We’ve been thinking lately about finding a new puppy to bring into the family while our dog Caesar is still with us. Caesar is nearly 12 years old which is past the average life span for an Australian Terrier and we all love having him around. I really hate the idea of ‘replacing’ him when he’s gone. It’s kinda awful to think you can just replace your little animal friend who has been with you for over a decade and he’s almost irreplaceable…. well to me anyway you know.
Guess which twonky art student bought an Elinchrom kit home from uni to photograph her dog?
He’s about six months old in this photo 🙂
Caesar joined the family after I spent a few months living in London with Heather and BluddyMary. Heather is a vet and when I told her that I was wanted to get a dog when I got back to Australia she told me to do my research and pick a good breed that would suit our lifestyle. Solid advice…. except that every breed I mentioned she told me about the breed’s inherent genetic health problems –
Rotweillers / German Shepherds / Golden Retrievers – hip dysplasia
Maltese / West Highland White Terriers – dermatitis, skin cancer / melanoma
Staffordshire Bull Terriers – deafness, hernia, dermatitis
Cocker Spaniels / Fox Terriers – luxating patella
Yorkshire Terriers – bronchitis, cataracts, skin allergies
King Charles Spaniels – ‘eye poppy outie dogs’ she called them (apparently pressure on the side of the dogs head can literally cause the entire eyeball pop out of the eye socket requiring surgery to relocate them… never get one of these dogs this in breeding to make the eyes protrude should be stopped). And it went on and on and on!
Anyway… I eventually suggested an Australian Terrier and she thought about it for a minute and went ‘Yep. You can have one of those they’re pretty damn sturdy and smart little dogs.’ and in a rare moment of weakness where I decided to acknowledge someone else’s expertise 🙂 I went home and eventuatlly did exactly that – bought an Australian Terrier.
He got his name from a bit in an Eddie Izzard video – Definite Article – where he’s talking about a dog food they had renamed from Mr Dog for ‘small yapper type dogs’ to Caesar! Strangely Caesar seems to suit him … he thinks he’s a big dog and he has a big dog’s bark (not a yapper at all thankfully!).
He was such a cute little puppy and he’s still a gorgeous dog who follows me around from room to room all day and nudges at my legs when I walk when he’s hungry (which is all the time… for such a small animal he’s a bottomless pit). Caesar is such a loveable little mutt (well he’s not strictly speaking a ‘mutt’ … he has a champion bloodline but that’s neither here nor there) with such an amiable temperament and I’m really going to miss him when he eventually passes away…
He’s always been really tolerant of the Small Child – never snapped at anyone ever.
Totally off topic – I found some ads for an actual dog food called ‘Cesar’ and it makes me wonder if it was the same Cesar dog food of previous Eddie Izzard Mr Dog/Cesar dog food fame 🙂
Anyway I started talking about all this because my sister and her husband recently got an Irish Terrier named Zeus for their family and the poor little thing got sick (the vet thinks it was leptospirosis??) and he died last week. He was only 5 months old and they had all grown so fond of him even over just such a short period of time that they are planning on finding a new puppy to replace him… and I don’t like the idea of replacing Caesar at all. So I guess I should seriously considered bringing a new little puppy into the family sooner rather than later.
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