I Didn’t Want a Dog... So I Bought One Off Gumtree

I never liked dogs. I didn’t actively dislike them, but I wasn’t really a fan and never really wanted one…

Which worked out well I guess, because what we actually got was a baptism of fire… All packaged up as a Yorkshire Terrier.

Gumtree in itself is a red flag really, but what am I if I’m not impulsive and impatient… And 24 hours later we had a small, stinky, little ball of anxiety wrapped in fluff with split nails and a matted coat. The story goes that his owner had to go back to Japan and her friends were ‘rehoming’ (selling) him for her… who knows, it was all a bit weird, but not a puppy farm, so that ticked one box…

Not knowing a thing about dogs, it was still pretty obvious to me that this was potentially not the ‘best purchase’. But then we hadn’t set out to make a ‘purchase’ we had set out to find a puppy dog friend. So no matter how much everything screamed ‘No’ do not take this animal, it also screamed louder ‘Yes’ take this animal home. I also had my 18 year old daughter sitting there and her eyes were pretty much saying ‘We gotta get this pupper out of here’…

While this ball of fluff was anxiously running around not wanting to have anything to do with us, I realised I knew less about dogs than I even thought I did. And in that moment it made perfect sense to pick the most emotionally questionable, slightly broken one I could find.

Rigby wasn’t even really my idea

After a pretty rough couple of years, Rod decided he wanted to get a dog. Which made sense because he was a dog person before he met me. So to test the waters, we went and hung out with my mate Nic and a couple of her border collies, Morello and Gromit and went for a wander looking at plants and playing in paddocks.

Gromit is a conservation detection dog, usually out on wind farms finding dead things of the flying variety such as owls, eagles, bats, other birds and their by-products. But that day he was just being the adorable Grommie he is, and made me think ‘yeah ok maybe’ and Rod also think ‘Yes’.

But a big dog wasn’t going to work. As wonderful as Gromit and Morello are, they are not exactly the ‘curl up quietly on your lap’ kind of size. Rod wanted a smaller dog, one to sit on his lap and be easy to take out for a walk without the worry of being too big to handle…Which, in theory, was a very reasonable plan.

Now if you know me, I generally like a good plan. In fact, in most aspects of my life I need a solid plan… at least to start with. I know full well that all good plans will have leaks, and that is totally fine, but there has to be a plan, and I was happy with this one.

Enter Rigby… who immediately punched holes in the plan and it quickly disappeared down the cracks… but before we get into that story, there’s something else I missed…

Winnie and Lucy… Apparently they are dogs…

It seems that the whole “I never liked dogs” thing is not entirely true… Well, it’s not as straightforward as I thought it was. So I sent this to my mate Anne to have a proof read for me and she reminded me that her dog Winnie probably also had something to do with all of this dog loving business… And then I realised… she’s right. I have loved Winnie for yeeeaaaarrrrrrssss, like really actively loved her… I’ve always called her my little friend. I was never scared of her, never thought she might try and kill me, never even hesitated around her. The same was true with my auntie’s cocker spaniel, Lucy. And then my brain fell over, because apparently there have been dogs I loved all along… I just wasn’t filing them under “dog”. They were somehow exempt. Just my little friends. Which has opened up a whole new rabbit hold in my brain wondering about everything I thought I thought about dogs…

*Side note – The paragraph above has been added in at the last moment, so keep this mind blowing revelation I had in your mind as you read further, because all the words after this were written before I realised I liked some dogs even though I didn’t realise they were dogs…

Mel and The Fonz

Despite the obvious exceptions of Winnie and Lucy that I appear to have totally failed to see, I still didn’t think of myself as someone who liked dogs. I didn’t grow up with them, didn’t understand the obsession, and honestly thought people who treated them like family were a bit over the top. I also found them slightly terrifying, because in (my) reality (which had no basis in actual reality)…these dog things could jump up and rip your jugular out in one fell swoop.

Mel was one of those people who just subtly (or not so subtly) gets into your brain. She had this giant black shepherd called Fonz, who was quite adept at sniffing out nasty grassy weeds. He was very big, and in my eyes, very scary looking. He could easily rip out your jugular, except he wouldn’t…

I didn’t suddenly become a dog person overnight after meeting Mel and Fonz. It was a while before I was actually comfortable around him. I think perhaps it was the day where we were by a roadside, trying to find serrated tussock in amongst the Poa. I was looking at a small plant, suspecting tussock, and then this nose pushes me out of the way, has a sniff and moved on. I was wrong, he was right. I think it was his botanical skills that won me over.

But it was more than that, it was watching Mel with him. I didn’t have the words for it then. Still probably don’t, to be honest. But that was the first time I realised dogs weren’t just unpredictable chaos machines waiting to snap and destroy. They could actually be really good botanists, and mates, and something about them made things good.

That’s what started to shift things. Mel and I had many conversations about dogs. Most of it was her convincing me that they aren’t that scary once you understand them. She gave me books about dogs and was always nudging me that bit further towards dog acceptance.

We lost Mel two years ago to breast cancer, one of those excruciatingly unfair things in life that really piss you off. She never got to see this version of me, the one with an actual dog, the one who is actually starting to understand them, the one who somehow ended up completely obsessed and baffled about why I spent so many years against them…

She would have loved it though. She would have especially loved the irony that I now drive her ute which was once occupied by a giant, working shepherd… now occupied by a slightly unhinged, reactive yorkie who yells at the world like it has personally offended him.

Feels about right, really, and although I have never been one for woo woo things, I’m pretty sure she had something to do with Rigby ending up in our house.

Back to Rigby

He has hips. Technically. What he doesn’t have are femoral heads which are the bits that are meant to help join the legs into the hips. He just has back legs that are basically held on by muscle and ligament and good intentions.

In spite of this, he runs, jumps, launches himself at life like nothing is wrong (with his hips anyway). It’s quite mind blowing that he doesn’t even walk weird, which the vet said he probably would do.

He has cost an absolute small fortune, which has been largely bankrolled by my dad. Who is another lifelong non-dog person. Or at least, that’s what he reckons… He’s very invested now.

We don’t really know what happened to him before we got him. Could be bad genetics, could be something early on that stopped things developing properly. He was about six months old when we got him, so the first part of his life is just a blank space.
And maybe nothing dramatic happened. But he definitely wasn’t set up properly. Potentially no real socialisation, no real understanding of the world, and probably not a whole lot of being loved either.

There are a lot of big feelings in his very small body. Everything was a bit much, other dogs, people, bikes, shadows, pretty much just existing was a lot.

Of course my immediate, highly qualified response (as someone who knew absolutely nothing about dogs) was to jump online and find the manual for fixing broken dogs… Surprisingly, it turns out that there isn’t a manual for the ‘baptism of fire’ model (probably not surprisingly for the people who know dogs).

Not finding the step by step instructional, and realising I really had absolutely no idea what I was doing, I had a moment of panic and then formed a new plan. The only way to actually help him was to learn everything there is to possibly know about dogs. And in typical Fiona fashion, I went headfirst into the rabbit hole.

Workshops, books, training sessions, and a million questions (some very stupid ones), and I quickly learnt enough to realise how much I didn’t know—and that even the basics weren’t basic enough.

Luckily, I was surrounded by dog people. Not just people with dogs, but people whose lives revolve around them. I just hadn’t noticed it before… but once I did, I made sure they knew it. Anne and Nic got the brunt of my ramblings (and the panic call about a baby tooth—yes, I have a science degree, but plants don’t have those).

Somewhere along the way, I ended up at a Paul Bunker seminar in Victoria with Nic and a whole bunch of brilliant dog people. High-level detection work, buried scent, search patterns, the kind of stuff that’s so far in the future for me I can’t really see that yet.

But what stuck wasn’t really the technical side. It was watching the connection between the dogs and their people. Starting to learn how dogs actually learn, and how important it is to meet them where they are. I felt completely out of place at first, but everyone made me so welcome, and taught me more in four days than I thought possible

I came away not only with some frickin amazing new mates, but with the confidence to actually try things, even if I don’t fully know what I’m doing yet. That shift alone probably changed more than anything else.

And then, in what can only be described as a completely reasonable decision, I decided I was going to train Rigby to be a detection dog. My reactive, anxious, structurally questionable little yorkie… Of course somewhere along the way this has also turned into a whole pack of botanist dogs. By day they search for my favourite plants, by night they’re piled in my bed under the doona where they belong.

Rigby will be the head of the pack, then maybe a couple of terriers, some Chihuahuas, and a working cocker spaniel… What could possibly go wrong. Nothing I tell you, absolutely nothing…

Aside from that legitimately being something I am totally aiming toward in my head, I must also make it clear that I am (kind of) joking… I have seen what goes into preparing a dog for conservation work. Teaching the scent is the easy bit (well, easy to the people who can do it). The work involved in ensuring the dog is field ready and safe is huge, and is more than just a side quest. It’s a full time job in itself, and that’s only once you know what you are doing!

Getting to spend time out in the field with Lyn and Jack and Miki (Canines for Wildlife), was another huge stretch of learning for me. Miki has learnt to sniff out the critically endangered orchids which is part of the orchid conservation program I work on. He just goes out and does it, finds orchids like it’s no big deal. Meanwhile I’m standing there asking Lyn or Jack all the questions and trying to work out his body language and all the intricacies they are looking at. They helped me watch better, and spot tiny little changes in movement, see the ears and the eyes and the tail and then all of it together. And again, dogs were responsible for me to getting to know more amazing humans.

Mallory (who I met at the seminar in Victoria) coming down with her shepherd Syd was another turning point. She cuts straight through the noise and looks at what’s actually happening, forms a plan and then we try it. It was more about training me than Rigby… We even had some walks side by side… Syd, to her credit, handled Rigby far better than Rigby handled Syd.

So Yeah… I’m a Dog Person Now

He loves the games. The sniffing, the searching, using his brain instead of just yelling at the world.

But he’s also still Rigby. So I highly doubt he will be heading out into the field to find rare orchids anytime soon. But he’s my study buddy, we are learning together.

And in the process of all of this… he’s taught me patience.
Not just with him, but with people in the world.

Because now, when someone is being a complete dickhead, instead of immediately getting annoyed, my brain does this weird thing and goes “hmm… that’s just like Rigby when he sees a dog.” Over threshold. Brain offline. No learning capable of happening. Just big feelings and unable to make good decisions.

And suddenly I am a lot more tolerant.

You realise they’re probably not really a terrible person. Just feeling overwhelmed and a bit dysregulated. Maybe they need a nap. Or a treat. Or to curl up on a rug with a licky mat and something to chew on. Underneath all these big feelings, we are all just humans (or dogs). Sometimes we temporarily lose our minds and can be annoying dickheads. Which, to be fair, I can totally relate to.

The conclusion is I am now very clearly a dog person.
I still don’t quite know how that happened.
But I have a small, shouty, structurally questionable yorkie to thank for it.

And I reckon Mel would be pretty happy about that.