Author Archives: msmalley

It’s jumping the gun a little bit, but here’s our thoughts on the name of our future furry family member.

So here’s some ideas:

1. Something on the sausage (dog) theme, like “links“, “banger“, or “snags“. I think this would work really well if we had a standard and a mini – they could be “cumberland” and “savaloy“.
2. Traditional standard human names like “Peter” or “Susan” (neonames like Sharonda, or anything ending in an i just wouldn’t work)
3. Adjective-based names, such as “Mrs Wrigglesworth“, “Napoleon” (cos the dog will be small, but will probably end up ruling our household), “Halfie“
4. Namesake dogs from popular fiction. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of dogs in fiction and not many of them tend to be good role models. For instance, there’s “Blood“, a telepathic dog that helps the protoganist find  women in A Boy and His Dog. Then there’s the downright evil “Cerberus” or “Cujo“. There are the occasional good dogs, but their names are inappropriate for other reasons, such as “Einstein” from Dean Koontz’s Watchers. This dog is a noble and honest beast who if I recall correctly eventually sacrifices himself for his master. All well and good, but I doubt anyone will assume our dog is named after this one when introduced as Einstein! Then there’s the “boy’s best friend” dog stereotypes, such as “Lassie“, or “Buster” (from Superman III). A dog that would be an excellent role model is the dog from the recent remake of I Am Legend (the book of which I’d urge you to read, especially if you’ve only ever seen one of the movie adaptations). Unfortunately, that dog’s called Samantha, which is already covered in category 2 above!
5. Traditional standard dog names, such as “Rover“, “Spot“, “Rex“, “Fido” etc. (Fido’s not bad for three reasons – a traditionalist revival, Latin for “I am faithful”, and brings back memories of being a nodemaster in FidoNet).
6. Name them after our previous dogs – “Akeela“, “Max” or “Chockey“.

The only real requirement is that it’s something you’d feel comfortable shouting the first syllable of at night in a deserted park (so perhaps some of the ideas above need a rethink).

Our favourites so far then are:

• If it’s a male wirehaired dog – “Shlomo” (given the whiskers and personality).
• If it’s a female dog of whichever variety – “Couscous“.

However, researching the fictional dognames has given me a final bit of inspiration that’s worth investigating… “K9“.

Feel free to leave a comment with your suggestions!

Today, we met Sue & Ian, custodians of the Sunsong line of Dachshunds, as well as their two pairs of dogs – two standard wirehaired and two miniature smooth.

We’re now convinced we should get just one dog to start with (to ease ourselves into the idea of training) and that it should be a standard wirehaired (not that the smooths weren’t cuties too!).

Here’s a picture of Ruiha with three of them!

We’re off to visit sunsong at the weekend, to meet some wirehaired dachshunds.

We’ve never seen the wirehaired variety “in real life” before, but like the look of them in the books, plus there’s been some good recommendations regarding temperament etc. Fingers crossed all goes well, which means we’ve identified the variety of one of our pair!

Photos to follow…

We’re aiming to find Dachshunds in time to have them integrated in our family by the end of October.

Working backwards, that means they’ll be born no later than end of July (giving 8 weeks with mother before they get to come home with us!), meaning they’ll be conceived ~ end of May, or NOW!

Our task then is to find some breeders so we can put our names down on their waiting lists.

A subtask first however is to decide the type of Dachshund – smooth/short, long haired or wire haired…

The Teckeldrive is on…!