Golden Retriever - review

I don’t know whether it comes to the breed in general, but I’ll speak only about my dog.

When I was 14 years old, I wanted to have a dog very much. And I can say that I didn’t want to have a small dog, kinda those palm-sized Yorkshire but I wanted to have a big kinda doggy.

I was already 15 when I finally managed to talk my parents into buying a dog for my birthday. We bought a 3 months old boy: it’s was pretty late for a puppy as they usually start selling them when the puppies are 2 months old. But the thing is that our puppy had a disease and we had to wait for some time for it to disappear. The problem was that his testicles didn’t drop by the time he was 2 months old. Yet after waiting for some time when the situation wasn’t improved, I still decided to take this dog, after all I needed a friend and not a show dog. Now the doggy is 5 years old already and still the disease is here.

But in all the other respects (let’s forget about this small defect) this dog is just awesome. He’s beautiful, fluffy and friendly. He easily and quickly got on well with all the cats that were living at our place long before he was born as well as with all the other family members.

He is very clever. When he was a puppy I taught him some simple tricks like sit, bark, high five etc. I can assure you that it didn’t take him long to remember all the tricks. Literally, it took him about 2 days. He also was able to understand some simple words that I said like - go away, stand, down, eat, walk and so on. I didn’t even train him to know these words, he just learned them naturally.

I can list the following things to the cons of my dog:

- He is a little bit timid. Sometimes he can get scared of the bags with leaves, for example or of the wheelbarrow (as if he has imagination ). He is also afraid of some big dogs. Before he was 3 years old I was afraid to let him play with our neighbour’s Labrador, just because he was very active.

- My dog doesn’t love walking. The very first time I got him out was when he was 5 month old. (I didn’t do it earlier because of the vaccination). It was the very moment when he became scared of something. So the next times when I took the leash, he used to run away.

Even now, when he is already an adult dog, he is ready to walk only one and the same route and each time I go somewhere else, he refuses and stops persuading me that we don’t need to go there. This is why I can’t take him for long walks with me.

- My dog is physically defected (this is all because of those testicles). My dog can’t give a brood. Maybe he doesn’t even bother about it but still I guess it might be bad for his health. (unfortunately, vets don’t say anything definite about it: some of them claim that we have to operate the dog and remove them, as there’s a chance of them turning into a cancer, while others say that it’s better to leave them as they are, because the operation will be very difficult.)

 

Pros:

+ He is beautiful. My dog has got very beautiful talking brown eyes and a charming “smile.”

+ He is clever. He understands everything that I say to him. He understands when it’s better to leave for him, when to lie down or when he can freely jump with an awe.

+ He is artistic and skillful. You see, my family members taught him to beg. And he uses all those tricks to get at least a piece of my food. At first he tries out his “sad eyes” trick and sounding sighs. If it doesn’t help, he starts using his “doggy smile”. If it doesn’t help either, he puts his paw or his head on my knees (if he puts his head, then he tries out the “sad eyes” again), and only after that all the tricks being done but in vain, he can sigh very loudly and lie down next to me.

+ He is very friendly. He gets on well with people, cats and other dogs.

+ He is funny. It’s such a pleasure to watch this dog all the time.

+ He looks like a polar bear. My dog is of creamy-like color, he’s almost white. This is why he resembles a polar bear so much. In general, he looks very cute.