JASMIN – A WILL TO LIVE

Jasmin was born with several brothers and sisters on a June day in 1995.  The litter was even in weight and healthy.  No cause for concern.  By the end of the first week, I noticed that Jasmin was a little bit smaller than her peers.  Later her condition worsened, despite sessions alone with her mother and attempts to give her milk from a pipette.  She didn’t put on weight but she didn’t die.  At the age of three weeks, she had still not given up her extraordinary struggle to survive.  She weighed one pound, whilst her biggest brother weighed five.  Her eyes, ears and teeth had reached the right stage of development for her age, but she still had her first greyish puppy coat, whilst the other puppies were now a beautiful ridgeback colour.  She was full of scars on her head where the other puppies had pushed her away from the milk bar.  She tried to move around like a normal puppy of that age, but fell flat on her face - she didn’t have the strength to carry her own weight.  She reminded me quite simply of a starving little bat.  Her mother had in fact given her up, but lay still when we put the puppy to her breast.  “OK, if you insist,” Rikke seems to say to us, “but it’s not going to work”.

Jasminog Paws

Our principles of natural dog breeding crumbled.  If you want to live as much as this, we’ll help you, we told her.  We took Jasmin right out of the puppy box.  In the daytime, the children kept her warm by carrying her around under their T-shirts.  At night, she lay on my shoulder.  We fed her every couple of hours and let her mother nurse her in between meals.  One evening I had tickets to a jazz concert in town.  I couldn’t leave her alone, so I took her along in my pocket – that night she became Jazzmini!

Jasmin gradually became stronger and I wanted to sosialize her back into the puppy box.  I put her down to play with two small bitches.  Just the right size for a tug-of-war camp, they decided, as they each grabbed hold of one end.  If I can’t use the two smallest puppies, I’ll try the biggest, I thought, and introduced Jasmin to Jason, a strong and beautiful male puppy.  “Now, little lady, what have we here?” he asked in his gentlemanly manner, and played courteously with her from the first moment.  Later Jasmin played with Jason and with Paws and by the seventh week, she was fully acclimatised back into the litter.

Jasmin 13 år gammel

Jasmin remained small for a long time.  At the age of four months, I was convinced that I had bread the first miniature ridgeback.  “How kind of you to think of us in our old age!” commented a Swedish friend of mine.  But Jasmin continued to grow slowly and is now (written in 1998) an elegant and in fact quite a large ridgeback lady.  She took her first challenge certificate at two years of age.

Jasmin was never for sale and she never will be.  She is the most adventurous and tireless dog we have ever had.  She is always by our side, no matter the time, mo matter the weather.  She helps us herd in the horses, and plays with our lambs.  She plays with the children night and day.  The only problem I had with her in the early days was to teach her to show me due respect – she treated me like a dog mother, and growled and grabbed at my legs in play – not quite the way we wish to present our dogs to the world!

Postscript written in November 2007.  Jasmin is now 12,5 years old and still thrives in our family.  We didn’t breed from her, not because of her growth record, but because she developed an allergy at the age of three years which she had for a couple of years.  Otherwise she has been fit and well.  She is the unquestioned leader of our dog family which consists of Jasmin, the German Pointer Bella and the young ridgeback Lauren.  One command fra Jasmin and they obey!  And who would have thought that she would be the longest survivor of the litter?

Postscript written in 2009.  Jasmin died in the summer of 2008 at the age of 13 years.  She was bright and happy right up to her last day.