Eskimo North

These are the first dogs we had after we moved into our house. Tia, was a female red Doberman, Mac was a male Weimaraner. They aren't fighting in this photo, just playing. About once a year they'd get into a knock down drag out fight which tended to result in torn ears about half the time.

We got Tia as a puppy, she was the product of an accidental breeding, both parents were papered but she was over the height specification so was not. She was a really good dog though, excellent temperament, good with the kids always, and generally obedient. She did have a couple of funny personality traits though, she had a bit of a sadistic streak where she liked to sneak up behind someone and then when she got right behind them woof-woof-woof-woof to see what kind of reaction she could get. The other thing was she was a sneak. She used to like to pull the socks off my wife's feet when she wasn't paying attention. She had a technique where she'd very carefully grab one corner, gently tug, then go to the other side, and do the same thing and keep doing it until the socks were all the way off.

We had a water bed and she knew she wasn't supposed to get up on it. One day we came home and there is this yelp, yelp, yelp. I'm thinking what happened the dog but we go in and find her on the water bed with her front paws trapped between the mattress and the liner. She was unharmed, except for her pride. Who knows how many times she had done that without getting stuck and caught. She died at 14 years old of pancreatic cancer which had metastasized from a melanoma that was caught too late.

We got Mac, the Weimaraner, as a puppy from an animal shelter. He apparently got free from a breeder, or was set free, we don't know, but he had been kenneled so much without exercise that he could only walk about fifty feet. Fortunately, his muscles recovered after a few months. I suspect he was beaten as well, he was totally silent when we got him, wouldn't bark at all. Eventually he learned it was OK. Anytime we'd pick up a stick he'd duck like he was expecting to get hit over the head.

I suspect they didn't provide him with water either because another funny thing he would do is pick up the water bucket by the handle and carry it off and hide it somewhere. He was an extremely intelligent dog, figured out the door knob and window handle principal and was therefore very difficult to keep inside. I had to put a dead bolt on the front door to keep him from letting himself out when we went out, and locks on all the bedroom doors to keep him off the beds. It only took him a week after we installed the dead bolts to figure out how to open windows and let himself out that way.

He died from a stroke at 13 years of age.