E6: Beyond the breed: The dog you actually live with

Listen to episode 6. Available wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Bruce wanted a Rottweiler and came home with Judge, a Pomeranian he had not intended to buy, after Tatiana touched the glass of his puppy pen and Judge woke up and licked her fingertip. Ben wanted a Husky and got a Pomsky who walks up to Kane, the German Shepherd he lives with, presses a squeaky toy directly into his face at close range, and waits. Makenzie, before she was vaccinated, stood outside the small dog park opposite our building every day, pressing against the fence and wanting to get in. At four months old she was finally allowed, went straight to the Great Dane in the corner that the other dogs had been avoiding for weeks, and began chasing him wildly around the park.

None of the three of us ended up with the dog the breed description promised.

This is a conversation about what actually predicts a dog's personality, and how little of it turns out to be the breed.

It took Trigger, a Rottweiler, a single low growl to teach Judge exactly where his boundaries sat, and Judge came home from that friendship with a habit he'd never had before: scraping the ground after he goes, something he'd only ever seen Trigger do.

The conversation moves through Bowie ending up on top in a house of three bigger dogs, Kane taking Bowie's whole head into his mouth in play and never once closing down on it. Through Pomeranians once being kept, in 1970s and 80s Cologne, as older ladies' lap dogs, more toy than companion, a long way from a dog willing to bark at strangers twice his size. Through everything the Shiba Inu warnings had told me to expect, and how little of it prepared me for the dog who actually walked in: stubborn in exactly the way described, and not much else the reading got right.

If the breed doesn't tell you who your dog is, what does?