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GOOD DOG

/ janpriddyoregon / 5 Comments

Our first dog was Oranje Anisette, Ann Ann, who was a year and a half old when she came to us in 1973. She had been owned by a Saluki breeder who found her character too gentle to be a fit for him. I had flown to Arizona to look at a bloodline I first met through magazine photos. I wanted to show Afghan Hounds. I was flexible aboust age and color, though I had been to enough dog shows by then to know that black dogs disappear in the ring. Ann Ann was black.

Ann Ann had hunted jack rabbits in the desert. She chased a squirrel twenty feet straight up a tree on the University of Washington campus. “Squirrels can climb trees?” Another time she actually caught one but spit it right out unharmed when I shrieked. Rain completely mystified her. “What is that stuff?” I walked her all over a wealthy Seattle district during breaks from my long studio hours, and she napped on my workbench in the Fire Arts Building on campus. The first time she saw a lure she was thrilled. It took her a couple of minutes to figure out she was chasing a shredded white plastic garbage bag. She stopped mid-course and trotted back to me. “That was kind of silly.” She finished her Canadian Championship. A sweet girl.

Our second Afghan Hound was Onika and I had driven with Canadian friends from Seattle to Colorado to see her as a puppy. There were five puppies in the pen when we arrived outside Fort Collins and the breeder was not yet home from work. The one girl who caught my eye over and over turned out to be Onika. Her mother was BOB at the first Colorado Grand National Field Trial—seeing that trial was the reason my Canadian friends made the trip. Onika later won both her majors owner-handled, but she died when she was chased onto the highway by a well-meaning neighbor in 1980. I sat in the garden and cried and cried.

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