Welcome to Club Canin 🐶

+ A donation to Association Animara

At the house there are two dogs: Moika and Naïa.

One day my father-in-law, Hervé, was coming home from work on the ferry. He met an acquaintance who had a tiny puppy in his arms. He’d found the tiny white and beige pup on the streets but didn’t know what he was going to do with her. Et voila - Moika became part of the family.

Moika, as sketched by Martin.

Naïa arrived last year, given to us by a friend of the family who knew someone with a litter. We’d buried Kahn (the slightly crazy male dog who liked to chase cars) a month or so earlier and wanted another dog to keep Moika company.

Moika, the older sister, is well-behaved. She’s chill. She smells good. She takes her job protecting the house very seriously.

Naïa, the little sister, likes to go rummaging in bins… and she smells like it. Just this month, she’s destroyed two pairs of Martin’s shoes. She likes to steal Auguste’s toys. If left to her own devices, she tries to hang out with a flea-ridden gang of strays.

Naïa, as drawn by me. Text says: Naïa sleeps after a hard day of work.

We love our silly bin dog. But we also love having shoes that aren’t ripped to pieces. So we started taking Naïa to Club Canin to hopefully get some manners drilled into her silly doggy head.

I tagged along with Martin a couple of times and it’s like stepping into a Hairy McLairy book. There’s a dog the size of a pony with droopy jowls, a little Jack Russel, a few sleek Belgian Malinois, a black dog that looks like a mop with a tongue.

The club is run by a large Tahitian guy with a grumpy demeanour who everyone knows as the Dog Whisperer. And you watch Naïa, who joyfully refuses to follow even my most basic of instructions, fall into place next to him with a big doggy smile.

The dogs learn how to rest next to your legs, sit, lie down, stay. Then they have a little dressage course where they run through a tunnel, stand in a kids pool full of plastic bottles, go up and down a ramp, and jump over a hurdle. The volunteers give tips as each dog owner puts their pup through their paces. Dogs are motivated by their favourite toy and frequent pieces of ham.

Every session we come back and Naïa is a little bit more behaved for a while… but she might just be trying to charm more snacks out of us.

Association Animara

Driving around the island, the thing that breaks my heart is the stray dogs and cats you see everywhere. Full of fleas, missing patches of fur, ribs sticking out, sometimes with drooping nipples that suggest a recent litter. Sometimes you see tiny puppies or kittens scraping by on scraps.

There’s no animal shelter here, and the local government doesn’t seem to care about encouraging people to spay or neuter their animals. It’s pretty much left to the locals to sort it out.

The dogs here are not the fashion pooches you see on the streets of Melbourne and Sydney, let me tell you.

There’s one group, Association Animara, doing the good work of spaying/neutering strays and trying to get them into loving homes. At the beginning of making this newsletter, I pledged that 5% of paid subscriptions would be donated to this association. To be fair, I didn’t actually expect to get any paid subscriptions.

But to my surprise, my revenue for my first year has been… $700.18! Thank you to my wonderful paid subscribers, you’re the best.

I’m going to double my original contribution, and if you want to be part of the donation, you have the opportunity to upgrade to becoming a paid subscriber before next week when my newsletter has it’s first birthday 🥳

(Of course, you can also always consider donating directly to Association Animara!)

If you like reading about our pets, check out my farewell to our cat Tsilla or my evolution into crazy chicken lady.