Introducing Mac

Jake is a hand­ful at times, and he loves swip­ing things off any table or shelf. He’s also very vocal when he wants to be let into or out of a room, or when he tries to per­suade either of us to give him a few extra bites of cat food.

Other than that, he’s really quite well adjusted, and has been a part of our lives for the past two years now. He’s gen­er­ally happy, except when Naomi and I spent an inor­di­nate stretch of time at the hos­pi­tal. He got so stressed he pooped all over the sofa. You don’t often see a cat with sep­a­ra­tion anx­i­ety, but Jake is it.

Naomi loves dogs, and we thought long and hard about adding a dog to our house­hold. The canid can­di­date would have to get along with Jake. And whether or not Jake took to the new mem­ber was another issue we had to tackle. Cats are a dif­fer­ent ket­tle of fish from dogs, as they say, although that’s an idiom/phrase that makes things a lot more complicated.

There­fore, a puppy young enough to train to be socia­ble with cats was the sen­si­ble approach, and we went to the usual pet shops and pet farms where I cud­dled every cute puppy and said, “yes, I like him/her”. Thank­fully, Naomi, being the expe­ri­enced for­mer dog owner, said, “you say that with every puppy we see, how like that?”

Scour­ing the clas­si­fieds was next, but tex­ting dif­fer­ent own­ers giv­ing up their dogs for adop­tion was a chal­lenge. Many didn’t respond, and sev­eral that did replied that their charges had already been adopted because the list­ing was put up sev­eral months ago, idiot.

We also made a trip to the SPCA, where we met Sum­mer, a beau­ti­ful boxer who unfor­tu­nately needed a house with a yard for her to romp around in. We would’ve adopted her if we had a suit­able abode. We con­sulted the peo­ple at the SPCA for a “dog that got along with cats and who would be able to live in a condo”, but unfor­tu­nately no suit­able can­di­dates were found.

Then came a flurry of SMS exchanged with some­one who had a year old Jack Rus­sell Ter­rier up for adop­tion, and who seemed keen on find­ing a suit­able fam­ily for the pooch, who was described as hav­ing a quiet tem­pera­ment — i.e. less frisky than your aver­age Jack Rus­sell Terrier.

We made an appoint­ment for him to bring the dog over to see how he took to Jake. As expected, the dog, Mac, took an instant lik­ing to the quick mov­ing furry ani­mal, and whined till king­dom come when he wasn’t allowed to play with Jake.

Jake was sim­ply not impressed.

A week later, we made another appoint­ment for Mac to come over and have a trial stay, and he came over with his kit of col­lar, med­i­cine, chew toys and some dog food.

Three weeks after that, he’s still here, and has made him­self right at home. In fact, a lit­tle too at home for our lik­ing, as he’s not 100% house trained.

As for get­ting along with Jake, let’s just say it’s not exactly like a house on fire. Jake has stopped meow­ing his “this is my turf” meow, but isn’t impressed at Mac’s con­stant and per­sis­tent efforts to try to start a fam­ily with him.

But Jake does get his own back by taunt­ing Mac, run­ning past him and into areas of our apart­ment that he knows Mac can’t get to, either because it’s too high (book­shelf), or it’s a demar­cated no-go area (kitchen/tv room). He also likes swat­ting Mac and swip­ing things off the table onto the hap­less dog, like car keys and pens. I find it funny, but we really have to stop encour­ag­ing him, because it’ll be glasses and other larger break­ables next.

We have a sunken-in liv­ing room which is three steps down from the main hall­way, and when Mac and I come back from walkies, we usu­ally find Jake hid­ing there, just below the top step of the main hall­way, with only his ears and a lit­tle of his eyes vis­i­ble, ready to pounce on an unsus­pect­ing Mac.

Jake has also suc­cess­fully attempted paw­ing pieces of Mac’s food (while Mac’s eat­ing) into his own mouth. We’re not too opti­mistic about see­ing both boys cud­dling up to each other, but that’ll do. Mac has a cou­ple of scratches on his paw and face to remind him (albeit tem­porar­ily) to take it one step at a time with their friendship.

It takes a bit of effort get­ting to know a dog you’re adopt­ing, espe­cially if he isn’t a puppy any­more. Mac was born a lit­tle over a year ago in a puppy farm, and appar­ently, he had fallen off from his cage and was sport­ing a limp. The puppy farmer then told Mac’s guardian that because of his limp, he wasn’t for sale but was avail­able for adop­tion. Mac was then taken home and passed on to another fam­ily, where he lived for sev­eral months before a (human) mem­ber of his fam­ily got preg­nant, and for that rea­son, they had to give Mac back up to his orig­i­nal adopter, with whom he lived for sev­eral more months before we con­tacted them.

It’s been a great learn­ing expe­ri­ence for me these past weeks. Naomi is like the dog whis­perer, which makes it a lot eas­ier to under­stand Mac and how to inte­grate him into our family.

Mac’s naugh­tier than his appar­ent docile nature leads you to think, and so far, it’s also been a chal­lenge try­ing to make sure he doesn’t think we’ve renamed him, “NO NO BAD DOG”, as a book we’ve been read­ing tells us that we might just be inad­ver­tently doing.

Like most Jack Rus­sells, he can get a bit bois­ter­ous with play, although we’ve found that when you chuck a towel or blan­ket over his head, you can pretty much deac­ti­vate him as he falls asleep almost imme­di­ately. Save for the time of course when I chucked a towel over his head and went out the bed­room, only for him to walk off the edge of the bed and onto the floor, and into the wall.

So much fun. We might just watch less tv.

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