Adios Amigo, we’re bawling for Buddy

T

HE Boychild was 11 when he chose his much-lobbied for dog from the DSPCA website. Big, black, beautiful, about a year and half old and as it turned out half mad, Buddy joined the family in 2007. Full of energy and scared of everything, on the lead he would all but dislocate your arm. He refused to stay in the house until the snow of 2010. Then he wouldn’t get out. Every time you fed him he acted as if he hadn’t been fed since 2009. He moulted more than any dog in the history of hounds.

Additional pets he greeted variously. The rabbit he loved, the goat he did not. The puppy he had mixed feelings about, although the puppy thought Buddy was a god. In the mornings the puppy rushed to greet you with hysteria, no such frilly emotion from Budser, just the thump, thump of his tail on his sofa, indicating that he would accept homage. When it was time to make coffee instead of pet him, the paw would come out to stop your hand from moving.

Immediately after Christmas Buddy stopped being Buddy. He wouldn’t eat, he could barely walk and then the tail, that canine metronome, stopped thumping. It was so shockingly fast. The vet said it was a combination, none of it survivable, some of it perhaps prolongable. That’s the first hard part. Not if, but when to do the kindest thing. We all bawled over the days of goodbye, we all bawled for the final one and I am bawling writing this. The kids are devastated, it’s hard to watch, and I, the world’s most reluctant dog-owner, am sad too. I won’t miss the clumps of hair everywhere, the slobbery dog breath from the back of the car on the way up the mountains or the endless shite in the garden, but I do miss Buddy. We all do.