Hi, Tegan-dog!
Smooches to the new corgi-worgi!
(Obligatory yes-I-know-no-one-asked Welsh stuff)
“Tegan” means “toy” in Modern Welsh, but as a name it’s a dimutive of teg (pretty, fair, nice).
The Welsh plural of corgi (lit. “dwarf-dog”) is corgwn (pron. CORE-goon).
The female of the species is a coriast (CORE-yast).
As in “Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief”? :dubious:
Such a cute doggie, Bob. Good luck with her. Watch those heels.
AWWWWWW!!! What a cute little corgi!
Yay new corgi in the house! Have tons of fun with your new doggie and be sure to take a few more pictures to satiate us non-corgied dopers. I hope to get one as cute as yours. But we already know the name of our future Pembroke - Ein (from the anime Cowboy Bebop). Why yes I am a nerd, why do you ask?
Exactly! What can I say, we were kids and thought it was cute.
Thanks to all the well-wishers; I’ll try to get a new picture up tonight.
Tegan has realized there are two cats in the house. I think she wants to herd them along.
Cute doggie! I hope she’s prepared for a life of servitude as “just another cat slave”.
To add to my last message, these days I would go on-line and look up a Welsh name for my puppy. What’s Welsh for Katie? 
Cadi [KAH-dee], diminutive of Catrin [KAHT-rinn]. (Well, you asked!)
Oh, and Penchan, Ein can be Welsh, too: there’s a name Einion (pron. ane-yon), or if it’s a girl, Einir (ane-ear). Ein on its own (pron. een) just means “our”: Ein corgi Ein, “our corgi Ein.” Just in case you get any lip from the Nerdly Corgi Naming Society.
Aw, what a cutie! melt
I can’t wait to tell my daughter that out there somewhere there is a dog named Tegan.
cute dog.
That’s wild - we have 2 Beagle/Corgis. We call them the Borgi Brigade, or in our geekier moments, The Borg.
Tegan is adorable!
The enchanted Corgi strikes again! This is similar to how we ended up with our Corgi. When my husband and I married, he knew when we stopped having to travel for work I wanted to get a dog. When the time was right, we went to a breeder I found in the paper. Instead of being a reputable breeder, the place was a horrible puppy mill. The conditions were awful. I took one look around at the poor puppies, covered in filth, almost-starved, in tiny cages they could barely turn around in, and told my husband we had to leave immediately and call the Humane Society.
On our way out, a little Corgi girl made eye contact with my husband. I am quite sure she cast a spell on him. They are enchanted little dogs you know. I watched him as the spell took effect. He scooped her up and declared, “Yes, we are leaving now, but she is coming with us!”
I considered arguing using logic. This poor thing, while in desperate need of rescuing was most likely damaged goods. She was about 7 months old, and would likely be both mentally and physically messed up. I was not really sure we would be capable of carrying for a very needy dog. She was going to be our first as adults, and we were hoping to ease into dog ownership by getting an easy to care for dog, then work up to rescuing a needy dog once we had a bit of experience.
But I knew there was no logic that could undue the Corgi spell she had cast. My husband was absolutely taking that dog. He originally didn’t want a dog, but if we did get one, he wanted a male dog. I pointed out this one was female, he didn’t care. I pointed out her ears, which were supposed to be on top of her head were actually on the sides of her head, and that was a sign she likely had other physical deformities that might be very serious and costly to treat, he didn’t care. I pointed out that since we had intended only to look that day, not actually get a dog, I didn’t have a bed, bowl, leash, collar, food, or anything at home. He didn’t care, said we could stop on the way and get anything we needed. I said it is Sunday, the stores are closed. He said she really didn’t need anything but us.
He was right! We brought the fragile thing home. When we got to the front door and encouraged her to go in, she wouldn’t. So we walked in first and called to her. We could tell she very much wanted to join us, but she had no idea how to step up one step to get in. We had to pick her up and bring her in. It was quite obvious she had never been indoors before; she didn’t know what to do. We talked to her and found she didn’t have any sort of “vocabulary” that 7 month old dogs normally have. No recognition of the word “food, treat, cookie, hungry, walk.” It was if no one had ever spoken to her. So sad.
The first few weeks were not easy. She had some serious health problems that needed to be corrected with surgery. She was very slow to figure out the housebreaking routine. We had bought a crate, knowing most dogs are reluctant to defecate in their “den,” but for this girl’s first 7 months that was her only option, so she had a very hard time learning to hold it. And once in our home, she was very reluctant to step outside for even a minute. We had planned on her being an indoor dog, but for some things it was necessary for her go outside for a minute, and that was a real struggle to get her to understand if she went out, she would be allowed to come back in.
Over time we worked everything out and she is just fine now. She is still on twice a day medication, and will be for life, but that is something we can easily manage. Our friends who know her ask, “Does she ever stop smiling?” No, she doesn’t. And I think it is a common trait among Corgis that she just loves to make us laugh. She will do some silly thing and we laugh. She notices the laughter and then will do the thing over an over. We have had to learn not to laugh at anything we don’t want her to do constantly, because she just loves to see us laugh.
One of her favorites is when we have company over; she will go to the clothes basket, pull out a pair of underwear and parade around the room with them in her mouth, waving them back and forth like a flag. Then when the laughter starts to die down at that, she amazes our guests by tossing the underwear in the air and catching them. She continues this until her little head actually ends up through the leg hole and waistband. Then she parades around “wearing” her trophy around her neck. She knows next a fun game of chase will begin, as we try to catch her to take the underwear off of her. She can be very quick when she wants to! Some of our guests have accused us of teaching her to do that little routine because it is so funny. No, she invented that on her own, encouraged by our laughter at her antics. She has experimented with socks, tee shirts, etc, but those never get the same laughter as the underwear, so she will dig for quite a while until she finds a pair. And yes, I have learned to make sure the laundry basket is out of her reach before company comes over now, but once in a while I forget, and she puts on a show.
One of the things I wasn’t prepared for when getting a Corgi, is other’s reactions to her. Every time we go to the park, people stop and stare. They come over wanting to know, “What kind of dog is that? She is so cute! Look, she is smiling at me!” She gets called “Short Stuff, Shorty, Sausage with stumps, Stumpy,” but she doesn’t care, she just smiles and wins them over.
She loves horses. She is not intimidated by them a bit. Once we took her to a farm not realizing they had chickens and she was in heaven. Instinct kicked in and she decided to herd the chickens. Back and forth she would chase them, move them all to one pasture, then move them all to another pasture, then another. We had to put an end to her fun, thinking the chickens weren’t enjoying it as much as she was, but boy she had a good time that day.
She is a great traveling dog, and we often take her with us on car trips. Her first experience at the ocean was funny. She marched out to the wet sand, busily sniffing away. The tide started coming in, and she backed away. Then as it went back out she chased it. Back and forth she went. Soon she had an audience, waiting to see what the cute little dog would do next. She didn’t disappoint. She picked up a piece of driftwood; put it down as the tide went out. Then waited for the tide to bring it back to her. Playing fetch with herself brought lots of laughter from her audience, she loved it.
One description of Corgis I have thought fits ours, is that they are “big dogs in little dog bodies.” She doesn’t have the temperament that many small dogs have. She isn’t yappy, or hyper, she doesn’t jump on you. Around others she is always well behaved, laid back and calm. She seems to think she is actually a big dog. At the dog park she always prefers to play with the big dogs. She doesn’t even acknowledge that the little dogs exist. We often open the door for her to go out or in and she just looks at us like, “Hey, that is not open enough for a big dog like me, open it wider, what is wrong with you!”
After she had worked through most of her early problems, we enrolled in a dog obedience class. She was quickly identified by the instructor as the class clown. She seemed intent on doing things a bit differently than the other dogs to get a laugh out of the other participants. Finally the instructor let me in on a little secret.
“You know what your dog’s problem is?”
“No, what?”
“You! You think your dog is just too damn cute! She knows she can do anything she wants, and all she has to do is look at you and you smile back at her. You will never have a well behaved dog if you keep thinking she is so damn cute.”
Well, I considered this, and decided I would rather have a cute happy dog than an unhappy well behaved dog. I wasn’t raising her to go out in the world and be responsible for herself. I was raising her to have a happy life. Her silliness makes us all happy. Twice while writing this she has come in, flopped on the floor, rolled over and let it be known a tummy rub would really make her day. Twice I have stopped to rub her tummy. After 7 years, that Corgi spell is still working!
I know you and your family will love being under Tegan’s spell. Be prepared for your friends and relatives not believing how she is able to wrap you around her little paws. They will think she is nice and cute, but will think you all have gone over edge about her. That is just fine. Maybe one day they will have a Corgi cast a spell on them and then they will understand.
Congratulations on being one of the lucky ones, chosen by an enchanted Corgi!
Excellent news, but I’ll admit to being slightly disappointed that the topic wasn’t, as I originally read it, ‘We ate a Corgi last night’. :smack:
that is a funny looking cat…
congrats on the new cutie. may y’all have many happy years together.
Grits and hard toast, that was a wonderful story.
Best of luck with your little Corgi. They’re sweet dogs with great personalities.
Set up a page at Dogster, and we can leave your dog a treat!
My great aunt and uncle in Maryland had the oddest crossbreed I’ve ever seen: Corgi + German Sheperd. It was roughly the size and shape of a Corgi with the coat pattern of a German Sheperd.
I have three corgis, all Pembrokes, two red-and-white and one black-tan-and-white (tricolor). Two (Scooter and Elwood the tricolor) are males and one is female (Corky).
Scooter, the red-and-white male, is a very mellow dog. He will lay still and be petted for hours on end, even to the point of serving as a fuzzy armrest. The one thing he gets excited about is food. But he’s also a very fearful dog sometimes: When there is loud noise, such as fireworks or thunder, he runs and hides. Sometimes he leaves a trail of urine as he flees, and often he flees in the direction of me so he can hide under the biggest monkey in the house. 
He also has a pretty severe startle response: If you suddenly wake him, he’ll likely bite your foot. Once, he was sleeping by my feet as I was using my computer. I got up and startled him, and he rolled over to bite the top of my left foot. He didn’t even bother to get up.
Corky, the red-and-white female, is active and intelligent, the polar opposite of Scooter. She obsessively plays with her toys, and is the master at tug: She uses her whole body to the point she looks like a shrimp. She routinely surprises guests with how strong she is. She has so much energy that sometimes she does laps in the house, flinging herself into the air to clear obstacles and woofing in the face of poor perplexed Scooter. When she was younger, we kept her in a linoleum-floored room that also contained shoes. (It’s always wise to keep a puppy in a room that’s easy to clean, even though she was housebroken quickly.) Her mothering instincts, undimmed even by her later spaying, were such that she defended the shoes as her babies and growled whenever someone got too near. It took a while to break her of that behavior.
Elwood, the tricolor male, is still just a puppy at five months. He is a real heller: Until very recently, he thought a bite in the face was a perfectly acceptable greeting. We had him on a sofa (our dogs generally have free access to all furniture) and were playing with him. When I sat down, he was on the opposite side of the sofa from me. I laughed heartily at something. Right before I closed my eyes, I saw a blur coming towards me. A fraction of a second later I had an odd sensation: The dog had taken advantage of my open mouth and thrown-back head to bite my teeth. Because he’s not neutered, he’s an amorous male. Unfortunately, his courtship consists of biting his beloved on the neck and ears and trying to ride them as they run away. Corky hates this, but he has found another (unspayed) female dog who thoroughly enjoys his advances and will play with him until exhaustion.
New picture of Tegan . She hardly sits still; I keep getting similar poses.