Hi, friends! Regina Scott here. I was looking back over the last few weeks of posts and smiled at Leann’s story about babysitting Ollie, her son and daughter-in-law’s slobbering dog. Our dog doesn’t slobber. He doesn’t shed either. That was a requirement for getting him. My husband and oldest son are allergic to animal hair, so the only way for us to have a pet is to get one that’s hypoallergenic.
We looked at a number of breeds, like Portugese water dogs (think of Bo, the First Dog), poodles, and some terriers. Irish terriers intrigued my younger son and me because they were called the daredevils of the dog world. That turned out to be the understatement of a lifetime!
Meet Fergus. He’s three-quarters Irish terrior, one-quarter German wire-haired pointer, but he has the terrier coat we needed. The pointer part of him comes out when he looks out the back door. He tends to point at whatever interests him. Unfortunately, one of the things that interests him most is jumping. He can hit four feet straight up from a stand, more than six foot at a run. He was over our six-foot solid-wood fence within hours of coming home. After several such escapes, my husband added three more boards to the top of the corner Fergus went over most often. He backflipped over it. No lie. He just jumped onto one side of the corner, and did the Flosbury flop over the other.
My husband added chicken wire. Fergus scrambled over it. My husband built a lip. Fergus went after a different corner of the yard. Finally, after much research, my husband strung a stout wire about three inches from the wood and about six inches from the top of the fence. It isn’t electrified, but the idea is that Fergus will hit it on the way up and be so startled it will break his concentration and make him drop back into the yard. It actually worked!
And then he learned to dig.
For the first year and half, our lives revolved around outwitting Fergus. In the process, we learned to love our determined escape artist. He’s much less likely to try to get out these days, which is a blessing! Although some days it's hard to find him among the pillows and stuffed animals on my son's bed. I also learned to understand why my friends are so devoted to their pets. That’s one of the reasons I included a dog in my November release from Love Inspired Historical, An Honorable Gentleman. Dolly is the largest mastiff ever bred in the Evendale Valley of England’s Lake District. She was meant to guard the Blackcliff Estate and its treasures, but she’s become a good friend to my heroine Gwen Allbridge. RT Book Reviews claimed, in fact, that Dolly nearly steals the show. Just like Fergus.
So what about your pets? Any other escape artists out there? Or other furry friends who like to steal the show?
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