I’m in the park with my dog, and along comes a woman with a darling, fluffy-wuffy puppy. But she’s looking a bit anxious. This is not her puppy. Her 15-year-old daughter spotted it on Gumtree and bought it for £500, because it looked so cuddly, and she didn’t know it was an akita. Now here was the poor mother, lumbered with the puppy, which was growing bigger rather quickly.
This is the trouble with akitas. They grow into whacking great creatures that can squash your own little dog into a pancake, just while playing, and we seem to have a lot of them round here. There’s another living round the corner, and another that a young woman used to bring for walkies, until it grew almost as big as her, and now we haven’t seen it for some time, but the one round the corner is now nearly as big as a small pony, and rather fond of my dog.
It’s very handsome, and its owner is a personable and muscular young man who keeps it on a lead, which is all good, except that it will soon weigh about 10 stone. My dog weighs only four, is a comparative Bambi, and has a slipped disc and weak ankles. A couple of akita pounces could probably snap it in two, so I think I might avoid their front garden in future, where it’s sometimes on the loose, just in case it objects to us passing by, clears the fence and has us for lunch.
Akitas are “dominant”, tremendously loyal, and make fabulous guard dogs, so you won’t have robbers if you have one, but you may not have many chums locally. Swings and roundabouts. Not that I want the country cleared of akitas, but I have a dream. I have lots of dreams, some huge and fairly hopeless: no more arms sales, no more wars, a warm welcome for refugees, save the rainforests – all the usual ones. However, this little one could be managed and come true: that people would be more careful when buying dinky-looking puppies. And perhaps do a tiny bit of research.
