The next eight weeks until we
picked Target up and brought him home passed uneventfully to say the
least. We juggled with names for our new
puppy. The breeder was calling him
Target because of his bullseye, but I wanted something heroic, or
creative. The joke was always that my
cat Cooper was named after my three favorite Coopers, James Fenimore Cooper (the
author of The Last of the Mohican’s),
Sheldon Lee Cooper (The Big Bang Theory)
and lastly, after the sexy Bradley Cooper… because... well… you know? I wanted the puppy’s name to be something
similarly complicated and deep. Not only
did I want to be able to tell stories about my dog, I wanted him to be a
story in himself.
While, my boyfriend
could often just let me roll on things like this, it would have been easier to
let me roll if I wasn’t entirely indecisive about which direction I was rolling
in. One day I wanted to name the puppy
Coupland, (after one of my favorite authors Douglas Coupland), but days (in
some cases even hours) later, I wanted to name him Rex, like the border collie
from Babe. In the end, it would be the
night that we picked him up that we finally decided to continue to call him
Target. Despite the fact that I didn’t
think it was creative enough for him in the beginning, I have been very
surprised at how many people meet him and smirk when I introduce him.
“Your dog’s name is Target?” This has also left me wide open, a few times,
to affectionately joke:
“I should have called him ‘Missed
The Target’” when he does something clumsy or completely misses a queue.
We had a plan in place after
we had paid the deposit for the puppy.
We had decided to push picking the puppy up a few weeks later than eight
weeks old. I had read books saying that
a puppy left with its mother for 10-12 weeks would adjust easier and I also
personally felt it might be easier on my boyfriend (we were supposed to get our
dog in March, remember?). I was reading
all of the training books I could get my hands on and was happily telling
people that yes indeed I was going to be one of “those” dog mom’s. We wanted to be prepared and I was prepared
to be prepared.
Until we weren’t. The day the other male puppies were getting
picked up I received a call from the breeder.
In order to ensure that none of the females would go to irresponsible
breeders, they were all pediatric spayed before they went to their new
homes. Target, being the biggest and
most formidable of the puppies (as well as, we know now, being deaf) was
playing far too rough with his sisters after their surgeries. She asked me if we could please come and pick
him up and we did. After work that night we drove a couple of hours out to the
breeder’s house and picked up our puppy, about 4 weeks earlier than we had
planned.
We spent the first week or so
completely unprepared for Target. We had
picked up the essentials for what we needed at the pet store after we left the
breeder’s house with him and after that we “winged it” in every sense of the
phrase. I would eventually find my
stride, but until there was Target, I only had cats and absolutely no maternal
instinct.
Now that the time has passed
and he has become such an integral part of our lives, I often wonder what would
have happened if we hadn’t been called to take him that evening.
If the breeder had found out
he was deaf before we did, would she have kept him?
He was such a love, even as a
puppy and she was always saying he was her favorite. If he had been left to get attached to them,
would he have stayed there?
I have had instances in my
life that would make people believe, I couldn’t possibly think that everything
happens for a reason. But, the way
things went with Target, certainly makes me think that it’s true. Even if, the reason I believe this is because
my boyfriend and I found not just the good, but the amazing in the hand that we
were dealt.
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