Budgie

22.4.1992 - 27.3.2007

Budgie was my first dog, a maltese mix. I got him in 1992, when I was 14 years old and my parents finally had a weak moment after years of me nagging them to get a dog. I didn't care what kind of dog it was, main thing was it was a dog. So, finally, we brought this little white furball home, he was hardly 6 weeks old and should have stayed with his mother a couple weeks more. He was my dog, so I was responsible for his training and I failed miserabely. It was hard to get information on dog training at that time, dog training was only for german shepherds, the trainers gave bad looks to dobermann or schnauzer owners, and a person with a maltese mix was too exotic and could not be taken seriously.

When Budgie was about 1 year old, I discovered a new agility club, where all kinds of dogs were welcome. There I started training Budgie and learning understanding dogs. Budgie used to bite people and fight other dogs, never obbeyed a command and we had major communication issues. My parents were speaking about putting him down, but I could not allow that and rather tried to understand and fix it, it wasn't his fault, after all. I got loads of magazines about dogs and dog trainings and tried to fix all the things I did wrong at the beginning. This was a very important lesson for me to learn about dogs - and I really learned a lot.

Budgie started to turn into a relatively normal dog soon. We were successfully competing in agility together and made it to the A3 category. When he turned 7 years old, our communication was already very good and we lived together nicely, so it was about time to get a new dog. And do everything right from the beginning. That's how the first parson russell moved to live with us. His name was Arnie and he was the most obedient dog I ever had.

Budgie lived a nice long life and even helped to raise a few litters. He lived with a failed liver for the last 3 years. When his appetite got weaker at the beginning of 2007, I first assumed it's the bad teeth. But as this didn't improve significantly after the bad teeth got removed, more tests have shown that Budgie's kidneys are failing. He was almost 15 years old and there's not much to be done about it at such age. So he got some support treatment and we tried to make his last days as nice as possible. When he started to suffer and completely refused food for a couple of days, we had to let him go.