Don’t Judge a Dog by its Breed

Thirteen years ago, two weeks before my husband and I married, we decided to get a dog. At the time we lived in a small Brooklyn, NY, apartment. My husband wanted a boxer, but we didn’t have a fenced-in yard and our living space was already tight. We settled on a pug.

We brought home Santiago, our first pug, at 10-weeks-old and he was the best puppy you could imagine. He was snuggly and full of love, slept through the night in his crate, was potty trained in a few days with no accidents, and wanted to be friends with everyone. Even before training, Santiago was a natural born therapy dog and he passed his Canine Good Citizen and Therapy dog exams around age five. Before he was even one year old, and as soon as he had all his vaccines, he was visiting my great aunt along with all the other residents at the nursing home. He took his job of spreading love very seriously.

Santiago was a social pup and we didn’t want him to be lonely, so we brought home Casius about two months later. Casius would not fall to sleep in his crate unless one of us kept a hand in there with him. He broke out of every crate we brought home and scaled the baby gates we tried as an alternative.

Casius has a healthy sense of skepticism, is smart as hell and loves to run. “Pugs don’t run the lure course,” someone told us during our first summer of many at Canine Camp Getaway, but he did, and he ran fast, proving himself skilled in running the agility and parkour courses as well. Nothing kept him still. He kept running and jumping, remaining athletic after two bilateral knee surgeries. When we discovered he had hip dysplasia and a degenerative spinal condition at age 10, we were surprised because he never showed any signs of physical distress.

We moved to Buffalo and bought a house less than a year after we brought Casius home. Shortly after I began volunteering with the local pug rescue, and I fell in love with Brutus and he joined our family. Brutus had been hit by a car and we were advised that he would always need a cart and would be incontinent, but he never did and he never was. He did have a habit of marking everything in the house, (we replaced the flooring two times because of him), he was goofy and stubborn and it took months of training for him to come around to trusting men. “Pugs don’t have a good a sense of smell,” someone told me at Canine Camp Getaway, but Brutus seemed to like sniffing as much as Casius liked running, so we continued with classes at home, and Brutus often behaved better than the non-pugs in his class, who were bred for sniffing and competing.

Next in our lives was Finn, another rescue dog who we helped my Mom adopt from North Carolina. “Uncle Finn,” spent a lot of time with my pugs, his nephews, joining us at Canine Camp during the summers. “Pugs aren’t outdoorsy,” people told me, but our Finn loved to hike, miles and miles. Over the years and through several States, Finn showed us that being in the woods, and taking in the smells and the scenery was his thing. I think Vermont was his favorite place.

I share these stories as a reminder that if I believed everything I was told about pugs, I might have missed the chance to enjoy my pugs’ unique and wonderful personalities. Each of our pugs have their own distinct likes and dislikes which I learned by exposing them to experiences. Taking the time to learn what each of them liked helped me nurture their interests. Eventually, each pug had scheduled activities with me once a week to develop their skills. I cherished that time, watching them grow and form personalities.

Certainly breed will have an impact on predispositions, health, and to some extent proclivity for activities, but every dog of a particular breed isn’t stamped out of a cookie cutter. Dogs, like humans, have their own unique personalities.

Do yourself a favor and get to know your dog. When I adopted Santiago, I didn’t know dog sports existed. Thirteen years later, we have tried agility, nose works, barn hunt, go to ground, parkour, therapy dog, flirt poles, flyball, and more. I’ve learned to love each of my pugs for who they truly are and along the way, have built the most incredible bonds with each of them.