corvus
Posted : 10/7/2006 6:51:52 PM
Pyry is a vallhund. He's the wrong colour and therefore can't be shown or bred from, but we love him all the same. You can see him in my sig rolling in the sand. He hates water, but adores digging. Thankfully, he usually reserves digging fits for the beach.
He does indeed bark a lot. If you don't mind it, it's pretty funny. He stands under chairs and beds and barks, and he barks at squeaky toys, and at the ball when he gets tired of fetching it, and at anything strange, and at anything frustrating.
I love him to bits. As small dogs go, I don't think you can get much better than a vallhund. Pyry is a total sweetheart. He's gentle, and steady, and reasonably confident in a quiet kind of way. He has the most adorable pixie ears and he's a fair bit like a corgi, only with longer legs and a shorter back so that he's not prone to the same back problems. I met his mother and his father and a number of other vallhunds the breeder kept and they were all lovely. They're an old breed, so the boys are quite a bit stockier than the girls. They do tend have a pretty strong streak of independence. Pyry is pretty good offlead, but occasionally he gets it into his head to go for a wander and will stubbornly ignore you until he's done. He has a VERY strong prey drive. I don't know if that's typical or not. He's killed rats in our yard and when he finds blue-tongue lizards we have to bring him inside so he won't kill them, too. I'm pretty sure if he ever happened to be offlead when a kangaroo hopped by we wouldn't see him until he'd well and truly lost it.
He's also got some health problems, which I suspect are a case of bad breeding. He has itchy skin and his ear canals are extremely narrow, so they get clogged up regularly. We've managed to improve the skin a little by going onto a fresh food diet with no grain, but we're still waiting to see if it will have any effect on his ears.
I will almost certainly have a vallhund at some stage. They're great little dogs and they fit in pretty well with most lifestyles, I think. Pyry isn't a very active individual and doesn't keep up with my 11 year old corgi, but I think you could jolly him along a little more and I've seen other vallhunds that have been more active. They're very agile and have a pretty bombproof temperament. Pyry is such a sweetie pie that it's easy to live with the independent streak and the barking. I just can't find words to describe how sweet he is. His only annoying quirk is that he's afraid of the dark, which I think is not his fault. He was left at a boarding kennel for a few nights when he was young and has been scared of the dark ever since. He runs around the yard barking at every perceived sound or smell. It's hard to convince him sometimes that there's no need to bark. If he thinks there's something wrong, he won't believe you if you try to tell him everything is fine. [8D]
So that's a quick summary of our vallhund. My mother is quite sold as well. She wants another little girl. A better bred one. Pyry came to our household because the dog we got before him we got from the same breeder. He was an accidental sheba inu vallhund cross and we had serious aggression problems with him. The breeder took charge of rehoming him and gave us Pyry instead, feeling pretty sure that Mum would be happier with a purebred vallhund. She was quite right. They're a lot like corgis, but a little more independent and less intense.