Tony Deyal | Three dogs and a cat

My first dogs were Devil and Blacks, and, because of his coat, my favourite dog was Rugs. My wife Indranie loves dogs coming and going. This is our story.

Lovely Lucy, the most petite of our three small breed dogs, ironically, is the alpha dog of the pack. She is supposedly a Trini Maltipoo, an energetic and intelligent mix of Maltese and poodle, which my younger daughter Jasmine bought in 2023 as a tiny pup fitting into half of her palm.

Beige-hued Lucy, short for Luciana, became anxious if Jasmine so much as left the bedroom. So, deciding that she needed a companion, our daughter again secretly purchased an even more expensive and tinier fluff of black fur with two bright pinpoints for eyes, which she spied online.

This one was allegedly a Schnoodle, a painfully shy, quiet, miniature Schnauzer/poodle mix, apparently abused by an indiscriminate breeder who took him far too early from his mother and who didn’t as so much provide a birthdate. Jas then had to protect the new pup from a furious Lucy, who was already displaying the far outsized bossy temperament that characterises her sex and breed. Named Bruno for his dark colour, given the 19th century German origin of the Schnauzer, he is finally showing, at two years old, a bit of the fine chocolate brown around the face that refers to the Old High German word brun. Some sources also link the name, extremely popular in Italy, to the word brunna, meaning armour or protector, which our Bruno lives up to in full doggone glory, having grown into a confident, sweet-tempered dog, always ready to jump to our defence day or night.

The first time she brought them over to surprise my animal-magnet wife, Indranie, we admired the pair of fur balls rolling through the house and fell in love. Over the years, they came to visit and spend holidays but, given their Latin nature, we decided not to take any chances and rushed the two to be spayed and neutered, introduced them to stairs and stayovers, and sneaked them little crunchy treats while chaperoning them as they met our ailing, ageing Antiguan pets, Mitzi, about 18, and her daughter Sheba, 12. To tears and in heavy grief, we were forced to put down the elder blind and deaf Mitzi last year January, and our beloved Sheba, this February, after the latter suffered liver failure.

On her birthday in April this year, Jasmine came home with a cute bundle of white fur cocooned on to her shoulder. This dog was unexpectedly given to her as a present by a desperate breeder who could not get the three-month-old sold, because the creature was male and apparently discerning Trinidadian buyers prefer their puppies to be pretty females.

In keeping with the Italian naming tradition, we christened this one Don Gino – Gino for short, given his noticeable bow-legged gun-slinger swagger and stature; and marked nature of making short shrift of his food. In short, we should have called him Don Giovanni because Gino is growing up, more horizontally than vertically, and is showing dogged determination to assert his escalating masculinity and size over the other two. So, off to the groomers they all went last week to be expensively shortened and shaved down from looking like wild canine rugs. He ended up at the vet to be neutered.

Wearing a large plastic cone over his head and isolated in his enclosure in our house, the normally frenetic Gino is undaunted by the effects of anaesthesia and surgery and has somehow managed to pull out a few of his stitches, probably hell-bent on showing the vet who is the real boss.

But, thankfully the puppy’s cut is healing, even as his ego, drive and desire to chase the lady - who literally bit him in the balls while playing a while back – continue unquelled. Such is the power of their noses and ears that he woke us several nights in a row with a spate of sudden angry barking followed by Lucy’s minute howls, sparked by a lone stray dog slinking past our house.

At least three other dogs passed through our hands and home recently, including a beautiful juvenile Cocker Spaniel, also named Lucy, whose sad owner was forced to give her up after an unforeseen straying husband and devastating divorce left her bereft of home and business and unable to take care of herself and both their animals.

We all loved this Lucy, too. I took the one-year-old spaniel for daily walks, my wife and daughter spoilt, groomed, and spayed her, and she started to fill out with a glowing rich auburn coat and soft, long ears. However, she kept jumping through the fence bars and we would receive yet more phone calls from neighbours and then strangers alerting us to Lucy running on the road. Worried that she could get dog-napped, injured or killed, we presented her, bed, bowl and all to a young family of four, where she is thriving and safe.

The second was another charity case, surrendered and sold to our soft-hearted daughter by an impoverished student owner, who often left the emaciated husky puppy to fend for itself on southern streets. Freya has heterochromia, different coloured eyes, in her case, one blue, one hazel, a harmless condition resulting from a variation in pigment or melanin. We could not correct the early conditioning of the streets nor the love for our neighbours’ garbage. So, after Freya’s umpteenth self-appointed road trip, and lacking the money to change our ancient iron fencing, we sent her to live with a nice family in Arima, north-eastern Trinidad, who owned an older Husky and, more importantly, resided behind towering walls, essential to sanity and security here.

In March, my then neighbour, a Venezuelan migrant, Emily, a qualified pedicurist bought us a scrawny khaki-coloured puppy she rescued from a struggling litter, owned by a migrant family who had hit even harder times. Following several sleepless nights from the non-stop crying, we gave him up, and he is now an almost full-grown stunning specimen of Golden Retriever and Husky, cared for by our dog-loving neighbours Terrell and Josanne across the road. They discovered, that being a Trini canine, Scotch calmed down with music. They are keeping him far from the alcohol.

Of course, a shelter pressed Jasmine to adopt a sick and thin Persian cat, we dubbed Aurelio, the golden one, who she slowly nursed back to robust health. Talkative, affectionate, and regal, the aquamarine-eyed Aurelio discovered our great outdoors – and increasingly bolder – the cursed fence, the inevitable stray street cats, and the roads. So, a few weeks ago, she reluctantly transferred the visibly lonely feline to a remarkable young man, Darry Hutton, who has rescued at least eight dogs and nine cats from Trinidad’s over-crowded streets, and who cares for another seven dogs at home on behalf of others. Aurelio adores him and is making friends. Darry uses his own scarce funds from boarding pets, whatever precious donations he can pick up, and his wits to manage, but he worries, as he admitted to us recently, about “the thousands of others still out there …”.

Tony Deyal was last seen sipping oolong and pondering how to hide an advertisement for a TT$3,000.00 teacup terrier. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com