Buddy, an amorous eccentric with high hopes but low stamina, fancied a visit with his girlfriend the other day, so he moseyed myopically across the bog between our houses and dropped in. Eventually this prompted a phone call between my husband, Don, and our neighbours to the east:

“Cindy? Don. Buddy’s here”

“Oh. I’ll come and get him – he’s been gone all morning”

“Don’t worry – he’s having a nap…..”

Buddy is a lovely old spotted “hound” from next door, and his girlfriend is Peebles, our 3-year-old “Haliburton” (Black Lab or maybe Newfoundland – definitely some German Shepherd and a dash of Border Collie) mix. Peebles adores Buddy and Buddy quite likes being adored. When he comes by, she greets him at the edge of the bush and frolics around him like a porpoise around a freighter while he holds his course firmly for our front door and the dog biscuit jar. It’s to be expected that they’d get along. Like most of the folk who live here they have a vague, complex family connection. Peebles is the offspring (Surprise, Mom!) of Cindy’s brother-in-law’s dog, the father is suspected but not charged.

That’s how you get a Haliburton. He or she comes to you by one of two routes: a friend with pups, or our local feed store, which runs a no-kill shelter for cats and dogs and turns no animal away.

Granted, pet adoption brings surprises. Peebles arrived sleek as a seal pup, and was supposed to turn out short-haired and reasonably compact, like her mom. Instead she blossomed into 77 pounds of exuberance and sheds black hair longer than mine like chaff from a combine harvester.

Still, she managed to fit in with the rest of the animal life about the house, namely Ralph and Alice, two elderly black and white “domestic shorthair” cats. They came from a Toronto shelter, and moved north with us. Ralph is our “Pack Leader” in Dog Whisperer terms. He keeps everyone else, cat, dog or human, in their proper place, and handles property protection and rodent patrol – by sleeping on the pillow of the tractor seat so that no one will steal it and leaving mouse heads on the bathroom mat. Alice, by nature a fastidious creature, has adapted to country life in her own way, snoozing on drifts of petals under the rose bushes while Ralph eats toads. They both have their peccadilloes certainly, but they’ve always been easy-going company. Even the sudden introduction of the smelly, bouncy and undignified dog into their well-ordered lives is something that they’ve forgiven, although they consider it a serious lapse of judgment on my part.

So Don and I have had good luck with the “Haliburtons” and the Domestic Short Hairs, in short: with the mutts of the world. And I recommend them. Although we have both had pets of the purebred persuasion in the past, neither of us wants to deal with inbred temperament and illness anymore.

My childhood companion, a purebred wire-haired terrier, would have been put down before breakfast these days. He bit the paper-boy, the florist (she fainted on the front steps), the gas man, sundry others…even I wasn’t allowed to touch his face.

When Don’s kids were small, their purebred Basset Hound developed a flea allergy, in a house shared with four children, three cats and a shag rug. Sadly, she also tended to stand on her own ears going downstairs, which meant that they frequently woke to the sound of a bald Basset Hound tumbling down the steps.

Then, in college, I shared a house with a beautiful purebred Siamese cat who broke the heart of the little boy next door. Little “Diva”(yes, that was her name) ran away from home to live the wild life with us in our student co-op. She refused to return to her poor owner, even though he arrived on our porch regularly with tins of salmon, trying to tempt her back.

So when you’re looking for a “Buddy,” maybe re-evaluate the merits of breeding line and perfect looks. Inbreeding never worked out for royal families, why impose it on our best friends? After all, any creature that’s always, totally, delighted to see me looks pretty good to me.

Rural environmentalist Joan Barton is a former family lawyer and current entrepreneur. Read more of Joan's writing here.