Photo above: Looking royal in a chenille throw.
Before we got Zara, it took Chris and I a while to decide on her name. Picking the right name was important to me. I wanted something that was only one or two syllables (easy to say over and over) and that was unique. I spent a lot of time on the baby-naming website nameberry.com looking at their many lists of names (by the way, that site is awesome if you need to name a child, furry child, etc.). I made an initial list of names I thought were interesting but Chris rejected most of them. After several iterations of the list, we had narrowed it down to three: Maya, Zoe, and Bella.
Maya was my favorite out of the three but I still didn’t feel like it was the right choice. About a week before we brought home our puppy, I consulted Name Berry one more time and stumbled across the name Zara.
In Hebrew and Arabic, the description said, it means princess. It can also be spelled Zarah and is similar to Sarah.
Chris and I both liked the name and so Zara was chosen. However, I remember thinking that the description wouldn’t apply. We were getting an athletic, rough and tumble dog. A vizsla. She was going to be a runner, a hunter. Princess dogs were the ones that wore frilly outfits and got carried around in purses.
Oh how wrong I was. A year and a half later, I can honestly say that the description actually suits Zara perfectly.
She is a princess. She doesn’t wear the cute outfits or fit into my handbag, but she acts, and is often treated like, royalty.
Some of this is probably the vizsla breed in general, and since they were originally bred to be hunting dogs for the Hungarian royalty, who can blame them for having picked up some royal tendencies along the way?
Zara is very particular about where she will sit or lay. She prefers to be on a piece of furniture instead of the floor. However, that is often not good enough. We have a leather sectional in our basement that is very comfortable. But Zara doesn’t like to lay directly on the leather unless it is very hot. We have several large, faux-fur pillows on the couch and she much prefers to position herself on one of those. If they are leaning against the black of the couch so that she can’t lay on them, she will take it upon herself to move them into a suitable position.
She can be very dramatic sometimes. She is still a leash puller (see this post and this one) which is really annoying when you’re running with her. About a month or two ago, I decided to bring out the gentle leader head collar again to see if that would make a difference. lol and behold, it did. She could barely pull at all. It was glorious. Zara clearly didn’t like it, though. As soon as I would take it off when we got home, she would jump on the couch, flop down, and rub her face and body into the cushions over and over again to get the feel of it off of her. She would make sure you were watching too, as if to say, how could you possibly put that terrible thing on me?
Finally, Zara is also very particular when it comes to weather. Too cold? Doesn’t want to be outside long. Raining? No thanks. Too hot? We got a note from our dog walker one day that said “Zara didn’t want to walk today because it was hot. She’d rather be on the couch inside her cool house with the fans on!” Such a princess.
Zara lying on one of the fur pillows.
