Each month we interview one of Sainte Foy’s canine residents, and for our first edition we chat to Sid, a blue and tan Border terrier, originally from Oxfordshire in England.
What brings you to Sainte Foy?
My passion in life is making sure my human helpers, Ian and Helen, are well exercised and kept safe. They love the mountains, so I come along to protect them. We spend four to five months a year in Sainte Foy, and I have a second kennel here.
What’s your favourite place in the station?
My favourite place in resort is the Sainte Germain wine bar. A lot of my friends go there and it’s great to catch up with them. As always, I have work to do there. Laura gets me to quality check small morceaux of charcuterie, which I quite enjoy. I also like 1580m because the owners are really friendly and the food smells are fantastic. It’s outside the centre of resort, so the walk getting there is exciting too.
I always know when Ian’s going to the wine bar, because he puts on one of his special shirts. He gets very excited, and I have to make sure he doesn’t forget me, or he’ll never get home, and then Helen will get worried.
What do you remember about being a puppy?
As a pup it took me two weeks to train Helen to feed me biscuits properly. I can teach her new biscuit feeding tricks tricks more quickly these days though.
What’s work like these days?
Both my human helpers worked in military intelligence, but that was before I was born. It’s funny really, because now it’s me who is in charge of security. They have some clever electronic gadgets to protect our home and my kennel, but I can hear intruders coming down the path 20 meters away, so I still let them know in advance. It’s all very exciting really.
Are you concerned about Brexit?
I’m quite worried about Brexit. The French “paperasse”, paperwork, is quite a bind and everyone is worried about me catching rabies. I’ve never seen a rabies, but I’m sure I could catch one if I wanted to. They are so worried about it that they give me an injection each year to stop me catching one. They think that I’ll go mad if I catch one, but I’m already mad about the injections. And it makes Ian growl a lot too, when he has to fill in all these forms.
Then I have to have a blood test to prove that I’ve not caught one, which I find silly because I know I’ve not caught one. The vet says that the blood test is to prove the injection worked, and that I’ve got successful rabies antibodies. Ian and Helen say it’s all very important, so I just go along with it. But then they say that it could all change depending on how Brexit turns out, so is it really all that important?
Do you ski or board?
Helen won’t let me go skiing with Ian, because she says that it is dangerous, and if Ian wants to do it, he has to do it on his own. I’m not worried about Ian going skiing on his own though because he’s very good at things like that, and I don’t worry about him getting lost without me because he always wears hi-vi cloths when he goes skiing.
What makes your tail wag?
Like a lot of dogs, I like going out on patrol. I like to inspect what’s going on outside, and smell who’s been about. I’ve been collecting pine cones ever since I was a pup. I’m in search of the perfect pine cone, but I’m not sure it really exists.
I have lots of friends here. The Diamond dogs are really good fun, and there’s quite a lot of them.
Do you have any superpowers?
Yes! My special superpower is that I can smell if dogs or humans have got any diseases inside them. Not the obvious problems like where they’ve bashed themselves and there’s blood coming out, but where there’s something going wrong inside them. There was this one time when a friend of Helen’s came round with her dog, and I could smell this cyst inside him. I had to tell his human helper, and since I’m not very good at talking human, I kept licking the dog’s leg to show them where the problem was. Eventually I heard them say that there must be something wrong, and they should get it checked out, so I could stop then. When the vet told him that he’d got a cyst, they mended it. They were all very pleased with me, which was nice.
