There is an old saying about accepting the gift of a horse without reviewing its dental records. It says nothing about dogs. My family has had four dogs over the last fifteen years. One we actually purchased. The other three were given to us. The first one was given to us against our will. A guy we knew said that his daughter had to “get rid of her dog,” and he wondered if we were interested. I guess he called us because we fit the “free to a good home” description. I told “our acquaintance” that he could bring the dog by the house and we would think about it. I imagined that he would make an appointment to come over and exchange pleasantries normally found in polite society. Sometime during the course of this social call we would regard the dog, and then after careful consideration – perhaps even sleeping on it (the decision, not the dog), we would let him know if we accepted his offer.
But I guess that all he heard was some kind of code talk for “Sure, we’d love to have him,” because in less than an hour he showed up with the dog and all the accessories (normally sold separately). I have never seen anyone unload anything from a van so fast – unless you count littering. He dumped everything: the dog, leash, food including the chewed-up dish, and assorted germ laden toys.
“Well, here you go. His name is Winston. Thanks. Bye.”
I am not even sure he put his van in park. Well we couldn’t have a dog named after a cigarette lest people think us bad parents and turn us over to the authorities, but the dog was already named so we softened it to Winnie. It wasn’t necessarily a masculine name, but it was a name that the kids liked and was reasonably close to the name that the dog came with.
Winnie was (I am sure he’s dead by now, as I almost killed him several times myself) a Siberian husky, He had crazy eyes: one was ice-blue, the other brown. Winnie was good to the kids, but his other qualities were all bad: He howled instead of barked; he ran the other way when he was called; he loathed all other animals – especially farm fowl. In fact, if Noah had selected Winnie as one of the two dogs for the ark’s maiden voyage – well breakfast would be decidedly different without chicken eggs on the menu.
After Winnie killed our chickens, he introduced himself to the neighbors by killing their chickens as well. I tried to confine him, really I did. But he was better at escaping than I was at confining. He could jump over a five foot fence and tunnel under a wall without any excavating equipment. When it became apparent that this dog was not a “farm dog,” we gifted him to someone else. I made it very clear to the new owner of Winnie’s proclivity for killing, but he had his own plans to take the dog “up North,” presumably to have him hitched to a sled. How far north? The further the better I thought.
Several weeks after we had accepted the gift of another dog that needed a good home I received a phone call. Apparently Winnie had escaped from his new owner and was now terrorizing Northern Minnesota. Apparently they traced Winnie back to me using his dog tags. I reminded the caller of the old adage which required him to accept the gift of this dog without criticism, comment or dental inspection.
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