A timeshare in loveable terrier Molly offers me the best of both worlds
The arm nearly left its socket. I made the foolish mistake of taking Molly, the latest canine addition to my household, out for a walk on the extendable lead, and allowed it to go slack. She obviously saw something interesting — and, as I have learned, that could be another dog 200 metres away, or a car, or maybe nothing more consequential than dandelion fluff floating on the breeze — and she took off like a rocket, almost taking me with her, face down in the dirt.
Somehow, when the lead tautened, my rotator cuff remained intact, though I had a leaden feeling in the arm for days afterwards. For a Cairn terrier, she has the chest musculature of an ox, and the pulling strength of a team of huskies clattering their way through an Arctic forest.
Another day, I somehow got the cable of the lead, which effectively is wire, wrapped around my wrist, and when Molly raced away to challenge another imaginary foe, it behaved like a tourniquet, stopping the flow of blood to my hand.
We got Molly earlier this year — the ‘we’ in this equation is too complicated to go into — and we sort of share her. Effectively, she lives with her other human, but comes to me for her holidays, usually for a week at a time.
We had the same arrangement with Foxy, a Jack Russell who died a week before Christmas and broke our hearts. Foxy was at least 15 (we didn’t know exactly, because she, like Molly, was a rescue) and in dog terms, that made her very much a senior citizen. She would sleep for hours on end, raising a lazy eye only to be fed or to go out to the garden to do her business.
Walks were lazy perambulations, the sort older people do on promenades in Italy just before sunset, interspersed with chats with others walking their own dogs. When we went to the beach, she would sit patiently while I had a swim, and there was no fear of her wandering out of my sight.
Hurricane Molly couldn’t be more different. She was two in May, which makes her a teenager in human years. I never had children, so I have only ever been a spectator to teenage angst, and now I feel it’s payback time for my reluctance to breed.
Molly shows all the traits. She’s impatient, she’s impulsive, she’s demanding, she’s messy.
If you let her (and I don’t) she would eat all day, and eat you out of house and home with it. She’s desperate to socialise but, like teenagers, negotiating boundaries is an issue. There’s no stopping to talk to other dog walkers, because all she wants to do is establish territorial primacy and, frankly, my shoulder isn’t up to the straining at the leash.
She’s always looking for attention. When I’m sitting at my desk, she’ll amble into the room. If she doesn’t get a pet or a hug straight away, she’ll headbutt my legs. If that doesn’t work, she’ll try to get up on my lap. My coping mechanism is to turn the swivel chair around so the back of it is facing her, but she’s a s bright as a button, and has worked out that all she has to do is run around the other side.
I sometimes used to allow Foxy sleep in my bedroom, but I stopped that with Molly after two nights. When she wakes, she’s really awake, and I woke one morning to find her snout mere centimetres from my face while she pummelled me with her paws, and had to dive beneath the duvet to escape her attention.
If all this is making her sound like the creature from hell, well, that couldn’t be further from the truth. When she needs to, just like any teenager, she knows full well how to wrap herself around my little finger, sometimes literally. She’ll crawl up on the couch, lay down beside me, make direct contact with her startlingly orange eyes and fix them on me with a look that tells me I’m the most important thing in her world, before gently looping one of her legs around my arm. It is heartmeltingly cute.
A lot of people bought or rescued dogs during the pandemic, only to find that dogs didn’t suit their lifestyles. I understand that, because I travel too often to have one fulltime, and it’s not fair on a dog to put him or her into kennels that often. This hybrid model, a timeshare in loveable Molly, is the best of all worlds.
It’s wonderful when she arrives but, just like most people feel about their teenagers, I’m sure, it’s also nice when peace and calm descend on the house when they go out to school or to play.