Memories of Archie

My family’s beloved Jack Russell Archie passed away On June 26, 2017, about a month short of being thirteen years old. Since I now have only memories of him, I’m going to put as many of those down on paper as I possibly can. If he can’t physically be here, at least the memories of him won’t fade.

I first saw Archie visiting the house of my cousin, Chris White in 2004, when I was 16 years old. It was right before my family’s eight-week holiday on the Gold Coast in Queensland. Only a week or so before this visit, Archie had been birthed by Chris’ long-haired, Jack Russell named George. Archie had only just gotten fur. He did not have the energy to do anything except rest quietly.

In the photo that we have of this moment, me, my sister Emily and her friend Sophie are holding George’s three puppies. Mum and I disagree on which puppy is Archie. Mum thinks that Emily is holding Archie because that puppy is the biggest, and Archie was the biggest of the litter when he got older. I think that Sophie is holding Archie because that puppy has white fur with light brown patches which look similar to Archie’s fur.

While Me, dad, mum and Emily were on our eight-week holiday on the Gold Coast, we discussed whether or not we would get a dog when we arrived back in Warrnambool. Dad was against getting a dog because he thought that he’d be the one walking him all the time and picking up all his poop in the backyard. Once he relented, we brainstormed some names. Of the long list of possible names Emily wrote up, we decided on ‘Archie.’

One reason that dad relented was that I said that I would pick up his poop in the backyard, and I honestly meant to, but I often didn’t. I didn’t spend that much time in the backyard, so I was oblivious to how many dog poops were in it. Dad was in the backyard all the time tending to his garden, so he always noticed how many poops were in the yard. I would pick up Archie’s poop if he asked me to do it, but it was generally easier to do it himself than to find me and ask me to do it.

On the other hand, dad never had to walk Archie if he didn’t want to. Sometimes dad would walk Archie in the morning, but that was never because I wasn’t walking him. Before we got Archie I never left the house, so when we first got him I loved having a motivation to walk somewhere new. Then I had to walk further and further in order to see somewhere new. Eventually I was walking Archie, all the way out to Merrivale and back. From my house on Princess Street, that is several kilometres there and back. Once I had walked him as far as I reasonably could in all directions, I continued walking him each day out of habit and because I didn’t feel right if I didn’t get the exercise.

Mum loved Archie right from the start, so she always walked him until she had her knees operated on when Archie was much older.

Emily didn’t take to walking him like I did because she didn’t want to handle his poop during walks. It stank and wasn’t a cool look. One day when I was staying in after school and reading in my high school library (where dad worked as the librarian) mum walked Archie into the library where Archie took a big poop. When Emily found out about this incident, she immediately wanted to know if there were people there, and if they knew she was related to any of us.

When mum and I first started walking him, we would only walk him around the block for exercise. He was still only a puppy and long walks were tiring. Archie would also sit down and look sadly at whoever was walking him whenever he got tired. Mum and I would carry him the rest of the way around the block whenever he did that. Unfortunately, this meant that Archie got lazier and lazier, because he knew that he could get carried whenever he wanted to be. One day Archie sat down and looked sadly at me the moment that we left the driveway, hoping I would carry him the entire way around the block. I never carried him the rest of the way again.

One day as mum was walking Archie he poked his nose through a gap in a house fence. It was the house where Princess Street meets Coulstock street , but on the opposite side of the road to Albert park. Back then, this house had a high, wooden fence with a gap in it, and little dogs that lived in the backyard on the other side of that fence. One of the dogs on the other side of the fence must have bit Archie hard, because he flinched back from the fence and stayed as far away from that house as his lead would allow every time we went past it.

In another unfortunate incident, I once walked Archie out along the highway in the Merrivale direction all the way to Allan Dunstone’s house for a visit. Archie spent the visit in the garage and got sick eating some snail bait. When Allan’s mum Helen dropped me back home dad noticed that Archie kept drooling, staring blankly into space, and not wanting to move around much. We rushed him to a vet who was able to take care of him.

When Archie was young we’d make a point of playing with him in the backyard. He liked to bite, so we would play tug-o-war with him. We used a ball attached to two looped strings, his squeaky green plastic bone, footballs, tennis balls, sticks and other objects to fight over. Sometimes I would lift Archie off the ground and swing him around during the tug-of-war. It never seemed to hurt him. He had a lot of muscle and a strong neck. Based on dad’s source, it was necessary for me to always win the tug-of-war so that Archie would know who was in charge. I made sure that I always won, except when he caught me off guard a couple of times.

Sometimes as a puppy Archie would entertain himself by chasing his own tail. I have never seen a dog do that before or since, except in a Footrot Flats comic.

Archie would also play by chasing basketballs and footballs around the yard by himself, pushing them along with his nose, growling with excitement, and trying to bite and tackle the balls. One day a kid saw Archie playing in this fashion and it prompted him to ask his mum if he could get a dog too. (This moment was relayed to me later by mum.)

Eventually Archie’s teeth had punctured all the basketballs and footballs, and all the other toys were either ripped apart or lost, so we just had him chase tennis balls occasionally. Archie loved to chase objects when people threw them but didn’t like bringing them back. He preferred for people to run after him, chase him and wrestle them off him. Or he would just get distracted after chasing them and wander away.

He didn’t like taking baths, but did like rolling around in horse poop at Albert Park (and anything else which stank.) After we made him take baths, he would dry off by shaking himself and by playing with the towel. Mum would put the towel over his head so that he couldn’t see and he would shake it off. We’d also play tug-o-war with the towel to dry him off.

Archie was mentioned in the paper once. The actual story in The Warrnambool Standard was about dad being able to grow an avocado tree in Warrnambool, but Archie got mentioned because he kept ripping all the avocados off. Dogs don’t eat avocados, but Archie just loved to bite things, especially if they were dangling over his head. He used to tear the washing off the line when he was young too, and (also when he was young) painfully bite our hands if we tried to pat his head (even though the biting was just playing from his perspective.)

Archie, throughout his life, was also generally indifferent to me patting him. If I patted him, he didn’t enjoy this enough to stop whatever he was doing. If he wasn’t already looking for my attention when I tried to pat him he would usually just keep walking past. I liked patting him though. Especially his head because he had soft, velvet ears.

Archie was so extremely friendly as a puppy, that he would want to jump on and play with everyone that he saw, regardless of whether that person was a complete stranger, and regardless of whether that complete stranger was a human, a dog or some other animal of moderate size.

One time, when I was walking back from high school with mum and Archie, Archie was so desperate to run over to the other students walking home, that mum decided to let go of the lead and allow him to ‘say hello’ to a girl that we didn’t know.

When mum asked her friend Marion to babysit Archie one time, he ran right up to Marion’s pet Labrador and jumped all over it, and they instantly started playing like they were best friends. He would also do that whenever he ran into Gwen’s dog Lucy,(Gwen being a woman who also walked her dog around Albert Park quite a bit). When he was much older, he and Lucy still sniffed each other but didn’t jump on each other anymore.

Often when we walked him around Albert Park as a young dog, he would start running in circles around the other dogs with a huge smile on his face, panting and hoping they would play with him. One time, he did the same thing to a horse. It seems that he assumed the horse was a really, really big dog here to play with him. Thankfully, the horse owners found this amusing, rather than annoying.

He would also try to say hello to cats whenever he saw them, even though they usually arched their backs at him.

Furthermore, not only did he want to play the moment he saw someone else, but he wanted to play with such enthusiasm that he could end up hurting the other dog or person.

One time we took him to the beach to have a run but he jumped onto a little boy and accidentally scratched him. The boy tried to run away, but Archie thought it was a game and chased after him. He came back to us after I chased him and yelled for him to come back.

Another time at Albert Park he was running alongside a little long-haired dog when he accidentally ran right over the top of that dog causing it to yelp. He learned to not be so rough as he got older. A couple of years later, Archie successfully played with a tiny Jack Russell puppy. He didn’t accidentally hurt, or tread on the tiny dog once.

Being a Jack Russell, Archie had been bred to hunt rats, and he loved catching rodents and birds. At first when he killed a rat he would be so proud that he would drag it to our doorstep to show us what he had done. When we walked him around Albert Park and he smelled a creature underground he would start frantically clawing at the ground hoping to catch and kill whatever was underground. He loved chasing birds too, even though he couldn’t catch them, he loved to run into a big crowd of galahs at Albert Park or Warrnambool College and make 100s of them all take off.

When Archie was a puppy, we decided to send him to puppy school, which was taught at the Warrnambool Vetinary Clinic. We couldn’t get him to stop biting our hands and humping our legs to assert his dominance within the household. He liked to hump guests’ legs even more. He once humped a former neighbour at a Christmas party when I was in high school. She was very young at the time, so Archie was able to wrap his front legs a good way around her whole body before he started humping. The image of that happening while Emily laughs is burned into my memory.

Archie loved puppy school because all the puppies played together in a the centre of the room, biting, chasing and trying to jump on top of each other while a woman instructs us how to better teach our dogs to behave. Sarah Lazzaro who I knew from table tennis was there, to train her dog White Socks. (Named ‘White Socks’ because he/she was black with white feet.) Puppy school recommended shutting Archie in a boring room like the laundry for five minutes if he misbehaved. This was at least better than the punishment that had been originally suggested to dad (I don’t know where from) of smacking Archie on the nose as punishment. I always felt awful that I ever employed that as a punishment. The boring rooms that we chose to shut Archie in as punishment for misbehaving were our laundry room, and the toilet in the flat out the back of our house. This punishment was not always convenient though, because sometimes he would nip at our heels while we were out walking him, and there was nowhere to keep him shut up in those circumstances.

Then somebody dad contacted suggested flipping him on his back as punishment to remind him who’s in charge. For me this punishment worked perfectly, but mum insisted that she wasn’t strong enough to flip Archie on his back. Apparently this was because she thought that she had to pick him up with both hands, spin him around in mid-air, and place him gently on his back, while risking injury to her own back. For some reason it never occurred to her to just push his side with the palm of her hand until he falls over. Even after I showed mum the more efficient technique she still didn’t remember how to do it. Maybe she just didn’t want to punish him.

Archie was photographed wearing a mortarboard when he graduated puppy school. Unfortunately the Clinic lost the photos and we never saw them.

 After puppy school, Archie was a lot better at not biting our hands. He would still playfully nip at them sometimes if they were raised over his head, but he would make sure that his teeth only lightly touched the skin instead of sinking into it. He would sit or drop down on all fours, in order to show that he was being well behaved. Because we had trained him to do this using doggy treats, he would usually sit and stare (or drop and stare) when he wanted food. He would also roll onto his back to show that he was a well behaved dog, and he knew others were in charge. He especially did this for dad and me, and we would rub his belly every time. In later years I would notice that he would sometimes roll onto his back when he wanted attention and to get his belly rubbed. I could tell this was why he did it, because after I only rubbed his belly for a few seconds, he continued staring at me while still laying on his back.

He learned to follow me around Albert Park and come when called. However, he still did not always come when called the first time, and wouldn’t come at all if he found food. Unfortunately, Archie was less comfortable sitting on my lap now. He figured that it was his place to be on the floor. I rarely got to pick him up or hold him because of that. One exception to this rule was when I lifted him down from fences. Archie enjoyed the fun of walking on top of other people’s fences, well into his later years. If the fence was too high for him to get down by the time he reached the end of it I would help him down.

One day I was walking Archie across the Princess Highway. We were trying to run all the way across because the lights had turned green. We made it to the middle of the highway and the ‘walk’ symbol was flashing red. A big truck was turning in front of us preventing us from running the rest of the way across the highway, so I stopped in the middle. This should have halted Archie, but instead his lead snapped. Not realising his lead had snapped, Archie continued running out in front of the truck. I shrieked his name in fear and he started running back to me with a big, happy oblivious smile on his face. He was always more likely to come when called if your tone sounded serious and I was extremely serious here.

For the first three years of Archie’s life, he had our cat Daisy for company outside. He would follow her around the backyard and she hissed at him if she realized he was there. He still liked the company though.

Archie had his own kennel and Daisy had her own house on top of the Barbeque where Archie couldn’t reach it, but it kept ending up on the ground anyway. One day dad saw Archie dragging his own kennel across to the barbeque so that he could leap on top of that before leaping onto the barbeque to knock Daisy’s house down.

Archie was skilled at climbing on top of things. He would always climb onto the fan from the reverse-cycle air conditioner so that he could put his front paws on the window box and look through the window facing the backyard. This window was about a metre and a half off the ground. One time when we had guests, dad joked that Archie wasn’t standing on anything. He was just the world’s tallest dog when he stood on his hind legs. We also have a photo of him at the window covered in mud that he’d been rolling in.

One time Daisy had a seizure inside. Archie saw it through the window and started howling until mum came to look after her. We were glad that he was there to call the incident to mum’s attention.

Being such a social dog who loved to say hello to everyone, Archie was quite lonely when Daisy died at the age of nineteen and a half years, so we got the Australian Terrier Max to keep him company. Archie liked playing with Max and also humping him a lot to assert dominance.

Max would eat his food very fast, so Archie had to start eating his food faster. Otherwise it would get eaten on him. One day that theme of being competitive about food got very ugly. Both dogs saw some KFC on the ground just outside Albert Park and immediately attacked each other for it. Max caught hold of a spot on Archie’s head above the right eye, and wouldn’t let go. I tried to pull him off but immediately realized that this was only going to result in pulling Archie’s face off.

 A passing stranger saw my problem and tried to help. For a moment she seemed to have succeeded. She gave Max a sudden jerk causing him to let go. I was so surprised that her effort actually worked, that I didn’t grab hold of Max’s lead fast enough and he attacked Archie again. I grabbed Max and hit him four times as hard as I could until he had to let go (with a yelp) because of the pain. I rang mum and dad who were visiting their friends Neil and Jude Hickey to tell them that Max had ripped a hole in Archie’s head. I could see something white in there which I hoped was not bone, but once the blood dried against a clearly solid surface it was apparent that I was seeing bone. Archie didn’t complain about having a hole in his head though. In fact he was smiling the moment Max was pulled off him. Then he was taken to the vet for stitches, and for years after he had a little bald patch above his eye where Max had attacked him.

Apart from rare moments of aggression however, Max was a very well behaved puppy that didn’t want to nip or hump legs and only wanted to lick people’s faces and get as much attention and pats as we were willing to give him. Max never needed puppy school. Therefore, there was less need to hammer home to him that he needed to obey us and have less status than the rest of the family. Because of this, I would let Max sit on furniture and sit on my lap. (Or at least this was allowed in later years. When Max was young we would always have to put him back outside within minutes for being too hyper.) Archie didn’t like seeing this though, and felt the need to hump Max extra to make sure Max knew he was below Archie in the pecking order.

Every time we came home Archie would be there wagging his tail, and (when he was young) about to jump on us. When I came home at odd hours after completing the night shift at McDonald’s Archie would growl, thinking that I was an intruder. When he realised it was me, he would flip on his back. After I had rubbed his belly I would give him a minute to lick my shoes. He always enjoyed the flavour of my shoes after a McDonald’s shift. Presumably they had some oil on them. Max would lick my shoes too, but also want to lick my face because he gets more attention for doing that.

When Archie was about 11-12 years old he kept escaping from our yard. None of us had any idea how he was doing it. Then one day while I was doing the dishes in the flat out the back of our house where I was/am living, I looked through the window and I saw Archie climb up on top of the fence. I called to Archie from the flat. At first it didn’t occur to me that that this was how he’d been getting out of the yard. It was quite high up and it didn’t occur to me that he might be able to get down the other side without hurting himself. I only realized that that was how he’d been getting out of the yard when I saw the incredibly guilty look on Archie’s face. His eyes said ‘Uh-oh! I’m in trouble.’ Now I knew why Archie was getting out of the yard and Max wasn’t. Max didn’t have Archie’s climbing skills.

Archie’s climbing skills were also noticed when I walked him and Max into the Wave School where dad’s friend Tim Kelly worked/works. We were cooking pizzas in the school’s wood oven for tea. Archie was able to climb on top of the very high chicken enclosure. Thankfully he couldn’t find a way inside.

As Archie got older he didn’t enjoy playing with other dogs as much. In 2016, a dog at Albert Park tried to start playing with him and Archie growled at him. That was the first time I saw Archie growl at a dog who was just being friendly. Later on he didn’t want to play with the new Jack Russell puppy owned by John and Janet who live on our street. Their puppy was biting, jumping all over him and acting exactly the way Archie used to act – And Archie found it very annoying. He also growled at Tim, Yukari and Chance’s (The Kelly’s) dachshund puppy Lucky for similar behaviour.

By this time I was allowing Archie and Max inside the flat out the back of mum and dad’s house where I was residing. They would be allowed in every night. Max slept on the couch. Archie usually slept at the foot of my bed. One time he slept on the bed, and occasionally he slept on the floor next to the couch where Max was sleeping. When I had my midnight snacks they would both come over looking for food and I would throw them both bits of crust from my sandwiches. If I hadn’t thrown anything in a while Archie would sit to show he was being good.

When mum and dad went on overseas trips I would let them into the house too. One time, I had a movie on at night, and Archie just cocked his leg and peed on the carpet right in front on me. I started to angrily ask him what he thought he was doing and then cracked up laughing before putting him outside and dealing with the stain.

As he got older he was more receptive to getting wet on hot days. When I walked his along the path which leads under the Mortlake Road Bridge, he would take a dip in the river. He would wade in right up to his neck in the summer. Max preferred to only get his feet wet.

Sometimes in the summer mum and I would walk Archie and Max along the beach and they would sometimes go in the water then too. One time Max was willing to swim out to me and mum through cold, deep water which caused him to shiver because he would get cuddled by me and mum in return.  Archie didn’t need the attention as badly as that.

Archie’s health seemed to deteriorate after we brought him back from a Kennel which was babysitting him during our week-long family holiday in Queensland in 2016. We had left him at kennels on other occasions too. The first time it happened mum cried because she was so sad to leave him in such cramped conditions, so this time we had left him at a different kennel where he could have more room and sunlight. For some (presumably coincidental) reason he started slowing down after he came back from this new kennel.

It was up to me to babysit him and Max while mum and dad holidayed overseas for several weeks again. Mum later told me later that she wasn’t sure if Archie would be alive when she came back. He did start eating less while mum and dad were away and had less energy. I would not bother walking him because he was always tired anyway.

A week or so after mum and dad came back from holiday it was time for Archie and Max to come into my flat at night again. Max sprinted right in, and I left the door open in case Archie wanted to come in later. Archie wasn’t always as eager to sleep in the flat as Max was. I was delighted when 30-60 minutes later Archie trotted in, even though he was looking quite tired and sad when he did.

The next night Archie didn’t come into the flat.

The night after that when he also didn’t come I decided to go get him and carry him into my flat, seeing as he didn’t have as much energy lately. I laid him in front of the couch where Max slept. I started to really worry about him when I went to get my midnight snack and Archie didn’t come to the kitchen to beg for scraps. That was something he DEFINITELY would have done if he’d had the energy and the kitchen was only a few paces away. I was definitely taking him to the vet tomorrow.

I didn’t get up until 1pm because I had a bad sleep pattern. Mum was in tears over how limp and lacking energy Archie was. Dad and I took him down to the vet to see if there was anything we could do to make him healthy again. Mum was too distressed to deal with it.

When we popped him on the scales at the vet we discovered that he’d lost a lot of weight. He was shaking, skinny and hair was falling out. The light brown spots on him that used to be clear and vibrant when he was younger were almost totally faded. He was practically white all over without any brown spots. I noticed that the hair had recently grown back over his right eye where Max had attacked him in that fight over KFC.

I was shattered to discover that there wasn’t anything we could do to make him well again. Jack Russells normally live from 13-16 years and (although I didn’t know Archie’s exact birthday) I didn’t think he was thirteen yet. I thought that I’d at least have a couple more years with him. The vet gave dad and me ten minutes to say goodbye to him before he came back with a needle. I patted him, told him I loved him and it was for the best and when the needle went in he died instantly. He was totally ready to go by that point.

I was sobbing, tears streamed down my cheeks and I leaned against the wall breathing heavily. Dad texted mum letting her know that he had passed, and she howled with misery. Dad had a cry too.

Dad and I took his body home to mum wrapped in a blanket. We talked about burying him but mum said that she didn’t want to put him into the cold ground while his body was still warm. Even though he couldn’t feel anything anymore she wasn’t emotionally ready to do that. She said that Archie should have been given lethal injection before his health deteriorated this much, but I pointed out that putting him down while he still had will to move around and do things would not have been better or easier.

I couldn’t stop crying and feeling sad for the whole week after Archie’s passing. I would have dreams with Archie in them and then get hysterically upset in my sleep knowing that what I was seeing wasn’t possible. The first thing I felt when I woke up each morning was aching sadness because he was gone. It occurred to me that I’d seen him almost every day for the last thirteen years and him not being here felt very wrong. At first I thought that I should deal with this by letting all the tears out but that turned out not to work because I had an endless supply of tears. All I could do was trying to keep myself distracted until the feelings of sadness faded. I visited Collin’s Bookseller approximately a couple of days after Archie’s passing, and ‘Time to Say Goodbye’ by Andrea Bocelli was playing on the sound system. (Luckily without the lyrics) I decided to play that when I visited him at his grave to reminisce and say goodbye later.

Mum said that this was why having a dog as a pet is not a good idea. It’s too sad when they die. But it was almost always a delight to see Archie for nearly thirteen years, so if I have to be sad for a week (or when I think of his passing) then it’s easily worth it to have known him.

Of course I wasn’t able to get through this without crying again but I am glad that now I have put all this down on paper so none of these memories can fade now.