Kell - Part 1

Our adoption of Kell, one of the "Graham 8," is final! Kell came into our lives on April 17th of this year. Wendy Hodges,(and mean lady that she is :)) brought THREE Basenjis, one girl and 2 boys, and made us choose our foster. The girl was out due to pack dynamics, but it was so hard to choose between the 2 boys. Wendy said Kell was the more outgoing of the 2 boys and stood up to other dogs well. With our pack we thought that would be a good trait, so we brought him home.


Kell was very nervous and timid to begin with, but he has adjusted well to being a member of our pack. The first 2 ½ weeks we could not fill the pup up-- he ate almost constantly, and that included waking us up in the night and going to sit in front of his crate for a late night snack to be served. Thankfully, that has settled down to breakfast at 6 am and supper at 8 pm with the rest of the pack. He gained 5 ½ lbs over 2 weeks and looks very sleek and elegant now.

Kell loves toys, and we have a house full of toys that now are all over the place. Sidhe(Shaye), our 5 year old girl, loves toys too, but she generally left them all in the antique baby bed and only made a daily selection of one or two toys to have out. With Kell, 8 to 12 toys out is the norm. But he shares well with others. And he is such a talker -- he baroos, "arwfs," and makes numerous other sounds. The "arwf" is used to wake Duane in the morning to let him know it is time to potty. And if Duane does not wake up fast enough, the "arwfs" get louder and louder.

Breakfast should be served at 6 am, per Kell’s tummy. If we sleep past that magic number he has been known to fetch his food bowl by the handle, bring it into the bedroom, and drop it on the floor to announce that he is hungry. He discovered the toilet paper roll a couple of weeks ago and now it is very necessary to keep the bathroom door closed. He loved running through the house trailing the paper behind him. He is such a chewer,(Duane calls him a land shark) more so than any pup we have had in the last 30 years. A BRAT person suggested that we rub Vicks on anything and everything to help him halt his chewing, and it has worked well on everything we have applied it to so far. But Kell just keeps finding new things to chew, so we may have to buy stock in the Vicks Company!


Kell and Sidhe play well, and run B500s frequently. He has even tempted Duane’s 8-year-old Rogue into playing with him, and she generally does not get into play mode. My Cory, 14 years and grumpy, has even been seen occasionally pouncing with Kell.

Kell is a major thief of clothes and shoes and other items. He takes everything into an open crate we have in the house. He was last seen carrying a 6 pack of Ensure into his crate, which I rescued before he got a bottle opened because he certainly does not need the extra energy offered by Ensure! If anything is missing in the house we check the back of the open crate.


Kell is crate trained during the day, but at night there is no way he will sleep in his crate with the door locked. On his first night with us, we crated him, but somehow he got it opened and stood up on the bed next to Duane, and “asked” if he could sleep with us. So since then he sleeps with us in bed, or sometimes in the open crate. He is such a love, and there is no "alpha" in him at all. He is still in the clumsy puppy mode, but there are glimpses of the regal Basenji he will become. He has filled the empty spot left last year when we lost Gambit so suddenly at 7 years of age. I was not sure I could love another B after Gambit, so the chance to foster gave me an opportunity to see if I could bond with another B-boy. And there is no way a bond could not have been formed with this lovely, thieving, talking B-boy. Thank you BRAT for entrusting him to our hearts!

-Dawn Schroedter