Has anyone seen the damn cat?

Luxury Pet Department Blog entry number 4! ( we are starting to enjoy this).

Today is the first day that our new puppy sandy will be introduced to the company cat “Alanis”. In case you are wondering, Alanis is named after Alanis Morissette much to the displeaseure of my wife

Alanis is a very easy going cat, we re-homed her after she was taken in by the RSPCA and aparently she was living in a house with over 100 other house cats, poor little girl. Anyway now she has the life of riley, during the day I take her into the office where she snuggles up in her new duffle bag cat bed, passing the time sleeping and munching on cat treats . During the evening she comes home with us and snuggles up by the fire in her 2 tier wicker basket (yes thats right, one cat gets a 2 tier basket) anyway, I digress.

We have kept the two apart for the first couple of weeks while Sandy gets used to her new environment and Alanis gets used to the new dog smells, today was the day where the two will meet for the first time in the Luxury Pet Department office before settling them in together at home.

While Alanis was fast asleep on her cat bed I sneaked Sandy into the room on her lead and all was looking good, then Alanis opened one eye to see a dribbling Golden labrador staring her in the face…..

Soon both her eyes were open and we had a cat WITH ITS HACKLES FIRMLY UP, ready to rip Sandys head off!, I might add at this pont that all Sandy wanted to do was get to Alanis so she could lick her, there was no agression from Sandy. Within the space of a few second Alanis jumped out of her cat bed , jumped accross her litter tray knocking the litter everywhere and threw herself at the innocent puppy, I managed to get myself between the two of them to stop it kicking off and once Alanis realised that I wasnt going to let her beat the dog up, she ran away.

At this point I thought to myself, “this isnt going to be easy” and then I thought to myself, “where has the damn cat gone?” I put Sandy in her dog bed and told my other half to keep an eye on her while I go and make up with the cat.

An hour passed and there was no sign of the cat. I cannot find her in the office, in the stock room or outside, I guess the introduction had really upset her but at the end of the day the pair of them will have to live together so she will just have to get on with it.

Now it was getting late in the day and we still couldnt find Alanis, my mind started to think the worst, did she run under a car when she darted out of the office? maybe she has run so far away she cannot find here way back? even the shaking of her favourite cat treats didn’t bring her home, I decided to have one last look in the stock room….

I started rumiging through all the dog clothes to see is she had hidden amongst the dog coats and dog harnesses, I had no joy so I moved onto the dog beds and started rumiging through the Danish Design section, to my relief a little face popped up sandwiched between a Morocco snuggle dog bed and a Rodeo slumber bed.

Alanis looked scared and tired, I gave her a big cuddle and a huge saucer of milk to make her feel better, I am still feeling very guilty and I hope she will eventually accept Sandy into her life.

I am sure she will at least tollerate her!!

 

Dog collars for the rich and famous, but not for my puppy….

More madness from the Luxury Pet Department office!! this time it involves a £3000.00 dog collar or rather the lack of one!!

Ok you may think that I am mad when you read this, but I think the term “stupid” would be more suitable.

 A couple of days ago my new puppy Sandy, decided to eat a load of my stock on her first day in the Luxury Pet Department office, if you didnt read about you can do so on my blog entry here. After destroying hundreds of pounds worth of stock, I decided to keep sandy at bay until she is a bit more grown up and better trained, my first good decision as a “responsible” pet owner was soon upstaged by another stupid idea….

A friend of ours is in the photography industry, he mainly works with children but wanted a taste of working with animals so he approached us about taking pictures of Sandy. I thought, what a good idea! we can take pictures of Sandy laying in a Luxury Dog Bed or wearing some Designer Dog Clothes, she could then be the model for the website homepage. This would save us having to pay for images of dogs we know nothing about and Vernon (the photographer) gets his experience, I agreed and arranged for a photo shoot day.

Vernon arrived with his camera equipment ready to take pictures of new model Sandy. An hour passed and everything was going fine, Sandy was being well behaved and Vernon was getting some great shots of her laying in her Wallace and Jones Dog Bed and wearing her new designer Dog t-shirts, we were getting some great shots for the site and all was going swimmingly well, then Vernon came up with a suggestion…

“Have you got one of those expensive dog collars you sell in stock?” Vernon asked, I replied, “put it this way, at £3000.00 a pop we do not have a box full but we do keep a couple, why?”

“why don’t you get Sandy to wear one so we can photograph her?” he said ” it would make a great main picture for the homepage”.

At this point I wasn’t sure what to do? it is an expensive dog collar so letting a six month old puppy near it is probably a bad idea, however Sandy will be with us all the time and as long as we keep an eye on her everything should be fine, I agreed and fetched the collar from the stock room.

The 18 carat dog collar looked beautiful on Sandy, I was so proud of her sitting there all well behaved while Vernon took his snaps, everything went perfectly and we had some beautiful pictures ready for the site plus Vernon found out the easy way what it was like to take pictures of animals!

We packed away Vernon’s equipment and helped him load up his car, as we stood by the car Vernon said ” where is Sandy, I would like to say goodbye to my model!” I looked around and my heart dropped, no Sandy.. no dog collar. We started calling her but we didnt get a response so out came the dog treats and the search began, after about 30 minutes we decided to start searching further afield but we were not having any luck, I was starting to worry about her. Just as I was about to call the police a soaking wet golden Labrador puppy walked up the drive, I wanted to strangle her but I was so relieved that I just gave her a big cuddle, I was so pleased to see her back, Vernon gave her a cuddle and said his goodbyes and I chucked Sandy in the shower, at that point I noticed something was missing……

You guessed it, there was no collar, no £3000.00 18 carat dog collar around my dogs neck. It was gone.

So there I am, showering my puppy that has lost me over 3.5k of stock over the last week.

It is true what they say, owning a dog is expensive, but we still love her…………

Puppies, dont leave them alone in your stock room!!!

Yesterday was the day we we collected our new puppy, it is our first dog, (we have always had cats in the past) we have been so excited about collecting her couldn’t wait to get her home.

We run a business selling Luxury Pet Products so this dog is going to get extremely spoilt, we have already reserved her a Luxury Dog bed from the stock room and a seriously smart Hunter Dog Collar so she will looking seriously bling from day one.
Anyway I have digress a little from the subject, we picked her up yesterday (“her” doesn’t have a name yet although we are thinking

about Sandy as she is a Golden Labrador and it also co-insides with the colour scheme of Luxury Pet Department although that’s a bit of a sad reason!) and bought her back to the office, I soon learnt that what everyone says is true, you have to watch puppies like you do a child!!!
Within minutes she had weeed all over the floor from excitement and started having a tear up with the litter bin, my first thought was “get the dog treats out!” but but then my training kicked in and told me “treats are for when the dog has been good, not when it has just ripped the hell out of your litter” so I started to be a bit more strict (very hard when a cute face is staring up at me I can tell you) and the initial response was good for a Labrador!
Picking and packing needed to be done as we had a lot of orders on this particular day (for some reason everybody wants dog harnesses at the moment) so I bought “Sandy” into the stock room with me and gave her a toy to play with while I got cracking. To my surprise, she was very well behaved while I worked and seemed quite happy jostling with her toy while slurping from her luxury water bowl (another little treat!) in fact all afternoon she was no trouble whatsoever, which was when I made my first mistake as a puppy owner…………..

A shout comes from the office, “Dave, can you give us a hand with the phones please” I looked at Sandy who was out for the count on her Dog Bed

and I thought “she will be ok for a few minutes” how wrong I was…

I came back in from the office after dealing with a few queries to the Luxury Pet Department equivalent of Armageddon, my

gorgeous dog (I wasn’t thinking that at the time) stood there with what was left of an order I was packing in her mouth, then I looked up and saw to my horror what was left of the stock I left out on the table.
To add it all up, my lovely puppy decimated the following;

10 Dear Dog air mesh harnesses
5 Puchi Petwear Dog Leads ( not cheap!!)
1 PAW pet carrier (really annoyed about that one)
2 Dog t-shirts
10 Pug dog toy

s (ok, now its getting expensive)

At first I was angry with Sandy as you can imagine, but deep down I knew it was my fault and I only had myself to blame.

The morale of this blog is, DONT LEAVE YOUR NEW PUPPY ALONE, especially in a room with 50,000 worth of Luxury Pet

Department stock no matter how busy you are!!

If any of you are interested I have taken some pictures of sandy and the mess she caused and I will be posting them on our online galley which you can find by clicking on here

.

On a separate note, if you have any cute pictures of your dog then feel fee to upload them , we will always put them on (if they are suitable!!)