I got my first dog when I was nine years old and I haven’t looked back since. In the way of children all over the world, I pleaded and begged and all but sold my soul to get my first dog, and then proceeded to forget all about him as the novelty wore off in the first few months.
The dog, catcher, however didn’t forget me and continued to faithfully dog my steps (excuse the pun) until without my even realizing it, he took up a large portion of my affection.
I was lucky in this, my first dog lived to the ripe old age of twelve, whereupon he succumbed to old age and went to doggy heaven. After a suitable period of mourning I then found myself missing the unquestioning loyalty and faithfulness of my soul companion so I went searching around for another companion.
This wasn’t as easy as I thought since I didn’t want another Labrador (Catcher was a Labrador), but then again I didn’t want to deviate too far from the doggy characteristics that made Catcher my dog-in-a-million.
Amazingly enough, unlike when I went looking for Catcher for the first time at age nine, I found that mature college student that I was, I was still having difficulty finding and choosing the right dog for me.
I spent hours trawling through the various books and other magazines about dogs, in an effort to find out what I needed to know before I made a decision.
Being older I now needed some specific characteristics from my dog, traits which catcher innately had, or which he learned through interaction with me as the years wore on.
But since this was a whole new ball game, and a whole different breed of dog I was after, I gave the matter more thought than I otherwise might have.
This in turn led to my ultimately embracing everything that was dog, which in turn has led me to this point.
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