Pepper joined us in 2023, four months old, travelling all the way from Mumbai to the Nilgiris in a van with a photographer, a vastu practitioner and a pet ambulance owner who volunteered to accompany her to her new home.
Pepper was not calm. Pepper has never been calm. Pepper does not know what calm is. She is the opposite of a 100 Clonazepams.
She came, like Sophie, from World For All Animals — same organisation, same careful matchmaking, entirely different result. Where Sophie arrived and assessed the situation and decided she was fine with it, Pepper arrived and decided the situation needed immediate improvement, more energy, and her face pressed against yours at the earliest opportunity.
She is a force of nature in the body of a medium-sized dog.
She eats everything. I want to be specific: pebbles, plants, paper, bits of cement, things she finds in the garden that I can’t identify and choose not to examine too closely. She is not hungry. She is never NOT hungry. She simply believes that the mouth is a tool that should be kept busy.
She has no spatial awareness whatsoever. She moves at the speed of something that should have train-level brakes and doesn’t, and she crashes into furniture, doorframes, and shins with the same cheerful lack of concern. She will appear from nowhere and stuff her entire head in front of whatever you’re doing. She will lick your elbow. She will lick your ear. She has opinions about when you have been on your laptop long enough and she will share them physically.
Sophie observes all of this from a safe distance and makes her feelings known through a series of extremely expressive silences.
They are, on paper, incompatible. Sophie — measured, intuitive, dignified, the dog equivalent of someone who reads the whole menu before ordering. Pepper — chaotic, physical, enthusiastic about everything including things that are not food but will be eaten anyway.
In practice, they have reached an arrangement.
Sophie has maintained her position as the one who makes the decisions. Pepper has accepted this, mostly, except when she hasn’t. There is a particular look Sophie gives Pepper that I can only describe as “I am choosing not to respond to this.” Pepper does not notice the look. This is probably for the best.
What I didn’t expect, when Pepper arrived, was how much the estate would suit her. She tears around the garden at a speed that makes the birds scramble. She investigates everything, constantly, with her whole body. She is, in her own completely unreasonable way, entirely at home here.
Some mornings I sit on the deck with my tea and watch the two of them — Sophie settled and still, Pepper orbiting her and me like a small, enthusiastic moon — and I think about how the farm I imagined in 2005 always had dogs in it.
It did not specify what kind of dogs.
These are better. They are the beshtesht.
