The Langley Advance
Tuesday, September 26, 2006 08:22 AM

Odd Thoughts: Loveable rascal loved laughter

by Bob Groeneveld

We first met him in the Ladner SPCA, and he was not at all the dog we were looking for.

He was a bit of a pitiful sight. He had pressed himself against the wire door of his cage, trying to get as close to us as he could. I thought he looked like he was six or seven years old, but Donna noted that the tag on his door said he was only 14 months - and she had already fallen in love with his sad face.

We took him out for a test walk - a test bounce, really, because he was suddenly so full of life. When we returned to the office, he was so scared that we were going to take him back to his jail cell that he peed all over the floor. He wanted desperately to come home with us.

His name was supposedly Spike, but at more than a year old, he didn't recognize it at all. Yet, he was intelligent - he answered to the new name we gave him, Wasgo, by the time we had driven home to Langley. That should have told us something about the way he had lived his first few months.

Wasgo was a handful back in 1995. Clearly, he'd had no formal training. Like a neglected child, he'd made misbehaviour his way of getting attention.

We hired a trainer to take the rough edges off, and we worked hard with him. We realized we had achieved a major breakthrough when he defiantly picked up another gum wrapper off the sidewalk_ only this time it was just so that he could give it to me in exchange for praise.

Wasgo was a kidder. If you don't believe dogs can have a sense of humour, you don't know dogs - and you certainly never met Wasgo. From the first day, he loved to hear people's laughter.

We took him to obedience school, and at first he took his studies seriously - but he quickly fell into his natural role: the class clown. After a few weeks, the other dogs' masters were bringing friends and relatives along as spectators to Wasgo's hilarious performances. The trainer who led the classes called him "Steve Martin in a dog suit."

We did graduate - although definitely not at the top of the class. And later, Wasgo ate his Certificate of Obedience.

As a youngster, Wasgo was a high-energy and outrageously loveable rascal.

We took him to our cabin in the Interior a few days after we got him - and there he picked a fight with a huge Angus bull.

A wolf apparently fell in love with him, and left him gifts, like a freshly killed grey jay.

When our daughter and her hubby "borrowed" Wasgo for a trip to the cabin years later, he somehow duped them into believing that he regularly slept in the bed there.

He also convinced them that he was an old hand at boat-riding - with near-disastrous results when he leaned over the side to lap up some water and almost capsized the small craft. (A wide-eyed Wasgo behaved for the rest of the ride with his equally wide-eyed crew.)

He taught Kayla the Rottweiler to swim, and taught Tessa, his pesky little sister, nearly everything she still knows about civilized behaviour - a remarkable feat for one who never worried about such niceties himself.

He was a mechanic. He always let me know when the lawnmower was about to break down - and while I went to the garage for tools after it did, he alternately yanked on the starter cord and barked at the place where the grass was supposed to come out. Errant machinery irked him.

He had an outrageously large love of life - he filled the room with it, and it spilled over to nearly everyone he met. People stopped to admire him, and smile as they moved on.

Now Wasgo has moved on.

And the smiles remain.

published on 09/26/2006