After a recent post I realised that I haven’t introduced Henry yet. Henry is our newest family member, he is a dog… I won’t go further than that because we are really not sure what breed of dog he is. Here is the full story;
Way back in February (the 19th to be exact), a neighbor called to say that a puppy had wandered out of the bush to sit on her verandah. We had been hearing dogs barking and yelping in the bush for a few weeks and we think that this puppy just got lost from the pack. My neighbor didn’t want another dog and we decided to take the pup and try to rehome him.

The above photo is that puppy. We named him Humphrey.
We gave him a bath and took him to the vet for a check up, vaccinations and microchipping.


At the vet surgery, we met some friends of ours, who fell in love with him instantly… and he fell in love with them.

So Humphrey had a home. He stayed with us for a few weeks while our friends got their house ready for a wild baby, then off he went into the world. He still visits now and then to spend time with Henry.

The photo above is Humphrey today.
While Humphrey was still with us, but after he had found his family, we got a call from the same neighbor, saying she had found another puppy. She said this one had something wrong with him and he was very sick. She was going to put him down because he looked to be suffering. We (of course) said we would take him to the vet. Henry was delivered to our gate within the hour.
I took him to the vet, who told us he had a dislocated hip and a spiral fracture of the hind leg. He was probably going to be a three legged dog. We decided right there that we were now a four dog household (the difficulty of finding a home for a three legged feral pup was just too much).


Above are two photos of Henry on his way to his first vet visit. He had been given some pain medication for the trip (it takes two and a half hours to drive to the vet). Look at that grin!

The above photo is our first of Henry. He looked so small and sick. He was in a huge amount of pain and was still a friendly little boy.
Over the weeks, Henry began to improve and after two weeks of cage rest, he was allowed out to begin the process of building muscle in his bad leg.




After a few months, we took Henry back to the vet to see how he was going. Previously the vet had predicted that he would either lose the leg or have to have a serious operation to remove the ball joint of his hip as the dislocation had been done a long time before he got medical help. The dislocation had popped back in by itself, but remained ‘loose’. This time, the vet was excited to see that the hip joint was tight and that the fracture had healed clean. Henry was declared a sound dog… and that is when the fun started.




He demands to go on a walk every day, so someone has to take him. He gets into everything, and because he is so large we have had to move everything up to head height to stay ahead of his puppy phase (he loves to steal wool). Despite the inconvenience of locking things away and being dragged out for walks all the time, we love him, he is smart and easily trained, he is a loving boy who just wants everyone to be happy which is lucky because we think he will be a fairly big dog when he is grown. He reminds me a little of Jess, a past family member we lost some time ago.
Please leave a comment with your guess as to his breeding. So far we think there is some Kelpie, Border Collie and Bull Arab in there.