The life and times of Little Lottie, aka Crazy Girl, aka Stinky Minky.
It was the 23rd of August 2018 when I pulled into an Asda car park in Newmarket to collect “the goods”, aka Lottie, an approximately 3–5-year-old fawn pug. She was my second pug adopted from the PDWRA, and I had driven halfway between my house and her foster’s house to collect her. At this point, I had a 4-year-old fawn boy called Branston, and a 10-year-old black boy, Archie, who was my first PDWRA pug, whom I adopted 2 years prior. I was ready for a girl, and 3 is the magic number after all, but I wasn’t quite prepared for how unique and absolutely bonkers Lottie was.
I first noticed on the way home that she just would not lie down like a normal dog. She was on my lap (don’t worry; I wasn’t driving), with her blanket, but she kept pushing back on her front legs and lifting her head up. I realised later that this was the beginning stance for her classic ‘back drop’ move, which happened whenever in the arms of someone capable of rubbing her belly – which it turned out she was practically addicted to.
Lottie settled in fine with the boys. She was getting lots of attention from Archie, and I later ended up calling her his ‘sister-wife’ as they were obsessed with licking each other. Archie was especially partial to chewing- or gumming- on Lottie’s ears.
Despite settling in well, it wasn’t long before Lottie’s past caught up with her in terms of her health. On her first day with me, she had stitches from her spay and BOAS surgeries and was completely bald from her chin all the way down to the underside of her tail, and on most of her feet because of demodectic mange. Her claws were thick and overgrown, and she was missing a couple of toes. When I adopted Archie, the extent of his health problems were bad teeth and an ulcerated nose crease, so it was quite a shock to realise just how much the girls suffer after having been bred. I quickly noticed that Lottie’s eyesight wasn’t the best, which turned out to be advanced pigmentary keratitis, and she spun around like the Tasmanian devil whenever she was excited – this could have been from being crated for most of her life, or potentially some brain damage from lack of oxygen during labour, something we would later decide was the most likely (for all her cuteness she didn’t have the most powerful brain) but it was the onset of her recurrent UTIs that really became her biggest hurdle.
She had investigations done after nothing seemed to clear her UTI’s up, and it was concluded that in her short life, being bred and not cared for properly meant that her bladder wall had thickened, and her urethral sphincter was weak. A bucket load of medications and specialist food later though – and she was cured. Hurrah!
This is when we had a few great years with a bouncy, super fluffy, mad as a box of frogs Lottie. She struggled in the cold weather with her front foot that was missing a toe, but nothing that inventive boot manufacture couldn’t solve. She even managed to learn a couple of tricks, one of which was running and jumping into my arms using my slightly bent legs as a springboard. She had incredible speed, and her back legs were built like a sprinter, she definitely had a tush on her!
In the later years of her life, some of the problems of the past came back. A couple of years after losing Archie to cancer in 2021, Lottie started getting a little bit wobbly in her back legs, the once sprinter and thick-legged girl was now stumbling. It didn’t stop her though, even when she started leaving poopy nuggets around the house (which she had no idea she was doing!).
The pug myelopathy took its toll though, and despite absolutely loving her pram walks and sniffing the air, she became doubly incontinent in 2024, which started with another UTI, her first in years. But as Lottie had the privilege of almost complete ignorance, she was still happy as Larry, so we began expressing her bladder, and even though the UTI took a long time to clear up and at one point we thought it might never go away, it cleared up and we carried on in this routine for a whole year with no more bladder issues. (She did have a spell of colitis, which I’ll spare the details of, but as you can probably imagine, an incontinent pug who drags her legs and spins in circles and has NO idea she is doing it was… an experience. My partner now has PooTSD.)
In the last six months of Lottie’s life, she slowly deteriorated. She developed another UTI, just over a year after her last, and her breathing became very bad. She seemed to be less ‘with it’, and after trying a few different medications, we decided it was time to unite her with Archie and send the crazy girl over the rainbow bridge. We don’t know how old she was, probably around 12 or 13, so after nearly seven years with us, she won the hearts of everyone with her quirky and bonkers personality, and often quite baffling habits. Branston is back to being an only pug, which I’m sure he is fine with, as neither Archie nor Lottie ever wanted to chew on his ears anyway!
