No Longer Campaigning for Two Canines

A while back, readers might recall, I was somewhat obsessed with the notion that Max, our 1 1/2-year-old Havanese/Wheaten Terrier -- we call him a "Mini-Wheat" -- needed a friend. Not a friend of the human variety. He already has those in the three Picket Fence Post children, The Spouse and me, whom he follows around the house while I work from home, though watching me work at my laptop all day is dreadfully boring.

You know how a person can sometimes be described as a "people person?" Well Max is a dogs dog. He absolutely perks up when he's around other dogs and stays that way. (He perks up when he encounters new people or when the kids return home from school, but the effect doesn't seem to last.) Maybe he'd have more fun with another dog to pal around with, I thought.

In spare moments, I would browse through the pet adoption site PetFinder -- which is how we found Max -- looking for an appropriate canine companion or him. Over a period of weeks during the summer and fall, I must've e-mailed The Spouse a dozen links to buddies whom I thought might get along well with our pooch. The Spouse, who was solidly against having two dogs, would either find a reason why the dog wouldn't work well with our family or just beg off from my e-mail saying he had too much work to do to look at the link.

The Picket Fence Post family was, in fact, divided over this second dog issue. The Girl was in her father's camp, asserting that Max likes being the one and only dog in the house, the king dog if you will . . . but I can't help but wonder if that's not somehow related to her feelings about being the only girl in our house and the only granddaughter on one side of the family. Both The Eldest and The Youngest Boys, however, were on my side and would sidle up to me at my computer to look for potential new dog buddies.

Then the chocolate incident occurred last month where Max got into some concentrated cooking chocolate and wound up spending a collective total of two days being cared for by professionals, first in an animal hospital, then at our vet's office. It took him weeks to return to his normal, friendly, goofy self after nearly being poisoned to death and having to sport a cone around his head to stop him from scratching at the shaved areas where he'd had his IVs and the EKG pads. (That plastic cone came off only last week and there's a nice ring of matted hair around his head with which I'm currently contending.)

After all that craziness, I hopped off of the "We should have two dogs" campaign, at least for now. When I tried to imagine what it would've been like had TWO dogs gotten into all that chocolate . . . well, let's just say that that scenario put the kibosh on my dog shopping. And quick.