Letter From America: Enter The Groenendael!
Ronnie Bray's beloved dog Belle is a horse of a dog. At first he thought she was a Border Collie, but as she grew and grew he was finally forced to accept that she's a Gtoenendael. Now you just try o pronoune that...!
Our year-old puppy is a horse of a dog who sometimes answers to the name of Belle and sometimes doesn’t. We found’ her on the Internet when looking for a companion dog for Frankie after Shep was put down.
She was four months old when we adopted her,. And the papers declared her "Believed to be Border Collie." Although she didn’t look like any Border Collie we had even seen, she was black and white, alert, funny, and adorable, and so we took her home.
Searching through Border Collie books and surfing the web for the many sites devoted to this best of all breeds, shows what a wide range of conformation there was in the Border world. We managed to convince ourselves that what we had was a Border Collie but an unusual one. This didn’t concern us because we learned that it is not the conformation that matters, but the performance, and she showed enough intelligence and problem solving genius to pass muster, even in the daylight.
Her size was interesting. She seemed to grow, not in leaps and bounds, but in a single bound! Gay was the first to take note of the size of her feet, and prophesied that if she grew into her massive clodhoppers she would end up as a BIG dog. I cloistered myself in denial so that I could not hear anyone denounce my dog as Non-BC!
By the time she was eight months, I was forced to admit that if she was BC, then she was probably crossed with a horse, but the cloud of denial reclosed to swallow me up just as quickly as it had parted to admit a little light, and I found all kinds of excuses not to strip her of her title. She just had to be a Border, because I love the breed to distraction, and I did not want my precious Belle to have a question mark hanging over her pedigree.
In our so-you-own-a-Border-Collie book, I once saw a picture of a working dog called Kerry, whose head, face, and ears were Belle’s to a T! I have tried to find it to show to unbelievers. But that page must have been printed in disappearing ink, and countless page by page searches reveal no dog called Kerry, and none of the Border Collies even faintly resembles my sweet infant. False Memory Syndrome, perhaps.
Belle grew until on Saint Valentine’s day she reached the ripe old age of one year old, and weighed in at four stones and nine pounds, a rattling sixty-five pounds in American money, almost twice the weight of Frankie who is a modest thirty-seven pounds and beautiful with it.
Belle had a big ruff, a long tapered neck, and a tail that was not only long but had more hair on it than I have seen on three other dogs. When her tail is held straight out, the hair falls vertically, and looks like a pennant tapered at the tip, but long and massive at its base. I kept telling people who asked, that she was Border Collie, but I started tagging on the "believed-to-be" bit. No one argued or offered any alternative possibilities.
And there the matter might have rested. However, last Tuesday, the day after her first birthday, we tuned the television to the Westminster Dog Show just in time to see a dog that was the spitting image of Belle.
"That confirms it," I thought. "Belle is a bells and whistles Border Collie and I am vindicated!" My triumph was short-lived. The caption at the bottom of the screen said the dog was a Belgian Sheepdog. I was mortified! "My Collie. My Belle, my dear Collie. They have stolen your identity and are passing you off as a foreign dog!"
And then it dawned. The Belgian Sheepdog on screen was a noble and beautiful animal. Its black glossy coat shone as bright as did Belle’s, and the same alert, intelligent, and inquiring look that I was accustomed to seeing on Belle, was all over his noble well-chiselled face.
I rushed for the computer and searched for "Belgian Sheepdog," and was delighted to find that they were very popular with people having a well developed taste in dogs, that they were of noble ancestry, and were divided into four well-defined kinds, Belle being an aristocratic Groenendael. As far as my untutored eye – and steel tape – can tell, my darling ex-Border Collie is very close to breed standard.
But, no matter what she had turned out to be, she would always have been close to my heart for I dearly love my "believed-to-be-Border Collie" more than words can tell. It is the kind of love that you have to feel to know. My only regret, and it is very slight one, is that she is something so difficult to pronounce. I mean – try it for yourself – "Groenendael!"
Copyright © Ronnie Bray – 2005
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
