#blogjune Day 3
I wrote a post for today but I have decided that it shouldn’t be published. It’s actually very difficult to talk about what I’ve learned in my new job because a lot of it is about dealing with people.
I’d like to introduce one of my furry family members, Ball Ball (波波) the Pekingese instead. My mum called him Ball Ball because he looks like a fur ball when he was a puppy. He’s terrified of everything, and of course our newly installed fake grass is pretty scary too. He’s hilarious.
We adopted Ball Ball in October 2012. My brother bought him when he was a puppy, he’s my mum’s best friend, he put smiles back on my mum’s face which has been lacking since my dad passed away from illness many years ago. Then my niece came along, and my sister-in-law discovered that she’s allergic to dog hair. With mum being the primary babysitter for my niece, she’s left with no choice but to re-home Ball Ball. After many failed attempts, my husband and I decided to adopt him so mum didn’t have to give him up to the dog shelter and she can still see him when she visits in the future.
It sounds straight forward except Ball Ball lived in Hong Kong! Since the day we decided to “import” him, it took about 6 months to prepare him for the flight down under. He passed all the tests and finally was ready to go but we couldn’t find an airline that would take him because of his breed, they are more likely to not survive the journey. At the end he had to fly to the Philippines, then to Sydney. The original 7.5 hours journey became a long haul, so we decided that he might as well stay in the Sydney quarantine facility because the Perth facility was fully booked and it’s bigger and the weather is not as harsh as Perth. After 30 days in Sydney, he finally landed in Perth.
He’s a typical Pekingese, stubborn, territorial, difficult to train, he bullied our older dog (BeBe, a 12 year old Shih-Tzu x Maltese) in the first few months and he’s not interested in doing anything to please everyone, he would only listen to me because he’s my dog (he decided!). He had some behavioural problems at the beginning, who can blame him after such long journey away from home and his human. It took a little while to build trust between us and took him almost one year to accept my husband, it was hard work and a lot of patience and frustration.
He’s happily converted to an Aussie now, he’s still not friends with BeBe but they are house mates 🙂
//icecjan/ 