meet the dog of my colleague whose dog is a full sibling to Bella but from a previous litter. We also liked their looks, neither of us wants to spend hours on coat care and a low food bill is great.
Bella will be 11 months old mid-November so we've had her for about four months. It's not all rainbows and unicorns but I love having her around and in general think she suits us perfectly. I know that some things she does that frustrate us stem from the fact I have problems exercising her. Me and fiancé are both trying to work on that. When content, Bella is a very lazy dog. My fiancé loves that as much as it irritates him when she tears paper all over the floor when bored. Personally I think it's made our floors cleaner through more frequent sweeping... well if it weren't for the fact that Bella always thinks of finding more paper to tear right as we are finishing cleaning the floors! Oh well, at least she's preparing us for the arrival of ten small fingers.
No comments:
Post a Comment