Leroy

There comes a time in every parent’s life when the endless nagging suddenly gets too much, one reliquinshes common sense, torches the family budget, and resigns oneself to many years of picking up steaming piles of shit. Yes, pet ownership eventually comes to us all. With Sophie about to turn six, I decided it was time to get an animal.

While most children by this stage have experienced the joys of small animal ownership, my habit of obsessively overthinking every decision meant that the poor kid hasn’t even had a goldfish. I spent months reading up on possible pets, carefully considering the pros and cons, and wound up unable to make a decision. Who could have known that the humble turtle could be expected to live so long? If one believes in the sentience of animals, as I do, then the ethical consequences of purchasing an intelligent rat for a five year old are horrendous. Would you like to be dressed up like Barbie and stuffed into a pink, plastic campervan?

But from personal experience, I know that pets are great teachers, and that a wise dog or cat can set you up for life. As is often noted, dogs teach optimism, loyality, resilience and a certain down to earth capacity to eat anything: it’s difficult to imagine a dog ever developing an eating disorder. Cats, meanwhile, instruct in the arts of malevolence, sensuality and indolence. A dog settles a kid with daily demonstrations of unconditional love; meanwhile, a cat shows them how to conquer and lay waste.

So last Christmas, with a few too many psychic eggnogs in my system, we adopted a puppy and a kitten, both from rescue organizations. They came with the unlikely names of Jasper and Leroy. Jasper, the kitten, is a splendid little tabby with a purr like an outboard motor: the vibration is completely out of proportion to his size. Puppy Leroy (‘bad, bad Leroy Brown, the baddest man in the whole damned town, meaner than a junkyard dog’…) is also stripy, technically a brindle, so together they look like walking television interference.

Leroy is a glorious mix of many breeds, a pure bred mongrel, the kind of dog that people stop you in the street and try and identify his breed. This is fun for me, kind of like watching people have a stab at a quinnella or a trifecta. Leroy is a mix of great dane, irish wolfhound, bull arab and bullmastiff, and so far only one person has managed to correctly identify all four of these breeds. (Few people get the wolfhound, the genetic joker in the pack). Whether any of these ancestors were pure bred dogs themselves, I doubt, meaning that he is blue ribbon mongrel.

Leroy is sensitive, detached, quiet: I call him the deviant.I find myself unused to the soulful manipulations of the hound species, very unlike my previous dogs, bullmastiffs, with their ‘attack first/ask questions later’ mentality. However he does get in touch with his inner psychopath whenever he sees a rabbit.