Puppy

Big news today. We have been talking about getting a puppy again for a few weeks, and yesterday we did it! We saw an ad in the newspaper for some Icelandic sheepdog puppies for sale in a small town near Reykjavík. So we took a little trip in the afternoon and chose a redish colored little bitch from the remaining 3 puppies. We decided on the name Snotra, which means pretty in Icelandic, a typical name for an Icelandic dog. She is purebred, we saw both mom and dad, but not breed registered, but we don´t care about that, since we are not planning to show her or breed from her.

The price of purebread puppies here in Iceland is very high, due to the high cost of importing dogs (there is a six week quarantine on a remote island to the north of the country, so there is also a considerable cost of transport), as well as the fact that importing dogs was illegal until a few years ago. This was due to the fear of losing our relatively disease-free status in the animal population here. However, people still wanted to have dogs, so there was some smugling, about ten years ago parvo was introduced to the population and there was a huge death toll (mostly puppies and older dogs), since none of them was vaccinated. Today the import ban has been lifted, the dogs are vaccinated, but we keep the quarantine to try and prevent any further disease spread, and protect our rabies-free status. There is some talk though to abandon quarantine for passport and vaccinations like they did in the UK.

Anyway, we are enjoying the recent addition to our family, she is still a little apprehensive, especially whith the cats following her everywhere and hissing if she comes too close! Toilet training has commenced, we have managed to avoid poops inside so far, she has been good about going in the garden. The peeing is a little harder, less predictable, however she has shown definite progress already.