It’s funny, when folks think about dogs they think of man’s best friend except when they use the word “dog” in a sentence.  Phrases such as ‘dog days of summer’ or its ‘a dog eat dog world’ or ‘I wouldn’t treat my dog like that’.  I guest that man’s best friend simply doesn’t get the respect that they deserve, well most dogs don’t.  I’m different.  I’m Maggie and this is my story.

I was born in a little town in Minnesota.  It was a nice little town, the kind that most dogs really wish they grew up in.  I’d like to start the story the way Snoopy starts all his, “it was a dark and stormy night… and a shot rang out”.   That’d be dumb though, so I’ll just tell it the way it was. 

It was a cold January morning (hey that would be cool if the guy from NFL films said that part of it!).  My mom’s people went off to work thinking it would be just another day.   My mom, her name was Sammi, knew that something was different. 

Mom was really cool.  She was always there to take care of us, feed us, clean us and of course break up the occasional fight between me and my brothers and sisters.   One of the biggest reasons that my people chose me was because my mom was such a loving dog, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

It was a cold January morning (did you hear that deep voice saying that, I knew you would) and my mom’s people went off to work thinking that it was just another day.  My mom was nine weeks pregnant, which if you know anything about having puppies is about the time that the puppies are done baking in there!   It was getting crowded, my brother Bernie was taking up too much room.  My sister has never been very patient about anything and I was tired of the overcrowded conditions.  So we got together and had a vote and decided that January 27, 1989 was the day that we would grace the world with our presence.

Of course, it would have been simple to be born with people around, but we’ve never been ones to do things in a simple way, we’re Brittanys you know! 

People just get in the way and they want to hold you and kiss you (yuk!) and you just want to sleep and snuggle with mom.  Well, we started our journey into the world sometime after nine in the morning and by noon, we were all out and cleaned up by our mom and having some lunch when our uncle Ron came to check on mom. 

He was stunned to say the least.  I’m convinced that he was stunned by my beauty, but I could be wrong.  That whole miracle of birth thing and all may have had something to do with it I guess.

Mom had squeezed us out and cleaned us up in just under three hours and had even cooked our first lunch for us as a family.  What a mom!  It was quite a day.

Early Puppyhood

I’m not going to kid you; being born is a traumatic experience.  It’s dark, you get shot out of a cannon in this little bag and then mom is giving you a bath and feeding you.  That’s a lot of activity after a long winters slumber.  It’s also really cold when you first come out.  Mom helped out a lot with that.  She tucked us away after she cleaned each of us and fed us.  It was pretty amazing, but she was an amazing mom!

I really don’t remember a whole lot about my first day or my first week.  Until you’re about two weeks old you can’t see much and you can’t hear anything, it’s weird!  I do remember running after these little furry critters (I learned later that they were bunnies) while I was asleep.  I really don’t know what I’d do with one of them if I caught them, but you got to give it the old Brittany try! 

Anyway, after about two weeks of darkness, we could start seeing shapes and stuff.  We could also hear.  The first sound that I recognized was the food dish clanging.  Man was that a great sound.  We all came running when we heard that one. 

Like I said, we also began to see things.  When I saw my brothers and sisters the first time it was pretty cool.  I couldn’t figure out why they were so blurry though.  Eventually they would fix themselves and everyone started looking just like me.  It was really cool!

At two weeks old you don’t spend a great deal of time thinking, even if you’re a great thinker like I am.  I spent a whole lot of time playing who can get under the step in our whipping box.  I guess I should explain a little bit about where we were living at the time.  How should I put this, oh yea, it was a big box.  It had really really high walls, like 30 feet high (at least it seemed that way when I was two weeks old) and it was a long way from one end to the other.   It had papers in the bottom because some little puppies liked to make a mess (not me of course).  Oh yeah and our mom was there, all the time!  No un-chaperoned parties for us. Rats!

Anyway, in our big box home, we had this little step thing that mom used to get in and out.  We would spend a lot of the day trying to be the puppy under the step.  This was an important position to be in.  Please don’t ask me why, but it really did seem important at the time.  We also spent a lot of time eating and sleeping.  Looking back on it now, it was amazing how tired we got without doing anything.  Maybe it was just those short little legs and that big box that did it to us.

When we were about three weeks old, we started to get teeth.  I was looking forward to this as I thought it was really going to be fun and boy was I right!  Imagine my brother’s surprise when I chomped on his butt that first time.  He yipped and ran.  He cried and then mom came over and picked me up by the back of my neck and all the fun was over.  Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.  Did you know my mom had huge teeth and a nasty growl?

Anyway we played a lot.  Bite-face was a particular favorite game of ours.  In case you haven’t played bite-face, basically the rules are you take your sharp pointy teeth and bite your brother or sister in the face with them.  While you do this, they try to do the same thing to you.  When one of you screams, you lose and the next victim is chosen and the game starts all over again.  Now this is a fun game.  It really doesn’t hurt that much. 

The humans don’t like us to play this game.  This is especially true when its dark out and they are sleeping.  In fact, they get really crabby about this and they yell at mom.  Hey, what do we know; the light in our box is on all the time!

That’s another thing that’s kind of cool about our big box.  We had permanent sunlight in there until we were about three weeks old.  Don’t get me wrong, it was nice and warm, but how’s a girl supposed to get her beauty rest with that light shining in her face?  I sure hope that it doesn’t cause me to wrinkle!  Can you spell lawsuit?  Well, I couldn’t then and I guess in thinking about it, I still can’t. 

This is something else that’s kind of strange.  I never did meet my real dad.  I know, I have a human dad that takes care of me and stuff, but my real dad was this guy named Butch.  I think it was Butch Nitro Charger.  When mom told me that, imagine how scared I thought that they might name me something similar!  I still shiver when I think about it.  Apparently it was an arranged marriage and it didn’t last.  Oh well.

My temporary people decided about this point that we all needed names.  I guess it made sense.  When they yelled “here puppy puppy” they got stampeded by twenty-four little paws and more sharp teeth than you’d care to imagine.  They gave me the name Hanna.  I don’t know why and truthfully, I never asked before I left.  To be really honest, I still answered to “here puppy puppy” because it usually meant that someone was going to feed me or give me a treat.

Treats, now there’s a concept that I learned early on.  I found out that humans are pretty dumb about this.  They figure they can get us to do anything if they give us a treat.  The secret is, we hold out for them.  We’re going to do what they ask anyway, but it’s just a lot easier to live with yourself if you get a treat out of the deal.  So treats came early and often.

So, I would guess that we’re about four weeks old now and we’re off to our first vet visit.  Mom told us that this really wasn’t our first visit. She said that our first visit was actually when we were two days old.  Apparently my tail was a whole lot longer when I started out.  She said that that wasn’t good for me if I was going to be a huntin’ dawg like her because we’d catch our tails on stuff.  Well, that meant that we wouldn’t get to keep’em. 

Oh well, I don’t remember it so it must not have been that big a deal.  My one sister didn’t have to have this done ‘cuz she didn’t get no tail when she was born.  Now that doesn’t mean that she’s a natural hunter or anything, it just means that mom forgot to put one on her.  Got it?  Good.

Anyway, we went off to visit this vet guy.  We all piled in a basked as mom watched closely.  She counted and recounted and counted us again to make sure we were all there.  They took us outside with a blanket over us and we got in this car thing.  Later on, I would really get to like this riding in a car thing, but this was pretty scary if I do say so myself.  Fortunately we were all together and mom was there too and she was still counting heads.

After a short trip we arrived at the Vets office.   We went inside and this big man picked up each of us and looked at us.  He looked at our ears, played with our feet and shined a really bright light on each of us.  That part was ok.  Then out came the huge needles!  Geez, I sure hate shots.  Anyway, it was over quickly, but I had a sore butt for a week.  Even my sister without the tail didn’t get off so easy this time. 

The vet’s office can be a pretty scary place.  It’s got big rooms (remember we were in the whipping box for the first four weeks of our lives), lots of big people and those darn needles.  On the other hand, we did get a lot of treats.  We also got a lot of pets from all the humans there.  It’s a little scary being in a basket and having everyone staring at you and your brothers and sisters. 

Anyway with our visit over, we got hustled back into the car in our basket with mom still counting nervously to make sure we were all there.  When the car started we decided to take this opportunity to make a break for it.  I got on the bottom of the pile (because I was the biggest) and my brother Bernie got on top of me and then my sister Abby climbed up on him.  She then started to climb out of the basket, that is until we got busted (she never was very sneaky)!  Our human parents caught on to our fiendish plot when Mom started carrying on like she was worried about us.  They grabbed us and tucked us into the basket again (once Mom counted one more time) and put the towel back over us for the rest of the ride home. 

The next couple of weeks were pretty uneventful.  We all grew very very quickly.  Oh, I guess there was one event that was pretty noteworthy.  Mom put us all on diets.  Talk about cruddy things to do, holding out on food for your kids is pretty cruddy.  I guess it was for our own good.  She told us that we would start getting “real” food instead of dining at “Mom’s Deli”.   So on the first day of real food we get this stuff that looks like what the humans call “oatmeal”.   Funny, they thought I was actually going to eat this crud.  No way, uh, ah, not going to do it.

The one really cool thing about the food that first day was that it was fun to play in.  If you stepped in it and then climbed on your brother he would get full of the stuff.  You could also get a mouthful of the stuff and go and lick your humans, they really liked that (puppy breath, yeah right, does anyone actually see what puppies eat??). 

Anyway, by the second day after the closing of the deli I relented and finally started to eat the mush that our humans were giving us.  It didn’t taste nearly as bad as it looked and it was still as much fun as any toy I ever had.  Heck I found that if you rolled in the stuff and then ran at the humans they would run away screaming.  (You can insert an evil Brittany laugh here if you’d like).

About the only other thing of any consequence that happened is that we discovered poop.  Poop is possibly the puppy’s best friend.  It will make humans run even faster away from you if you have rolled in it than the mush we were being fed.  Mom said that rolling in your poop made you like the wolves that wanted to hide their scents from other animals.  Now that would probably be a really important thing, but at that point, I didn’t know what a wolf was or for that matter a scent.  Oh well, we just liked rolling in the stuff in our box, it meant that we all got baths and then got dried with big fluffy towels.  We then got to sit on the couch with our people until we fell asleep. 

Did I mention anything about sleep yet?  Sleep is something we did a lot of at that age (about 6 weeks).  Heck we could be running along, fall over and be asleep before we hit the ground.  Those were the days!

When we slept, we always slept in bunches.  I particularly liked sleeping with Mikey because he had a big belly and was soft to sleep on.  I think Abby slept with me for about the same reason.  I was a bit fuzzier than the rest of the family, so I think I had just a bit more fur to keep them warm.

The Big Event

When we got to be about 7 weeks old, I started to notice that there were a bunch of strange humans that kept coming through the house.  Now there were the normal ones, Ron who fed us every day at lunchtime and my human Grand Parents, but there were others too. 

Uncle Ron had picked out Abby to be his dog.  The Grand Parents had picked Mikey.  Some other people came and got my other sister and took her home on her 8-week birthday.  What a stinky deal that was. 

Well, a day or two after that, my new parents would come to see us.  It was around lunchtime when Uncle Ron came in to feed us.  He had some strange guy with him.  Mom met them at the door and jumped up on this guy and kissed him.  Apparently he wasn’t so bright as do you have any idea where a doggie Mom’s tongue has been?  Eeewww!

Anyway, this guy made his way past Mom so we figured that he must be ok.   We all scrambled for him and started to play.  Uncle Ron tried to feed us, but heck, this guy was fresh meat and he didn’t know enough not to sit down and let us bite him.  Yeee Hawww!!!

Anyway, the guy must have liked us because he came back that night with his wife.  She took one look at us and fell in love.  Me and my brother Bernie were the only ones left that could go to a home, so we both acted our best.  We wrestled, we played bite-face, we let them pet us, we were quite entertaining if I do say so myself. 

They left that night without taking either of us home.  I don’t think they made it very far however because they called about 10 minutes after they left.  (Insert drum-roll here)  THEY PICKED ME!!!! 

They liked me because I was a feisty little critter.  This is a decision that they would come to regret (at least a little bit).  I would be there first dog, their introduction to the dog world, the ambassador of dogdom for them.  I would change their lives.

Then I realized, what the heck do these people know about taking care of a dog.  How would they meet my needs?  Who would I play with?  Would I have my own whipping box at my new home?  Do they know how much to feed me?  Do they know that I’m in charge?   I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?