Sweet Baby Tonka
Yeah, I know. At four years old and sixty pounds he doesn’t qualify as a baby anymore. But he’s just soooo CUTE and sooooo SWEET and sooooo . . . “OK, OK - enough already!”, you say . . . but he really is adorable!
Tonka is my first puppy and my first male dog. He and his sister were turned in to a shelter Manatee County, Florida where they were picked up by the AKC Malinois rescue group. I contacted the person who was keeping him, and luckily she let me take him. He came home with me at about 16-20 weeks of age. He was a very sick boy, with a horrible infestation of just about every parasite you could come across, plus a really attractive upper respiratory infection, and was significantly underweight. I suspect that’s part of why his ears never stood, but oh well.
He earned his name by being a little yellow truck that would make every effort to bulldoze me over when I’d get down on the floor with him. And he’d try to lure Butter into a wrestling match by pouncing around in a play bow while making noises that sounded suspiciously like a little kid making truck noises (RRRrrrrr! RRRRrrrr! RRRRrrrrr!)
Of course he has about fifty nicknames too: Boy, Boy-Boy, Adora-Boy, Crazy-Boy, Tonka-Boy, Baby-Boy, Cute-Boy, BlueTongue-Boy, T-Dog, T-Boy, Tonkers, Tonk-Tonk, Tonka-Baby, The Tonkinator, and of course - Sweet Baby Tonka.
The three things I love most about him are his creatively devious methods of getting what he wants, his well developed “Madam, you are clearly insane” look, and his tongue is blue - the whole thing!
Here is Mr. Sweetness looking quite worried because:
1. There’s this thing on his foot (he’d cracked a nail) and
2. He’s not sure what that person is doing with that strange thing (camera) in front of their face.
