He Barks!

I am happy to report that Bucky has found an arch nemesis in our otherwise Pleasantville neighborhood. It is Large White Siberian Husky! I was walking Bucky through our park yesterday and he saw LWSH from a distance of 20 feet. He stood in repose and then ran towards LWSH and barked! 3 times from what I remember. I held onto him (barely as I didn't see this coming) and appropriately berated him for his boorish behavior. I thought that he had no vocal cords as I haven't heard anything from him before. I had never seen Bucky so agitated and I dare say, I was pleased.

New Dog

So we have a new dog. He is new to us but not new to the world. He came to us as Dumpy, but we thought his self-esteem might suffer being a reference for trash, so we held an online informal survey via Facebook (we have such a love-hate relationship with that site) and we ended up with Bucky. Bucky is the name of University of Wisconsin's affable's mascot and maybe our vocally loyal Wisconsin friends wholly outnumber our mascot-apathetic Georgia Tech ones. No matter - all the non-Americans we know think we are weird to name him this.

Bucky is a chocolate lab. He is 4ish (or thirtysomething in dog years). His hair is more coarse than typical labs. He is kinda shrimpy for a lab (he is half the size of Matt's other dog Garrett). Speaking of Garrett, I tried very hard on my own accord to find a dog markedly different than Garrett so that Matt wasn't reminded so much of his beloved first dog. Alas, I falied miserably as Bucky is the spit and image of Garrett, except littler (I like to call him "Asianized").

We picked him up from a private dog shelter on March 1, and Bucky is absolutely a dream dog so far. He doesn't bark! We wondered for a while whether he had vocal cords (we hear that some owners have them removed - oh the horror!) but sometimes he groans in his slept, much to our happiness! He doesn't jump up on the furniture, he has never gone in the house, he doesn't bite - he is (if a dog could be described as such) idyllic!

The quirky things about Bucky is that he is distracted when he eats (not like other foodie dogs), doesn't seem to like to drink water (like doggie like father perhaps?), and he doesn't retrieve. At all. Our attempts to throw any object for him to retrieve have been met with icy stares of disdain. Perhaps he had a tragic retrieving episode in the past...

I am such a cruddy blogger but I thought I would try again with Bucky as my muse. We will see how it goes.