Wednesday, March 18, 2026

Meet Bear!

We have a new member of the Catican Guards. His name is Bear.

The Guards doing their Abbey Road pose. Bear is in the back in the blue harness.

Bear is part Labrador. The people at the dog rescue place think he might also be part beagle in which case he's a Beagador. I think he's actually part basset hound, which is an American breed, making him ... wait for it ... an Ambassedor.

You're welcome.

In my stories, I have a basset hound named General Beauregard. If Bear is, in fact, part basset, then he can have the nickname General Bearegard. The fur on his back is mottled, which would make him ... wait for it ... the very model of a mottled major general.

Two for the price of one!

His legs are too short for him to jump on the couch, which is just fine with the girls. They're little old ladies now, about 11 years old. They like him well enough, but he's a puppy and he wants to play. They do not. Lily, the small, fat one, will play a bit with him, but Leah, the princess, will have none of it. She's already put her paw down regarding playtime and Bear got the message.

It was wife kitteh who wanted the new dog, but since I get up early and therefore pull the morning duty with Bear, he has attached very strongly to me. It's great fun to come out of my study for a snack and see Bear running towards me joyfully to get his lovins.

He's a good boy and has only had a couple of accidents. At 4 months old, a lot of his training was done by the dog rescue group. That means all we have to do is enjoy him.

3 comments:

tim eisele said...

He looks like a good dog, I hope you have a good number of years with him.

I sometimes think the people at dog rescues just assign nominal "breeds" to dogs more or less at random because people expect it, but it doesn't actually mean anything. I expect that the majority of dogs in the US never had more than a small number of "purebred" ancestors, and I doubt that Bear is any exception. He looks to me like a standard yellow dog, the kind of dog that dogs converge onto when you stop doing any sort of selective breeding and just let the various genetic strains homogenize. Which is fine, all of our best dogs have been this sort of generic dog.

K T Cat said...

There is actually a canine version of 23-and-Me, which we did with the previous puppy, Buddy. When he turned out to be a pit bull mixed with equally athletic dogs, we quickly found him a new home.

Mostly Nothing said...

I feel safer knowing the Catican Guard has new blood.