Emily is a looker and very bright as well. I never expected to be so lucky when we drove over two-hndred miles to check her out at a local in-home rescue. As you know from an earlier post, we were impressed from the first and brought her home. She amazes us every day. Photo by Joe Kitchens.

Emily rules. As in the case with all good dogs, Emily is now the chief regulator and arbiter at our house. There was so much we had planned to teach her that has simply been turned back on us. She already knew how to walk on a lead, asks to go outside to relieve herself, and accepts her crate as though it is meant to be her personal domain, to her a welcome relief from our untrained ways. Oh, our wonderful lab, Peachie was much the same, but the style was different. Peachie accepted whatever came her way, gently guiding us toward her way of doing things, staunchly ignoring our efforts to teach her tricks.

Emily is either “on” or “off”. Despite her trim physique, she limits herself to a madingly hyper game of hide-and-go-seak in the morning and sleeps at least two-thirds of every day. We have taken her to school where she is the teacher’s pet, responding to lessons as though they were only a refresher course.

Where Peachie was a Queen, Emily is a can of lightening, a young Princess Di, blonde and lithe, eager to please while bursting with intelligence and speed. For example, chipmunks, who had grown fat and lazy during Peachie’s tenure, now live in abject fear. The squirrels who regularly feasted at our birdfeeeder now venture onto the ground only at the fartherist reaches of our backyard. Emily is fast, I mean like- a- Whippet fast.

Which brings me to her figure. Where Peachie moved at a regal pace, Emily is rapier quick. Her waist is trim and her body svelt. Well muscled, not an ice-breaker like Peachie. We have no papers on this new child, but suspect she is descended in some way from a sight hound or possibly a terrier on her family tree. She looks like a slim lab. While most labs thunder along like a minor earth trimor, Emily is graceful. Finding it difficult to lift Peachie into our SUV or onto the vet’s examinining table, we hoped to find a less substantial lab-not a miniature, though that idea must have crossed the mind of the mixed-breeders. At an even fifty pounds, Emily is fully grown and more than twenty pounds lighter than our wonderful old girl, Peachie. Emily springs into the back of our SUV effortlessly.

This has all led us to wonder what Emily’s ancestry must be. We have even discussed having a DNA test done. Heck, everybody else is burning up money subscribing to Ancestry.com. Does it really matter? Only in the sense that we could advise people about what this particular lab mix is so they could duplicate it.

The reason labs are the most popular dog is simply their temperment. Loyal, happy, gentle, trainable for retrieving game birds (their historical role) and substantial. Aggressive labs are rare and in such cases their behaviour -like that of any other negected dog- usually results from a lack of socialization when young; or, worse they have become fearful from abuse. They are gentle and affectionate, big and hungry and want to hang out with their human buds all the time. Tireless workers out of a duck blind (which equires a good bit of training), labs are content to be couch potatoes (with no training required). We do not hunt, though we do hold a grudge toward chipmunks who eat the roots off our plants.

In the end, we decided that we could not reasonably afford the price of a pure-bred lab. We wanted to adopt a shelter pet if we could find the right one. So, we studied the listing of pets in the shelters online, looking for what looked like a small lab. And Emily looks like a small lab, maybe not to a breeder or dog show judge, but that’s okay. With a little prompting, our vet agreed she looks like a lab as we paid for her first “wellness” visit.

Emily has brought a lot of joy into our household. Peachie would have enjoyed her, I like to think. The pandemic has isolated us from our family for the most part since last March, so we have had plenty of time to get to know Emily.

Not everything we have learned is good news. Emily is a demon at digging. We have to provide a foot-washing ceremony after every unsupervised romp outside in our fenced backyard. One corner of the house (previously known as “Chipmunks Refuge”) seems to be slightly tilted out of level and there is a new foxhole there about the size of Vermont.

.