Find the right dog, give it proper I.D. – and have fun together!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

It’s official! Yesterday I signed the papers and we adopted Lady, a three-year-old Labrador Collie cross. She’s been in our foster care for over a month, and as the weeks went by any notion of taking her back dissipated.

Mind you, that’s not to say there hasn’t been dog-induced drama along the way.

Marina Fiddler, the co-founder of Madra, advised us to foster Lady for a while, to see how things went for all of us. She told us it was important that the dog fitted in to our lifestyles, not the other way around, so it was vital to me that Lady could handle a trip to town.

We’d met a lot of dogs during an 18 month search, finding that some rescue dogs have been through such traumatic times that a crowded street proves too much for them.

We don’t know much about Lady’s past, but she proved such a star on her first appearance on the streets of Galway, that I became completely over-excited and took her for an extra walk on the Salthill Prom.

We’d already walked the bog road that morning, because I wanted to get the energy out of her before her big trip to the city, so we’d had plenty of exercise. After the Prom, there was tea and buns at Dalooney’s, a cuppa with Whispering Blue and a gathering outside Neachtain’s, at which point you’d think I’d know enough was enough.

But no. I am, sometimes, a complete and utter idiot.

After driving home from the city my spirits are so up I can look down on the moon. The sun is shining and the grass is long. Hey, why not mow the lawn?

An hour later my knee starts hurting. ‘Tis the old trouble, as men in their fifties are allowed to say. Time to stop, but no, I’ll just do another hour and finish it off. The sun’s shining and the dog’s brilliant and what’s a knee between the sun and a dog?

By that evening the pain in my knee is trending on the twitter inside my brain. How could I have been such a fool? A torn meniscus had been removed years ago, and the knee had recovered well. But now I can’t walk without pain, and I have to walk, as we have a dog.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.