If I could change one thing about my dog it would be.....

Someone recently posed me with this question out of the blue. I found it to be a strange thing to ask but it did make me think.

I know a lot of people that have dogs and for one reason or another, the area that I live in in Vietnam has a very large portion of the expat population that have adopted rescue dogs, which is wonderful.

Now I am not trying to get down on anyone else or even "big up" myself or my dog, but some of these other dogs have , how to say this.... they have issues. Some of them are just wild and can not ever be let off of a leash or they will take off into the distance and maybe they come back, maybe they don't! This is a very dangerous prospect in Vietnam because there is a very active market for dog meat and well, a wandering dog is ripe for the picking as far as that is concerned so you really gotta keep an eye on your pooch.

Whenever we go outside, Nadi (my dog) is almost never off the leash precisely for the reason. Even though if she was off the leash I don't think she would wander very far. This is evident any time we go to the beach because she rarely gets more than 100 feet or so away from me and she always comes to me when I call for her.

_{Beach day always = bath day}

It is a bit unfortunate that dogs are banned from the beach here but this doesn't really seem to apply during the day when it is blazing hot because the "guardians of the sand" can't be asked to come out from under their umbrellas to reprimand you. In the evenings, which is when the Vietnamese come to the ocean in droves (I presume because they don't want sunburn, which is actually quite smart) you better not even try to bring your dog there because you and the dog will be kicked out immediately.

Unfortunately, there isn't a great deal of nature near my house other than the beach, so we don't have as much outdoor activity time as we did when I lived in Chiang Mai, which is just wonderful for national parks, waterfalls, and various nature areas in general.

One day Nadi got a little too ambitious right out of the gate and was completely gassed and overheating about 1/5 of the way through my group's hike. Thankfully there was a stream along the way or I would have had to turn back because she was jumping up on my legs and refusing to walk anymore. She doesn't know how to pace herself :)

She also has legs that are 4 inches long and covering any large distance requires a lot of energy on her part.

Speaking of energy, some of my friend's dogs are just wild and they go absolutely ape shit whenever they see another dog. This is annoying to me and I am very happy that Nadi doesn't do this. When she sees another dog of course she is curious but she is other times rather indifferent to their presence and mostly just wants them to go away.

Other friends of mine have dogs that just yap yap yap yap all the time. I think I dodged a bullet on that attribute because it is a pretty common trait with smaller dogs.

Most of the time she just spends her day finding new places to lie down and as far as I can tell she is completely content to do that. This is why I only have one bed in my house, and she has 5 (one of them is also mine.)

Another aspect of Nadi that I absolutely love is the fact that I can leave the house with complete confidence that she is not going to tear the place up. In the 7.5 years that she has been alive she has only once torn up something and honestly, it was my fault. I left the bones from my chicken wings in a trash can next to my desk that she could reach, and well, some temptations are just too much to resist. This is the one and only time that she has ever torn up anything in my house and it really wasn't a big deal other than the fact that she later threw up because 6kg dogs probably aren't supposed to eat a dozen chicken wings.

Like most pet owners, I have bought her a bunch of toys and this picture is actually 5 years old. Other than the rawhide chews (which she suddenly stopped being interested in about a year ago) we still have all the toys in this picture. She doesn't even tear those apart. It's pretty amazing actually.

She is extremely well behaved and I can take her to places in public and everyone is really happy to see her including restaurant and bar owners who know that she isn't going to do anything that is going to be a nuisance. One of my favorite pubs actually gets on my case when I don't bring her with me.

If I tell Nadi to sit down on this stoop and tell her "stay" she will not move from that spot unless lured away by another human. She is extremely well-behaved and I really didn't even do very much in order to make this happen. Some people will spend ages training a dog and even then some of these animals still just simply can not be taught. I did almost nothing to get her like this.... she is just naturally smart and well-mannered. I am very lucky.

So when the person asked me "If you could magically change one thing about Nadi, what would it be?" I actually had to think about it for a while and circle back to the question later. I responded with absolute confidence that the one thing I would change about her is NOTHING. Here I am 2 days later trying to think of something I would change and I am drawing a blank. The only thing I would change about our life together is where we live because I can't do more stuff with her outside because the streets are dangerous and there is no nature here.

She's absolutely perfect the way that she is. I simply can not understand how her previous owner abandoned her. But on the other hand, I am very glad that they did because she has been a shining light in my life ever since.

How lucky am I?