A Beginning, of Sorts...

Thank you very much for joining me here for the inaugural blog post for this, the "Pawed Equivocality" Blog!

I'm Vague, and I've created this blog to put down in digital format the steps of my journey as I intimately investigate the "Rhodesian Ridgeback Condition". What is RRC, you might be asking, well stick around and observe my chronicle and you'll surely not only understand it but you might very well contract it as well.

Some brief history about yours truly the writer, before we delve headlong into the blogs primary topic of focus. I grew up in the Midwest, but thanks to life circumstances and the past seven years that I've spent serving in the United States Army Reserves as a Combat Medic have awarded me the unique opportunity to experience much of the diversity that our modern world has to offer. I'm a complete blogging novice so I just want to get that disclaimer out there immediately. Let there be no misconception that this undertaking will be ungainly and awkward at best.

Alright, enough about me, let's get down to the bone facts here. The Rhodesian Ridgeback, AKA The African Lion Dog, AKA all sorts of other names. While the Ridgeback is a fairly unheard of breed in the public's eye, for those who are in the know on these sorts of things have written aplenty o what they think the Ridgeback was, is, and should be. Sight hound, scent hound, wagon hound, or ridged primitive... Well at least they mostly agree that the RR is indeed a hound, if nothing else.

Let me take you back to 2005, a year in which a boy, blissfully unaware of the fact that a few short months down the road he'd be enlisting in the army, was busy researching the interwebs in search of his very first dog. Who knew that there were so many breeds out there! It was that day on the Internet that I discovered and fell in love with the fiercely intelligent, otherworldly courageous, fascinatingly athletic and most unique looking breed I'd ever seen. The eat African Lion Hunter, the Rhodesian Ridgeback. From a purely superficial standpoint, and let's face it at that age that was about as far as my thought process went, I had found THE dog for me. Smart, loyal, strong, fast, brave, misunderstood, cool looking, what more could a kid want?

Well that may have been where it all started, where the seed was planted, but it's been a long, long journey getting from that first contact, to now. 7 years later, with a deposit down at RStar Ridgebacks for a puppy expected to be ready for pickup sometime in September of this year. I've grown significantly as a person, oftentimes at a literally painful pace, to become the man I am today. In pretty much every way possible I am completely different than that boy.

Now I've done my research. Learned as much as I possibly could about the fascinating lion hunter. Which, now I know does not literally mean that the RR preyed upon the King of the Jungle. And yet even after the debunking of that myth, every new fact, ever revealed secret, the intricacies of the breeds history, it's development, it's suggest and fight for acceptance and sustainability, every time I learn something new about the Ridgeback, I fall that much more in low with the breed. And that, in the end, is really what the purpose of this blog is. To share with you the reader, my intense and unshakable passion for this breed.

So in closing, I hope that you'll stick around, or at least come back to check in on the place sometime in the future, so that you might be able to share in my must human experiment that is about to be undertaken as I strive to foster and encourage the growth of MY Rhodesian Ridgeback Condition.

-Vague