About a year into having our dog, our neighbor found a small puppy in the middle of a street howling. It was a classic cold, stormy November night and this poor little puppy was lost. So our neighbor decided to bring it home - ours. Ahem. We already had a puppy/dog (in her adolescent years, no less. Another story), and I was pregnant. I didn’t think it fair to bring a puppy into the home when one took so much of our attention and I was going to have my own little puppy. Our neighbor said he would keep the puppy for himself then. However, that little puppy had other ideas. He liked us much better. Our gate was locked and we have a good wood fence, yet that very rotund little guy could somehow squeeze under the fence and stay in our back yard with our dog. Calla was pretty good at tolerating the puppy. However, she really didn’t like it much when he would stand under her chest and bark at her. She’d growl and snarl and show her teeth, but that was all she could do. She found him irritating, but she wasn’t going to hurt him either. About two months later I lost my baby. I had tried unsuccessfully to give away this puppy and now I had him on my lap, tummy up, just looking at me. All I could do was cry. It was pretty clear then, we were keeping the pup. But what to name him? He seemed pretty stupid. Awfully cute, actually the cutest puppy I think I’ve ever seen. Big eyes a person could get lost in. A friend of our suggested the name, “Cosmo”. After all, he was a bit spacey and his eyes looked like they could be filled with stars . . . So, Cosmo it was. I think he was a bag of mixed breeds but predominately a herding type dog. He liked to herd Calla and anyone else he could. He’d push his nose alongside people’s ankles to get them to move a direction he wanted. He also turned out to be one very stubborn dog. Training him on a leash just never really took. I could pull and yank and order him to heal all I wanted, he just ignored me. He was much better off the leash though. Off the leash he would stay by us. On the leash he’d fight it all the way. Well guess what - there’s this thing called a “leash law”! So I’d yank and yank until he would stop walking and pulling me and look back at me as if to say, “Wha-a-at?” All the while Calla would be at my side. I thought she was hard to train, she was so easy compared to Cosmo!
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