We have not had the best track record with dogs.  

Our first two dogs met untimely deaths, one accidentally and the other due to health issues.  Both deaths were traumatic and I think I could have convinced my family that we needed to be pet free.

I should have known better. I mean, my entire family are dog lovers. I am too, yet I’m not as much of a lover as I was before I started paying bills and having responsibilities.

So when the “we must get a pet” itch began during the pandemic, we acquired Parker, a small, thin pup with chihuahua and some other sorts of hound in his DNA.  

Parker behaved like a pup from the get-go, had to be potty-trained like most pups, but eventually became a pretty well-behaved member of the family.

My oldest daughter, a hard-working college student who is a cancer-survivor and who never asks for anything, began hinting around about a second dog soon after we moved to our new place – complete with a lovely backyard with a picket fence around it.  

Now, you may have read the saga of Rosa, our dog for two days who ran away and traveled 13 miles over three days to the home of her foster mother. She is now living happily with an older lady in the country.  

There was a massive manhunt for Rosa, and all ended well. But it was a stressful and awful few days.

So, after our Rosa story ended, the hinting began again and eventually Michelle and I caved to the pressure. Our son, a level-headed sort, suggested we get a pup. After all, we’d had good luck with Parker and had raised him to be a pretty compliant and manageable dog.

Enter Walter.

Walter, also called “Wally,” was from a litter of pups with possible schnauzer and collie lineage. We had wanted a “small” dog, much like our little Parker with his thin frame and pencil-like legs. 

Walter was adorable with that schnauzer type-beard and cute little puppyness.  As we spent time letting him lick us to death and bite us with his little puppy teeth, we couldn’t help but notice his paws were abnormally large.  

They resembled the paws of a lion and were disproportionate to his little puppy body.

The size of his paws were a hint of things to come.

Walter is now almost triple his size. Not exactly a large dog, but a galloping, lumbering, lug of a dog who still exhibits hints of puppy yet is not aware of how large he is.  

His presence is alarming at times.

When he’d like some attention, he bulldozes into the room, pretty much pushing things out of the way or rolling over the top of them.  He has no boundaries. He climbs up onto our shoulders with the intention of licking or biting us to let us know how much he loves us.

 It has crossed our minds more than once that he will most likely trip one of us in the future. When we do dishes, he often will position himself in a furry heap  directly behind our feet.    

At the beginning of our walks with him, he spends the first few moments of the walk jumping up on us, sometimes acting as though he’s trying to cut us off at the knees from behind. 

If he were to choose to lay on our chest as some dogs do, he would collapse a lung or break a rib, I’m almost certain.

All dogs are happy to see their owners when they come home, and we are used to being greeted at the door. Parker and his minuteness greets us, jumps up and lands lightly against our legs. This is something we are used to.

Walter and all his overbearing hugeness  “tornadoes”  into the room, jumping up on Parker and pushing him out of the way.  His killer paws land on us, upper thigh, with enough force that we might fall over if we weren’t primed and ready.  He paws us as if he is indeed a lion and we are the picked-clean carcass of some poor deceased antelope.

Wally eats just about anything. He has eaten pieces of flower bed mulch, plastic pieces of various items, and pretty much anything left out that he can chew on if unsupervised.  However, it is beyond me how he will ignore a juicy blueberry that has dropped to the floor or a piece of tasty apple.  

We were once told to walk puppies often to keep them from being crazy, and I walked him so much for a couple of weeks that I formed blisters on my foot.  

Parker has experienced culture shock since his new “brother” arrived. Now, he is constantly faced with someone who wants to play and wrestle, eat all of the food put into both dog bowls, and one he must battle for couch space during cuddle time. 

Although Parker has made the decision to take charge and be the alpha dog, it sometimes looks as if Wally can place Parker’s entire head in his mouth if he so chooses.  If the puppy were aware of actually how large he is, there is potential for an all-out battle and dismemberment.  

Like an old barn cat, Parker sometimes escapes to the outer reaches of a corner upstairs, behind closed doors or gates put up to keep this rambunctious hellion at bay.

He sometimes looks at us as if to say “What have you done to me?”

There is still optimism.  Parker was challenging, somewhat, when he first moved in.  At 4 months old, Walter has a lot to learn.  

Therefore, we will soldier on diligently and give it all our best shot – and continue to research obedience training.