Enzo - 1 year

The end of June marked one year since we welcomed a beagle puppy into our home… Just before Marie-Hélène’s 11th birthday, we drove out to Branko’s Beagles near Saint-Laurent to pick up the purebred for which she had found the name “Enzo”.

One year in to being a family that owns a dog, Enzo is very much a member of the family… And thankfully, he’s grown. Puppyhood was adorable… but was it ever a lot of work!

Now, he rings a bell when he wants to go outside. He also doesn’t eat everything he finds on a walk. Until having a puppy, we had no idea how much litter people left behind, or how many birds hid in the shrubs along the path…

One fall Thursday, Enzo swallowed a sock. It wasn’t one of our socks… it was a sock someone had left behind in the forest. It was a sock so quickly disappeared I couldn’t tell you if it was a baby’s sock or a dog’s foot warmer, or some careless small person’s. The kids who were with me on the walk, told me of the sock, and it was so quickly gone that I wasn’t even sure there had ever been one. But on the Monday that followed, when we brought Enzo to be neutered and picked him up after the procedure, the vet had made a note on our bill to be more careful about layabout socks. Apparently, when Enzo had been sedated, he’d vomited the sock.

He’s vomited on our carpet twice; once after eating crickets at the park, another time after finding birdseed on a walk and mistaking himself for a member of the feathered species.

Once my sister asked me why we picked a beagle. For one, I’ve always heard good things about the breeder… Branko’s has a brilliant reputation. For another, beagles are known to be friendly, and Enzo is decidedly so.

He’s also an active dog… early on, he was eager to come along on family hikes and now runs alongside Christian on family bike rides, thanks to a bike harness.

Car rides make him nervous and balloons scare him. (We let him play with one when he was a puppy and it popped.)

I didn’t expect that I would turn into a person who likes talking to other dog owners. Even more than that, I didn’t expect that the all-season daily walk would yield such an appreciation for cold weather… There is something special about going out in the cold with a tough dog who delights in getting his exercise no matter what.

Mostly though, Enzo has been a wonderful diversion for the kids. The moment he’s out of sight, they ask, “where’s Enzo?” With school-at-home, he was always around for spontaneous cuddles. His “welcome home” treatment of Christian is delightful to witness.

This thing our beagle does...

I’m sure it’s made national news by now, that Winnipeg was blanketed by snow, heavy and wet, all 24 centimetres of it. The precipitation is welcome, winter’s last gasp less so.

Our beagle runs through the snow, snout down. Sometimes, in a drift, he freezes, all attention focused, as if perhaps he can hear somethings scuttling underneath. He then springs up and plants his head, like a spear, into the snow. It makes me think of a fox, smaller, a bit clumsier, less bushy-tailed, but still so, so hilarious.

Pet dogs

My mother-in-law remarked, the other day, that “dans le temps” (the French equivalent to ‘back in the day’) city people didn’t own so many dogs. St-Boniface in her time was the 1940’s and 1950’s. I can imagine fewer families owning dogs. I can imagine that now, we are a society that abounds in domestic pets. In fact, that was part of the reason I didn’t want to have a dog… so many people already had dogs and I was reluctant to join the society of people who obligingly carried poop bags with them. But I also wonder if it’s true, what she says as an observation.

Today, we took the dog to a dog park for the first time. We unleashed the puppy in the puppy pen and soon a husky joined in and I chatted with the retired couple while this beagle of ours held his own against the larger dog and chased it and howled at it for being unable to catch up. Other dogs joined and our hound smelled treats and jumped after other dog owners, determined to get their treats. To some degree, dog ownership is not unlike parenthood in that it drops you into this new category of people and expands your language and familiarity with behaviours heretofore ignored.

In 2019 the Canadian Animal Health Institute (CAHI) published a report indicating that the dog population increased from 7.6 to 8.2 million in 2016, nearly equaling the cat population for the first time since statistics were kept by the institution in 2004. (via)

In 2015, Philip Howell published a book titled At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog and Victorian Britain. In it, Howell set about studying the dog’s place in Victorian society and writes that “the Victorians may plausibly have invented the modern dog.” To this effect, he quotes James Rubin who “writes that ‘the spread of pet- keeping to the middle classes and its association with emotional wholesomeness is a modern phenomenon.’ And the case can be made that it is in the Victorian period specifically that the practice of keeping dogs as pets—with all its repercussions—developed most meaningfully.”

Howell’s introduction exposes how recently the study of pets has become a legitimate area of research, noting how the field was barely a generation old at the time of publication: “The historical study of animals has reached a maturity and acceptance that could barely be imagined only a few decades ago, when the idea was nothing more than a source of amusement, a satire on the faddishness of social history.”

See, the point of this is to say that it is only a matter of asking a question. The search for an objective answer can lead to worlds of discovery. Of course, I haven’t been able to resolve whether or not there are more dogs now in Winnipeg than there were in 1950, but a few minutes research has offered two clues: dogs as domestic pets seems to have originated in Victorian England, and secondly, the dog population in Canada has increased since 2004.