It's really the girlfriend's, but...

Since we live together, I’m pretty much just as responsible for the little guy as she is. She found a website for a couple of families who have some corgis which they breed on occasion. We definitely didn’t want to do the pet store or puppy mill kind of thing, and we’d been looking off and on at rescue sites, the local humane society and so on. She really likes the long-bodied short-legged type dogs, like corgis, dachshunds, and those type, and corgis especially had pretty much captured her heart. We looked at possibly adopting a couple of times before, but each of the available dogs had some kind of issue that we couldn’t work around well. Some didn’t play well with other animals, and I already have a cat. Some needed pretty much full-time attention, and we both work full time. So we finally decided to go with a puppy instead of adopting an adult. Once she found the site, we got in contact a few weeks ago and found out that they had one male still available from their recent litter of four. We sent them a deposit and waited for him to be weaned. The owner e-mailed last week and told us that he would be ready a week earlier than she’d expected. So yesterday we drove up to Oklahoma and made the remaining payment and picked up little Ernie and brought him back home.

The cat wasn’t at all happy when we brought him home. She really hasn’t been downstairs since we let him out of the carrier. I’d hoped that she’d maybe just keep a little distance and watch, but she immediately took off and hid, and she hasn’t really tried to make any contact since. I guess that’s better than the other result which I’d sort of expected, which was that she would try to stalk it and possibly hurt him. I’m sure she’ll gradually become a bit more sociable once she realizes that the little guy is staying and that he’s not going to try to chase her or anything.

So far the puppy’s mostly been sleeping and tottering around the place on his stubby little legs. We’re trying to get him to go potty in the right places and to not chew on things like furniture, and he’s gradually getting it, but it looks like it’s going to be a long, long road, and it looks like sleeping all the way through the night is not going to be happening all that much for the next few months…

See more progress on: get a puppy