Ellified, or How Dogs Will Save Us All

Another well-worded friend takes the helm. Snickers, snorts, and sheepdogs, anybody? by Patrick Palmer

I’ll make you a deal. If you’ll stay awake while reading this, I’ll try not to doze off while writing it. I’ve been seriously sleep deprived ever since a new dog moved into the neighborhood a couple of months ago. It wakes up every morning around five and starts yapping until its owners let it out. I’d march right over and give them a piece of my mind except that, well, they’re us.

After more than a year of being dogless, Tom and I decided we needed another pup, specifically another Old English Sheepdog. This big, furry breed makes every day special. It isn’t because they’re the smartest dogs, ranking well below poodles or even spaniels, and only a few notches above Kim Kardashian trying to form a coherent sentence. It’s not their boundless energy and their goofy, refuse-to-grow-up personality. Maybe it’s their shaggy coat and constant shedding that turns every day into “Take your Doghair To Work Day” that endears us. When we saw an ad for a sheepdog puppy in need of a good home, we jumped at the chance.

Saying you’re just going to look at a sheepdog pup without necessarily adopting it is like saying you’re going to Krispy Kreme just to grab a cup of coffee. We of course found ourselves driving home debating what to call the black and white female furball in the back seat. Trainers say a dog’s name should be kept short, one or two syllables maximum. It’s easier for the dog to remember when commands are sharp and clear. More importantly, hanging the wrong name on a dog can be embarrassing for both of you. Imagine the stares you’d get while standing in a dog park yelling “Come here, Thelonious,” or “Fetch, Persephone” while your chagrined dog slinks around telling the other pooches “I don’t know him.”

For us, the real measure of a good dog name is how many cloying variations can be made from it. For instance, our first sheepdog, Abigail, was Abby, but also Abigirl, Abidog, The Abster, and, later, Flabby Abby. Our second, Winston, became Winnie, Winnie-Pooh, Mr. Winston (which made him sound like a canine hairdresser), and The Winstonator.

Her current owner had described our new charge over the phone as having a crazy personality, which the pup promptly demonstrated by trying to hump my head as soon as I sat down to play with her. We knew we had to come up with an off-kilter name that reflected her quirkiness. We decided on Ellen Dogeneres, Ellie for short. By the time we got home, she was Smelly Ellie with The Jelly Belly.

Her first owners had neglected Ellie during her early months, leaving her outside most of the time and without a grasp of the Tao of bodily functions. Luckily, Ellie came with a crate to assist with the remedial housetraining. Once we set it up, we realized she’d quickly outgrow it and we’d be stuffing her into the crate like one of those Bonsai kittens-in-a bottle you see on the Internet. I ended up buying her a size XXL deluxe kennel, which was only about three square feet smaller than my first apartment and much nicer.

When we finished getting it outfitted, Ellie’s new home had a translucent roof, nightlight, fan, radio, and phone. Actually, she just had the base station to the phone, so that we could take the receiver up to the bedroom and use the intercom feature to tell her to be pipe down when she started barking at the first light of dawn.

The radio we tuned to National Public Radio to keep her company while we were at work. We figured the voices would be more comforting than a music station. I worry, though, that this could give her any unfair leg up on the goings-on in the world. I’ll walk in the door one day and say, as I usually do, “Where is she? Where’s my little Smelly Ellie With The Jelly Belly?” She’ll reply, “I’m right here. And while I’m worried about the rapid spread of HIV in Gabon, I’m relieved to know that Appalachian folk music is making a comeback.”

Most new parents, particularly first-time parents, find their conversation turning scatological. Go out to lunch with them and about the time the server is setting the chocolate mousse dessert in front of you, they’ll proudly regale you on their new arrival’s excretory prowess. With painstaking detail on texture and viscosity, they’ll delight in relating how their little one can turn two ounces of breast milk into a diaper full of material that requires a hazmat suit and tongs for safe handling and disposal.

Tom and I were no different. We’re lucky to work close enough to be able to come home for lunch, me about an hour ahead of Tom. My refrigerator notes changed from “Working late tonight, home around seven. Go out for Mexican?” to the digestive system box score: “12:10. Peed and pooped!! Love, Patrick.”

As responsible owners, we decided to have Ellie “fixed,” which seems an odd term for “sterilized” since nothing was broken. When I picked her up from the vet, she was still loopy from the anesthesia, her jelly belly shaved, stitched and stapled, her head surrounded by the requisite white plastic cone. She looked like a furry, drunk Elizabethan flashlight with legs. After coming out of the post-surgical fog, Ellie adjusted quickly to her week and a half with the cone, especially when she realized that she could extract revenge for looking ridiculous by running at maximum speed and jamming it into her Daddies’ legs. The fact that it acted as a megaphone for her crack-of-dawn vocal workouts was an added bonus.

The scar healed, the cone went back to the vet, and Ellie returned to her wacky shadow-chasing self. We’re still struggling with the housetraining, though, and are thinking about getting one of those big changeable signs found in factories that say, “X Days Since Our Last Accident” and posting it outside her crate as encouragement. The way things are going, we don’t need to sweat needing double digits anytime soon.

Minor digestive disasters seem a tiny price for having the house again filled with the sort of unconditional adoration that only a dog can give. (I’ve never had a person actually pee because they were just that happy to see me.) There’s nothing to put a bad day at work behind like having Ellie — all sixty pounds of goofy, clumsy, furry love — bounding and bouncing at me as I walk through the door, as if my being there were the greatest thing that ever happened to her.

No, you can’t beat the feeling you get when a sheepdog comes up to you while you’re sitting, puts her massive paw on your knee, looks at you rapturously through a mop of fur and lovingly says, “So, have you mailed that NPR pledge in yet?”

© 2003 © 2025 Patrick Palmer