My dog Symba
I wrote a post a while back asking everyone for their favorite breed of dog. I realized quickly that I don’t really have just one. It is the “specific dog themselves” that captures my heart. I thought I would share the story of Symba, our stray that we took in who was a Border Collie Mix. Your stories about Border Collies brought me to some very fond memories of Symba.
Symba was a stray, and about six months old. It was the coldest winter I can remember in Council, Idaho the temperature reached negative 20’s F. I saw she was slipping underneath a neighbors camp trailer. But she was very shy and didn’t come when we called the first time. A day later she was in our yard and I was taking out the trash and a piece of bacon dropped off the top and she gobbled it up like she was starving. I finally coaxed her up to the door and knelt down to say hello to her and she climbed right up in my lap. That was all it took and we became hers, she had stolen my heart. When my husband came home that night she was curled up on the couch beside me.
Now Symba was the most intelligent dog that has ever owned us! She was an escape artist, she could slip out of any collar, we tried all kinds of collars even a harness and she would slip right out of them like houdini. She would also jump any fence, well jumping is not quite the description of what she did. Symba liked to climb right over the top of them. She even scaled a six foot tall fence with ease. We soon learned that she was so attached she would stay right with us. She never took any “formal” obedience training but would walk with us off leash and I could get her to come right back to me with a slap of my hand against my leg and she was right back by my side.
Symba loved to ride in our pickup. When we would take her and the kids to the park and were ready to leave I would tell her to load up and she would take off at a dead run 300 yards and scale the pickup tail gate and be waiting for us to come back, we would move her up into the cab. She loved to ride up front, sitting in the passenger seat like a person. There was one time, (now you have to know that Council is a very small rural town in Idaho), but there was one time I had let her out and had to go take care of my baby, and before I could get her back inside I received a phone call from the dispatcher of our local police. She asked me to go get my dog who had decided to jump into the cab of a pickup of a gentleman that a police officer had stopped in front of our house. She was just sitting there in the passenger seat happy as could be. I was so embarrassed! But they all got a good laugh out of the whole thing. I was just happy they knew me!
I used to take her to visit my mom a few blocks away, and there was a time or two when she would disappear and I would get a call from my mom saying she was sitting in her car when she came outside. We had a fenced yard but there was absolutely no way to keep her in. Believe me we tried everything. Most of the time she was in with us, or we would take her out on a leash. But our children were very small then and there were times would would let her out into our fenced yard and then she would pull her escape maneuvers. We called her our “houdini dog”.
In her later years she started having seizures about one every six months. The first time scared me to death, and I rushed her to the vet. She was fine, just a little woozy when we arrived at his office and he explained what was going on with her. After that she would know they were coming and come right to me. I could tell from one look at her eyes that looked a little glossed over that a seizure was coming and sit with her on the floor until it was over. She was such a sweet dog, loved everyone, kids included.
When Symba died it broke our hearts, she will always hold part of mine. I have such fond memories of her antics.
