Dobby: My Heart on Four Paws | Peggy's Little Corner

August 6, 2016

Our big baby turns 11 this week. I baked him a plain cake made with lots of eggs, another old family recipe and one we always bake for Easter, called a Lazy Day Cake. Dobby got a new toy and a baggy full of doggie treats. Dobby loves to have people sing “Happy Birthday” to him. Though he is now 11 years old, Dobby is still as handsome as ever.

I can remember 11 years ago when Dobby first came to us. We have always had dogs in our family, but Dobby came to us in truly special circumstances. On October 13, 2005, I was on my way to pick Drew up from school, when a man in a truck flagged me down at the stop sign outside our house. He had found a puppy wandering in the middle of the road and wanted to know if he belonged to me. I took one look across the man’s arm and could see a cute little hound face and no more. We determined he had been a drop-off, and while the man was smitten with him, he said he couldn’t take him because he had cats. I indicated that he could leave the little guy on our side porch until I returned from collecting my son, which he did. When I returned, the puppy was still there, waiting just where he had been left on our porch. As I approached I noticed how shabby his condition was. I put my hand out gingerly in front of his face and said, “Aren’t you a doll baby.” The puppy then did something I had never seen any other dog do in my life – he placed his head entirely in my hands and let it rest there, a complete sign of trust. My heart was lost from that moment on.

The next few days were touch and go. He had been starved to the point where, not only was every bone in his body showing, but all of his cartilage showed too, and his poor little rectum was so shrunken it looked like it was turned wrong side out. His gums were red and inflamed and his teeth were underdeveloped for his size. Not only this, but his tail had a deep scar on it where it appeared someone had tried to cut it off, and he was covered head to toe in fleas.

I immediately took him to the vet, where it was determined he had born about the first week of August. Considering his young age, the vet told me to treat the fleas with Dawn dish washing liquid, the only thing safe enough to treat such a young or sick puppy. The Dawn liquid would not kill the eggs, they told me, but would kill the adults until he was old enough and strong enough for flea treatment.

I took him home, bathed him in Dawn, and fed him slowly on a diet of cornbread softened in milk. We didn’t have the heart to name him or even take a picture of him like this, until we knew he was going to survive. By the next week, he was already looking better and we decided to name him. Standing there in the middle of our kitchen floor, with his poor thin ears so thin the light shone through them, I could think of only one other thing so equally pitiful – Dobby the House Elf from the Harry Potter books.

As Dobby grew, and took solid food, I was obliged to feed him some of our girls’ good eggs, because he was constantly developing knots on what looked like paws that would become enormous. This was rather surprising, considering we had originally determined he was a beagle. How wrong we were!

Many years later, after tipping the scales at a solid muscular 125 pounds, we decided to do a DNA swab. The results were surprising. Dobby was not so much a mutt as we thought, but a purebred mix between a boxer and an American English coonhound. However, Dobby is bigger than either of his parents’ breeds. In a small footnote to the DNA reading, it mentioned that Dobby had a DNA that was specific only to him, and that he had quite possibly reverted to one of the ancestors of the boxer and the American English Coonhound. Through research, and what we know of our baby, we determined that he had many of the traits of the boxer’s ancestor, the Bullenbeiser, also known as the German mastiff, the fast Mastiff, or the Barenbeiser. The early sketches of the Bullenbeiser, with its characteristic muscular build, large size, fast and sharp turning ability, and excessively long tail seemed to be the only dog similar to our own big boy.

Despite his massive size, Dobby is a sweetheart, completely devoted to me, his mommy. He follows me wherever I go, and howls for me horribly when I’m parted from him for even brief grocery trips. He is the most maternal male dog I have ever seen, gentle with all little things, including our baby chicks. He watches them like a good Momma, until they are adults, and only gives them a fluff when they fuss about in my flower beds. He is fastidious in his environment and hates dirt, and he is impatient just like me. When business like his daily mountain climb is due, then it must be done now and not put off ‘til later. He is so perfectly in tune and alike to me, my personality, emotions, and habits I can scarcely believe he is not my own human son, and I have quite given up public life not to upset him, and to devote every moment I can to making him happy.