NotTheRock Musings

This is Travis. No, we don't own him. Let's just get that out of the way first.

You may or may not know that my darling Watersyne and I have been planning to get a doggie for a while now. We were married last year and our lives were a whirlwind and we knew that between our lives and our teeny-tiny house it just didn't make sense to have a dog yet. But when we got to Texas, oh, then that would be the time.

I suspect getting a dog is a little like getting pregnant in the sense that you're never perfectly ready for it so you might as well just pick a time and do it. There will always be reasons not to so just stop looking for them. So we agreed when we got here that we wanted to get serious about it. (Puppies, not babies. At least not yet.)

We had pretty much settled on the breed we want, too. My parents have two dogs, an Irish Setter and a King Charles Cavalier Spaniel. The Cavalier is a wonderful dog, smallish in size, with a terrific temperment and personality. However, they -- like so many dogs -- are hairy and shed a lot. Watersyne does not like shedding. It messes with her neat and orderly new house. You understand. (What she will do if our child has hair, I don't know.)

So the conventional wisdom is to get a poodle or something mixed with a poodle so that you get the hypoallergenic beneifts of poodles. That is, non-shedding, in most cases.

So the next question is, do they mix Cavaliers and Poodles? And they do. They're known as Cavapoos. Travis is a Cavapoo. And he was at a breeder in, of all places, Texas. I found this breeder online back in November and sent Watersyne Travis' picture and she fell in love. In fact, Travis has been her wallpaper ever since.

Obviously, we realized we wouldn't be getting Travis since we weren't going to get a pup until we got here. So when we got down here right before the New Year, I contacted the breeder and told them our story.

They were responsive and answered our questions and asked me to fill out a puppy application. They were located about 200 miles away but I knew we'd make that trek on a weekend to check the selection out and ensure we weren't dealing with a puppy mill.

So we tried to arrange a time to visit them the first weekend of January -- 1/5 or 1/6. And we heard nothing back. So I called the owner of the place (I had been dealing with her assistant via email) on Sat, 1/5. We had a lovely talk and she told us she has Lupis and her husband travels a lot so they're a little wary about people coming to their home.... but that she understands people's fears about puppy mills and she of course wants adopters to meet the pups and the mother, etc. So she said she'd check into her availability the next day and call us back.

Later that night, I get an email from her assistant that Sunday 1/6 won't work but how about the following weekend? I say, uh, sure, Sunday 1/13 works for us.

I try to follow up later in the week and get no answers. I leave messages Friday and two on Saturday, 1/12, trying to not only confirm plans, but also learn where I'm going. No response.

I get an email finally on Monday apologizing and telling me they had a new litter of puppies on Friday and that caused chaos and that's why they didn't get back to me but that they'd like to reschedule for the following weekend. I replied and said I could understand that, but that the professional thing would be to pick up the phone for 3 minutes and explain. Or answer one of my calls. Or email before the weekend was over. This was now going to be three straight weekends we were going to be making ourselves available without success. Kind of irritating.

I got no response to my email. So Watersyne gave a call and left a message. No response.

So we're more than a little pissed off. I'm withholding the name of this place -- temporarily -- just in case we can get something worked out. But if we don't, I'll be bashing them here so that perhaps Googlers will find out the truth about them. My only hesitation is that no matter how hard I search, I find nothing bad about them. They seem to be the go-to source for Cavapoos. Weird.

So Travis -- the idea of Travis -- remains in flux. We could always visit local shelters and give one of those deserving pups a good home... but I also don't feel bad about getting the breed we know we want. They're supposed to be great personalities, good with kids, easy to train, etc. So we'll see how it goes. There's another breeder outside of Houston, but she breeds Cavaliers to Havanese. We might go see her and maybe we'll fall in love with one of them.

To be continued, I am sure.

Labels: doggies, Travis