Gone to the Dogs

Quite lately I have been thinking of getting a dog again. The last time I had a pet dog was over 15 years ago, a rescued golden retriever mix which unfortunately did not even reached its third birthday because of a congenital heart condition. So for the past couple of months I been going through various websites and raiding my local bookstore reading about different breeds of dog and trying to decide what breed strikes my fancy and suits my lifestyle. I even filled out one time the dog breed selector questionnaire in the Purina website, just to help me out. My primary criteria being, the dog should be moderately active enough that I can bring it along when I run/hike/bike.

Eventually, I managed to narrow down my choice to two breeds :

The Portuguese Water Dog	The Finnish Lapphund

 

The Purina Breed Selector actually had the Portuguese Water Dog as the top dog that suits my situation. An old working dog breed that used to assist fishermen in Portugal in the olden days. However, I am quite more inclined to get the Finnish Lapphund, onced used by the Saami in Northern Finland as a reindeer herder prior to the advent of skidoos. The only problem with the lappies is their rarity here in North America. I believe there only about 200 of them in Canada/US and so far I only found 4 breeders all in the other side of the continent, one in Quebec, 2 in Michigan and one in Memphis and all of them prefer not to ship puppies and have the prospective buyers pick them up.

At any rate, I won’t be ready for a puppy till sometime in Fall, so lots more time to mull on the idea.

In the effort to put the word “Mac” which is evidently absent in most of my posts, here is a lame attempt in a form of a joke. Please bear with me :

A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Prada suit, Gucci shoes, Dior sunglasses and D+G tie, leans
out the window and asks the shepherd: “If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?” The shepherd looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers: “Sure. Why not?”

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Apple 17 inch Titanium notebook, connects it to his AT&T cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MySQL database through a web based php interface, exported the data into an XLS file, open up an Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulae. He uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-colour, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturised HP LaserJet printer, turns to the shepherd and says: “You have exactly 1,586 sheep”.

“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep,” says the shepherd.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the boot of his car. Then the shepherd says to the young man: “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my sheep?” The young man thinks about it for a second and then says: “Okay, why not?”.

“You’re a consultant,” says the shepherd.
“Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie. “But how did you guess that?”
“No guessing required,” answers the shepherd. “You showed up here even though nobody called you, you want to get paid for an answer I already knew to a question I never asked, and you know all about my business.

“Now give me back my dog!!!”