CHOOSING HONEY – Honey monster 1

It all started with an innocent walk in the park when I got into conversation with a young woman whose cute little black Pomeranian, a friendly little chap, was running back and forth, in and out of the undergrowth, as confident as you like. At the park gates, I expected her to put him on a lead but, instead, he trotted to her car and jumped into the front passenger seat. How well-behaved, how obedient, I marvelled.

When I got home, I googled ‘Pomeranian’ and showed my husband a picture of a similar dog to the one I’d seen.

‘He’s sired four pups, and three of them are still for sale,’ I enthused, exaggerating my excitement so he’d be infected by it and come with me to see them.

‘We said we wouldn’t get any more dogs,’ he moaned. ‘They’re a tie. And they get sick.’

Thirty minutes later we were in the house where the mother and four female pups lived – the little black father lived elsewhere. The mother was bigger than her ‘husband’ but we were assured that this was usually the case in the world of Pomerania. The pups were all adorable balls of fluff: two black, one apricot and one the spitting image of her mother, reddish with a blonde undercarriage and a line of black along her back.

The mother dog’s behaviour was impeccable. After playing with her pups, she put her front legs on the sofa and fixed us with an intense gaze, as if sussing out whether we were suitable adoptive parents for one of her girls. Then all the pups toddled towards our feet and gently nibbled our shoelaces before falling asleep with their heads on our shoes. Entranced by this display, we decided then and there to reserve a pup.

 

We chose the firstborn, the one most like her mother, and called her Honey because of her colouring and because she was so sweet.

 

Now she’s six months old, a teenager in doggy terms, our dear little ball of fluff has morphed into a monster. The Kennel Club guide to ideal weight for females is 4.5–5.5 lbs. The American Kennel Club is a little more generous, allowing 3-7lbs. Our little girl weighed in today at 15.5 lbs!!!

 Add to that her penchant for digging holes in the garden and bounding into the house spreading the evidence, attacking chair legs, skirting boards: you name it, she’s tried to eat it – I can’t tell you how many splinters we’ve retrieved from her chops – is it any wonder we have days when we look at our boisterous adolescent, who resembles a fox more than a Pom, and wonder what the hell we’ve let ourselves in for…