Mystery Roots of Emily the Lab

To refresh your memory, we lost our dignified and beautiful “Peachie” the Lab two years ago. Peachie had spoiled us with her easy going, tender approach to life . Of course she had that initial course in dog etiquette and would forever sit and stay-but as for the rest, Peachie’s courteous and warm-hearted demeanor trumped any formal training. She spoiled us and it took us a long year to decide to get another dog.

Of course we were shocked to find that the dog breeding business had become intensely “incentivized” to the tune of about $3000 for a yellow pup. With thousands of dogs in need of a good home, we thought we might adopt. We searched long and hard before we found a dog that at least looked like a lab. This involved an eight-hundred mile round trip to the coast to pick her up.

Emily was living in a home-based rescue. No problems there. The loving “parents” of the rescues had a home full of seemingly well adjusted and companionable dogs. One-year old Emily was among them and getting along fine it seemed with all the others, including a beagle mom with five pups nursing nearby. Vaccination certificates and a bag of the food Emily was accustomed to in hand, we were on our way home. She bonded to us quickly and was an easy traveler. (Like Peachie, Emily never deigns to be seen relieving herself on the side of the road. “That’s a good sign,” I thought, “Lady-like.”)

Comes adjustment time, we enroll Emily in obedience class where she is a star pupil -of course at this point we had already reached the “love me, love my dog” stage and Emily was sleeping through the nights peacefully in her crate/cave at the foot of our bed. It helps dogs feel safe to cover the crate with a sheet affording a cave-like feel, said to be how labs lived with the caveman and cavewoman parents of their ancestors.

In time, certain personality traits emerged we had not expected. Getting her into the tub for a bath for instance. It reminded me of Wild Kingdom TV episodes of alligator wrestling. She was not having any of it. Nor does she like water in general, say as in rain, lakes and surf. Is this a real lab? – or a scrambled DNA egg?

Too cheap to spring for a DNA test, we have chosen to focus on the good(?): (1) Emily’s affection for her parents (that would be us) is enthusiastic, especially at breakfast when we cook an extra piece of bacon for her; (2) she is incredibly athletic and unlike most larger dogs she can actually catch squirrels and chipmunks; (3) she looks like a lab about 90% of the time, but eye to eye she resembles the mother beagle we saw at her old home; (4) she has decorated our bedroom with the torn carcasses of expensive chew toys, preserving the skeletons and rags in a pile she returns to again and again as if to recall her conquests and, (5) the highlight of her day seems to be naptime, when we cover our bed with an old sheet and allow her to climb aboard for a few minutes. We kinda enjoy this too.

We know from experience that our own DNA tests held some surprises, while explaining some of our behavioral traits. After years of refining reports on my background, Ancestry.com seems to have concluded that 99.9% of my genetic stockpile is shared by people born in a tiny village in northern Ireland -while my documented family tree says otherwise, tracing my family back to the midlands of England. So, to what extent could I trust a pet version of Ancestry to supply me with useful information? The vet says they are maybe fifty percent accurate.

So, I made up a DNA report of my own “composure” (as my grandmother used to say) which I can recite to my snobby friends who paid three thousand dollars for their lab, or Newfoundland or Labradoodle. Here it is: Emily is descended from those elegant hounds who grace the Master’s paintings from Renaissance Italy, mixed with the English terriers that were bred to “go to ground” in the scrub and rock piles in order to viciously dispatch vermin, their painted images gracing the homes of lordly sportsmen.. I have collected several reprints of old sporting painting that show dogs that look like Emily. I plan to frame them in elaborate old gilt frames from the junk store.

Without getting too sentimental about this, let me suggest that it is our own emotional “DNA” that matters here. Can we invest enough patience and affection to help our pet learn the ropes and feel secure? Are we willing to invest enough care (not to mention money) in seeing that they remain healthy? Are we secure enough to realize that our beloved animal will not live forever and that we can only be loving caretakers of another life which, like our own, is only a “loaner.”