Animals are notoriously hard to capture on film, and one has to be prepared for that opportunity when it presents itself...and very fortunately, I was ready when I saw two of my dogs just going about their business on my backyard deck, Sango heading down to the yard and Rudy looking for a dry spot to lie down. The juxtaposition of their tails was just too irresistible to pass up, and I got the "tail end" of the shot! Rudy, of course, is the subject in the portrait "Essence of Pug", which perfectly captures the soulful and appealing nature of the breed. As for Sango, what is she? There are 'Labradoodles', 'schnoodles', 'puggles', 'maltipoos', etc., to describe the mixed parentage of these dogs. And then there's Sango, the 'pugervuren', which is a hilarious tale (or tail?) in itself! In the photo, Sango is just about seven or eight weeks old. I got her from Rudy's breeder after Winston, my older pug, collapsed and died from a silent heart condition. He wasn't even eight years old. I was heartbroken for myself and for Rudy, who had kept company with Winston ever since he was a pup. I decided I wanted a female pug puppy. As luck would have it, Rudy's breeder (who breeds show pugs) happened to have a three-week-old pug girl, the only one in the litter. She sent me photos of her. She looked every bit like a typical pug puppy, but something about her didn't seem right for a pug, and my intuition proved to be correct when a few weeks later Evelyn emailed me saying, "The puppy girl's growing a snout!" We couldn't figure out what was going on with her. Genes don't lie.. or do they? Her snout was giving her away, just like Pinocchio's nose.... Evelyn, in an effort to solve the mystery, ordered a DNA analysis on the puppy. But she didn't want to wait that long. As it turned out, momma dog had been artificially inseminated at a vet clinic with semen shipped from a canine sperm bank. She emailed photos of the puppy to the sperm bank, demanding answers as to why she didn't look like a normal pug. An hour and a half later, the director of the sperm bank called her, apologizing profusely. It turned out that one of the technicians had pulled the wrong vial and shipped it to the vet clinic--a mistake that cost Evelyn $1,000! As it is, Sango's daddy is a Belgian Tervuren, a breed that is very similar to the German shepherd, but with a longer coat, and recognized by the AKC as a member of the herding group and often used in police work as drug and bomb sniffers. Hence, Sango is a 'pugervuren'! She's now a big girl going on two years of age, outweighing Rudy by about 25 pounds with a HUGE personality to match. She has her mother's curly tail and her father's coloring as well as his herding instinct. She LOVES my cats and plays all the time with her best friends, Kaede, a boxer, and Rin, a petite Jack Russell terrier. I know I wanted a female pug puppy, but I absolutely adore my "$1,000 sperm bank mistake" and wouldn't trade her for anything... not even a thousand bucks, LOL. So there you have the tail end of the tale..Sango's, anyway. Enjoy and feel free to comment!