Letters from the editor: The dog ate my rationale and worked his way into our hearts

Try and rebuff a child’s please-please-please plea for a dog.

You’ll feel worn down like the carpet in a maternity-ward waiting room.

We had reasons to say no, chiefly not being home enough. Dogs are companion animals, and we didn’t like the idea of leaving one alone for hours at a time, whimpering in a bowl of tap water, wondering if we’d ever return.

Then my wife’s boss said she could work from home. We assessed the size of our house (small), our time (limited) and tolerance for disruption (moderate) and started looking with three criteria in mind:

• It had to be a rescue, since the death penalty remains in effect for unwanted pooches.

• It had to be lazy, since our “yard” cannot accommodate something built for herding caribou.

• It had to be quiet, since my wife has one of those work-at-home jobs where she actually has to work.

We searched and came up with — seriously — greyhounds. Despite their speed, off the track they are calmer than Lake Mission Viejo.

We went to a rescue. We became smitten with a 64-pound track veteran whose idea of retirement was sitting on a couch and letting my daughter brush his coat like a Barbie doll’s mane.

But there was a problem: our two cats. The rescue folks told us the hound had been “cat-tested.”

He failed, they said, without elaborating.

We looked into whippets, which look and act like smaller greyhounds. We found a woman fostering a cat-friendly wisp of a whippet. She was going to be at an upcoming adoption fair.

We arrived at the event. We looked in every crate, pen and kennel. Either that whippet was really skinny or wasn’t there.

I texted the foster “mom.” No reply.

We avoided big-eye contact with the other dogs for fear of falling in love with something bred for carrying freight in the Himalayas. So we left for some kid’s birthday party.

We must have been buzzed on cupcakes because after the party we decided to go back the fair, to see if the foster mom had whipped into town, whippet in tow. She hadn’t.

A little black-and-white dog sitting in a pen caught my eye. I picked up all 12 pounds of him, and he calmly placed his head on my shoulder, folded his ears like origami and let me pet him. I walked him around the parking lot.

My daughter played with him. He behaved like he was in parochial school. He passed a cat test with nary a hiss.

We told him to sit. He did. Shake. He did that too. Play dead. No.

He was fixed, house-broken, vaccinated.

A volunteer said he had been adopted once and “surrendered” after six months because he was too calm. The adoptive family wanted a more-energetic dog to roll around with their kids. Perfect.

Because he was surrendered, the adoption fee ran $12 instead of the usual hundred-and-something. Even better.

And what kind of breed was Mr. Chill, this Dalai Lama of dogs?

A Jack Russell terrier mix, they said.

Hmm. I’ve watched “Frasier” and know Jack Russells are the opposite of calm. The Google results read more like warnings. But I figured whatever this terrier had “mixed” in somehow decaffeinated his genetic disposition.

We signed the papers and took him home with a free bag of dog food. And he was calm, sweet and perfectly behaved.

For about an hour.

We would soon discover he has more energy than cold fusion. He barks when a leaf leaves a tree. He pogoes when someone’s at the door, growls like a Camaro at the mailman. Chews more than a bored right-fielder.

But he’s affectionate and frosting sweet and puts up with all of my saccharine similes. He calmly sits at my wife’s side, protecting her while she works. He plays tug-of-war with my daughter. He’s a gentleman on walks.

My kid named him Jackson, when she thought he was part Jack Russell. It turns out he’s a rat terrier, which looks similar but has longer legs and a less-marketable breed name (unless you have a rat problem). Like a lot of things in life, he’s the complete opposite of what we wanted — until we got it.

JOHN CANALIS is the editor for the Daily Pilot, Laguna Beach Coastline Pilot and Huntington Beach Independent. He can be reached at (714) 966-4607 and john.canalis@latimes.com.