Darcy

by Craig Ellyard
(Hull, UK)

Darcy and Leonie having an after breakfast cuddle

Darcy was our first Labrador and she came to us as we were voluntary puppy parents for the Canine Partners charity.

Darcy spent a wonderful year with us before leaving for her advanced training but she left us with so many happy memories. I’ve included below a couple of entires from the blog I wrote about Darcy and her time with us:

We all have routines and Darcy is no exception and her typical day is quite structured. It begins at around 6am.

Lynn (mum always gets up first!) lets Darcy out of her sleeping crate (or wire cage) and then out of the house. She (Darcy not Lynn) then runs down to the bottom of the garden to perform the necessary before going back into her crate for breakfast.

After breakfast Darcy settles down for a cuddle for all of two minutes before dragging out all her toys one by one and insisting Lynn plays whilst trying to drink her morning coffee (Lynn not Darcy).

A mad half-hour then ensues before Leonie gets up at 7am. After being jumped on by Darcy, who always greets everyone with a cuddle and slobbering kiss, Leonie tries to eat her own breakfast whilst Darcy insists on snuggling up to her on the sofa.

At 7.30 its time to wake Craig – and Darcy is far more effective than an alarm clock. Believe me, a loopy Labrador jumping and slobbering all over you really does wake you up.

8am and it’s time for Darcy’s first walk of the day as she escorts Leonie to catch her morning bus to college.

After returning home Darcy will again drag all her toys out whilst also trying to hitch a ride on the vacumn as Lynn tries to do the housework.

10am is the time for her second walk of the day with another long walk at 2pm. Sometimes Darcy and Craig will wander off at 5pm to meet Leonie's bus from college.

After her evening meal Darcy will have another play ( her favourite game is chase and fetch the toy) before a training session with Leonie. Leonie is soon to become a junior trainer with Canine Partners and she is doing a great job with Darcy.

After 9pm is Darcy’s quiet time – usually spent curled up asleep on the sofa whilst Craig and Lynn watch TV. Darcy sleeps in her crate and she usually goes to bed at around 11.30pm (unless there is a good late film on telly) when she curls up with her favourite soft toy and Craig on the sofa.

Time to introduce another member of the family. Pugsley is a chinchilla who is around 12 years old. Having spent all his life with Gadget and Scrumpy (our dog and cat who both passed away in 2006), Pugsley is well used to ‘giant’ four legged animals wandering around the house.

Pugsley lives in a converted dog crate, in fact with Darcy’s crate also being in the same room, our house is like a mini zoo.

And the chinchilla is an endless source of fascination for Darcy.

She likes nothing more than sniffing around Pugsley’s crate and chinchilla and puppy are often to be found rubbing noses through the wire of the crate. Pugsley also delights in throwing morsels of his food through the holes in the wire to Darcy who seems to have developed a taste for seeds and dried fruit.

But Pugsley and Darcy’s relationship recently reached new heights.

Now, Pugsley has always been an expert escape artist, and ‘security' has been steadily stepped up to the point where we thought that there was no way he could get out of his crate. But we reckoned without him receiving outside help from Agent Darcy.

Puppy and chinchilla had had their usual play but we hadn’t noticed that Darcy had chewed throught he plastic ties securing the wire around Pugsley’s crate.

When Lynn got up in the morning she found that a mini furry typhoon had swept through the living room. The chewed wallpaper, hole in the back of the sofa and knocked over lamps were the usual tell-tale signs that Pugsley was the loose.

The problem was - there was no sign whatsoever of Pugsley until Lynn, in exasperation, looked in Darcy's crate. And there, curled up in a corner snuggled up to a barnpot Labrador, was Pugsley - obviously shattered from playing chase with Darcy all night.

The two are best of friends but now we always keep an eye on Darcy when she is near Pugsley’s crate – we don’t want another jail break.