On puppies

The new puppy Aggie. (Photo courtesy of Michelle Bonnet Hale)

By Michelle Bonnet Hale

My pipeline has two columns: one near completion and the other just beginning. They are both my usual blend of personal and local, political and philosophical. I try every day to sit down to work on them. They both require research, phone calls, and digging through details to make sure that my positions are supported. They require thinking for more than 30 seconds.

Deep thought has become an impossibility in our house. We got a puppy.

“What were you thinking?” you might say. 

I say to myself, “What was I thinking?”

We’ve had puppies before, so it’s not like we didn’t know how much work they are. We are both retired now, so we have oceans more time than we had when we raised our prior puppies five and 14 years ago. But paradoxically, having more time means that we’ve raised the bar considerably on our expectations, and now every single second of every single day is spoken for by an adorable little white creature who has wholly captured our hearts. Not to mention the heart of every person she meets.

Our two adult dogs are standard poodles. The eldest, Molly, is not in the best health: she’s arthritic, profoundly deaf, has cataracts, and we need to watch her lab numbers closely. But she still gets out for those daily walks

and laps up the love we give her. She won’t be with us for that much longer. We want our dear girl to be happy.

Aggie the puppy and Hugo the poodle. (Photo courtesy of Michelle Bonnet Hale)

Jane, my partner, has been concerned that our 5-year-old poodle, Hugo, will be bereft when Molly goes. Jane has been talking about a new puppy for some time and I have been mildly (for me) interjecting that a smaller dog might be nice, since we are getting older by the minute and Jane and I have both suffered injuries while walking our boisterous 45- and 60-pound poodles.

Jane, a musician, has a finger permanently bent from Hugo yanking on the leash to run at another dog. Jane talked to a surgeon and the finger could be straightened with surgery, but there is no knowing how the scar tissue will lay down in recovery, so there could be unforeseen further damage. Jane decided to live with the known damage.

I was famous in my childhood for having permanently scabbed knees; I fell so much. Grace is not my middle name. In the summer of 2025 while out walking both poodles, Molly got excited and banged into me in the back of the knee, sending me crashing to my knees and the palms of my hands on the pavement. It put my 8-year-old knees to shame: it was the worst skinned knee I’ve had in my life. Inches of skin, gone.

So it would be nice to get a dog that would be manageable as we continue to age, not tiny, but certainly much smaller than our standard poodles. I told this to Jane.

Then we fell in love with golden retrievers.

They are not small dogs.

A breeder in the Petersburg area raises magnificent golden retrievers with wonderful temperaments. We’ve met many of these lovely dogs while visiting and had started considering seeking one of their puppies. 

However, through an extremely unfortunate string of circumstances, there are no puppies in their near future right now. It’s a story too terrible not to tell. The new stud they acquired developed an infection in his testicles and had to have his testicles removed. He’s a lovely dog, but the poor guy will be siring no lovely little puppies.

To make this story short, our new puppy’s mother is a golden retriever from these Petersburg breeders. Our new puppy’s father is the next-door-neighbor’s husky. This mating was not in the plans. I believe that the colloquial expression is “knocked up.”

At her 8-week appointment, our little Aggie weighed 15 pounds. She is a chonk. Her appetite is voracious. Our vet estimated that her adult weight will be 60-70 pounds. 

Hence the bar is raised. We’re intent on using our golden retirement years to train this lovely creature well. It helps immeasurably that she is half golden retriever and eager to please. It also helps that she is a chonk. She absolutely loves food and is treat-motivated and learns astonishingly quickly.

But we are wondering if we’ll ever sleep through the night again. Our two adult dogs are wondering if they’ll ever have peace in their own house again. I don’t know how it is that pretty much everything else in our life has to be put on hold — there are two of us! And just one small puppy to care for, but there you have it.

These other columns are cooking and I’m getting a sentence written here and there. I’ll be back. I promise. Aggie promises.

• Michelle Bonnet Hale’s roots go deep in Juneau and Southeast Alaska. She and her partner share their household with various relatives and three dogs. She served for six years on the Juneau Assembly.