It all started innocently enough in the bar that we own with this question ‘Can you do us a favour?’ Two of our regulars were having to move back to the UK because they were finding hard to make a decent living over here in Spain. Unemployment in Spain is fairly high and foreign workers often only get offers of low paid work. The favour was can you look after Scraggy until his documentation comes through.

Scraggy is a small Pekingese cross what he is crossed with I am not sure maybe a Jack Russel and he is a cute little dog.  Scraggy could not go back to England with them because he did not have the relevant documents (dogs now need a pet passport in order to travel to different countries within Europe) and so we have Scraggy for six months which is how long it will take to get his paperwork and shots up to date and then he will be able to travel to the UK.

The UK has very strict procedures in place and if you don’t have the right paperwork the animal will not be allowed in. Scraggy needs to have all the right injections and they all need to be given within the right time frame If you try to bring a dog into the UK without all this being in place then the animal will have to stay six months in special quarantine kennels before they are allowed to enter into the UK. Keeping a dog in quarantine for six months is a very expensive to do. The UK does not have rabies and they want to keep it that way and these strict restrictions are in place to make sure that rabies is not allowed to come in through a pet that has been infected while abroad.

Scraggy is eight years old and is real cute. How do you go about introducing a new dog into the home? I remember when my baby brother was born; my dad and I went to collect him and my mum from hospital. On the way home in the taxi my Dad gave me a gift saying that it was a present from my new baby brother. The object of giving me the gift was to make me associate pleasant things with the arrival of my brother.

Well that worked on me so when we brought Scraggy into the house we didn’t give Zac a present and tell him it was from his baby brother Scraggy, but we did give him a treat and an extra effort was made by us all to give some special attention to Zac so he didn’t feel left out. When Scraggy arrived at the house his hair had been cut very short indeed, in fact too short and the person who had groomed him had nicked Scraggy in several places. Fortunately the nicks healed pretty quickly and Scraggy’s hair grew back fairly quickly too.

Scraggy settled in with us almost right away and after a few minor adjustments our own dog Zac got use to having him around. It was getting to the hot time of the year and so for most of the time all the two dogs did was lay about sleeping and keeping cool. After having Scraggy with us for a few weeks I knew that I would miss him when he went home to the UK in October. At first we had to take the dogs out separately for a walk because they were too busy with each other to get on with the walk but soon they were fine together with Zac mainly ignoring Scraggy.

Next door to us they have a large German Shepherd dog called Rocky and one night after returning from a walk Scraggy went up to the sleeping Rocky who was curled up on the mat outside his own front door and Scraggy barked at him. Rocky woke up with a start and barked and growled at Scraggy and gave him a little nip from the sound of the squealing and yelping noises that Scraggy made you would have thought that Rocky had torn his back leg off. Zac joined in the fight with growls and barks of his own so it sounded like world war three had started.

This would not be too bad ordinarily but this all happened at nearly one o-clock in the early hours of the morning so it sounded much worse than it was because there were no other sounds to be heard and all our neighbours were tucked up in bed. All this barking and growling set off a chain reaction and dogs all up and down the valley could then be heard barking their heads off. From then on Scraggy was kept on his lead at all times when he was out so that he could not pick any more fights with other dogs, though his lead does not stop him barking at other dogs. Why is it that small dogs seem to be so feisty and why do they pick the biggest dogs to bark at?

On of the things that Scraggy's owner told us was that Scraggy hates water and hates getting wet but some times even in Spain there are times when you have to go out in the rain. This is the result of one of those times. You can see from the look on his little face that he really doesn’t like being wet.

Looking after someone else’s pet for six months is a big responsibly, we were told by Scraggy’s owner Travis that Scraggy would run off given half a chance which basically meant that he had to be on a lead at all times. It is one thing to lose your own pet this is bad enough but to lose someone else’s pet that has been entrusted to you to look after well that hardly bares thinking about.

Thank goodness we managed to get through the six months without losing Scraggy once and without Scraggy becoming ill. The six months flew by and the house was very quite after he left. Why is it that small dogs seem to yap at almost everything? Scraggy was no exception ours use to be a very quite neighbourhood until Scraggy came and changed all that he would yap at anything and everything both outside and inside the house. We all missed Scraggy when he went home but none of us missed his yapping.