Incessant barking fails to frighten off puppy’s new owner

A DOG-LOVER from Aberdeenshire made a 10-hour round trip to pick up a pup which had scared all other prospective owners off with its non-stop barking.

Michael Rose, 50, of North Cookston, near Ellon, drove to Dounreay, in Caithness, to collect Cody.

The puppy had been at a Scottish SPCA centre for 10 months.

Mr Rose, who co-owns a joinery business, said he trawled through every dog rehoming website he could find but kept coming back to the Staffordshire bull terrier cross.

He said: “When I told my wife Lorna she said, ‘You’re never going to go on a 450-mile round trip to get a mongrel are you? You could get one here’. But there was something about him.”

Mr Rose said the woman at the centre told him people had been put off by Cody’s incessant barking.

He added: “When I first saw him he was barking, but then so was every other dog in there. To be honest, if he had carried on barking when I got him on the lead I think I would have said I wasn’t taking him.”

He said Cody had settled in well over the past two weeks, accompanying him to work most days, and hardly barked now.

“He’s as good as gold,” said Mr Rose.