Draper, Utah · 10,000 square feet · one dog
Mud
He is thirty-five pounds of miniature Australian Labradoodle, he is mine, and on the days he decides to come to work he is the most popular person in the building.
That last part is not a joke, and it is not modesty either. I have watched members walk right past me without breaking stride to get to him. I said hello. They did not hear me. They were already on the floor.
I have made my peace with it.
Why he is like this
Somebody built this dog on purpose.
His breed was developed specifically to make the perfect service animal. Calm. Steady. Pointed at people instead of at squirrels.
I did not know any of that when I got him. I wanted a dog. I read approximately one and a half articles and then I wanted that dog, which is roughly the level of research I bring to most of my life decisions.
So I would love to tell you I planned this. I did not plan this. I got extraordinarily lucky, and then a hundred people got lucky along with me.
He is as sweet as he is attentive.
That is the whole dog, right there in one sentence. Everything below is just me taking eleven hundred more words to say it.
Bred for the work
Miniature Australian Labradoodles were developed to be service and assistance dogs. Attentive to people, low drama, easy in a busy room. Mud came out of that on-brand.
Good with anxious humans
Which turns out to be most of us. A pottery studio is full of people doing something new and being bad at it in public. He is very well suited to that room.
Please do bother him
How to say hello to Mud
If you see him, say hello. He loves making new friends and he is not being polite about it. There is exactly one thing to check first, and it is your hands.
Quick check before you crouch down.
Go. Right now. Get down there and tell him he is a good boy. He has been waiting all afternoon for somebody with your exact energy, and he will act like the two of you were separated at birth.
Rinse first, or just wave. Wet clay and glaze do not belong in a dog’s coat, and he is not the one who has to wash it out. He accepts waves. He does not prefer waves. But he accepts them.
Belly rubs: absolutely
He will do just about anything for one. I have never known him to turn one down, and I have never known him to decide he has had enough.
Ear scratches: not really
He is not a fan. He will let you, because he is a gentleman, but he is not enjoying it and you will both know. Aim lower.
Treats: he is not proud
He would sell me to a stranger for one. I am not telling you to bring treats. I am telling you what kind of animal I am dealing with.
Sample size: one dog. Methodology: I watched him. Peer review: none, and I will not be taking questions.
The training
He is better trained than I am.
Shanel Mackenthun did that. She is one of our members, and she trains dogs for a living, which is a fortuitous thing to have wandering around your studio.
She worked with him right here, in this room, with the noise and the carts and the wheels going and eighteen people walking around holding things they care about. So he did not learn to behave in a quiet living room and then get thrown into all of this. He learned it here.
Here is what that actually looks like on a Tuesday night.
- He gets out of the way. Every time. He has never once been underfoot in this building. I cannot say the same for myself.
- He never enters the wheel area. Not once. Not when somebody in there is eating a sandwich.
- He never enters the warehouse or the shelving area. That is where everybody’s work lives. He has decided that room does not exist.
- He knows the rest of the off-limits spots too. All of them. He learned the whole map and he has never argued about a single line on it.
His call, not mine
Some days he stays home.
He is here a lot. He is not here every day, and which days he comes is genuinely up to him.
He tells me. Dogs are not subtle. Some mornings he is ready to go before I am, standing there watching me look for my keys with the particular contempt of an animal who has never lost anything. Some mornings he looks at me and I know, and I go to work by myself like an idiot.
Because just like the rest of us, he gets a little peopled out.
And on the days he does come, he has a corner. His corner. If the room gets loud, or a kiln load comes out and everybody crowds around it at once, he takes himself over there and lies down and he is done for a while.
That is the one thing I will ask of you on his behalf. If he is in his corner, he is off the clock. Let him have it. He will come back out. He always comes back out.
But when he is feeling it, there is nowhere on this earth he would rather be than in this building with all of you.
Not with me. I want to be clear that I have been demoted. With all of you.
The dog situation, explained
Mud is the only dog who gets to do this.
He is the only one with a corner. The only one who gets to nap through somebody’s glaze crisis. The only one whose name is on a little chalkboard sign on the floor. He is, as far as I can tell, completely unaware of how good he has it.
Which brings me to the part where I tell you that your dog cannot come.
And I want to be careful here, because I know how that lands. It is not that we do not like your dog. I have seen the pictures. Your dog is fantastic and I would like to meet him under almost any other circumstance.
It is the floor.
Broken pottery and dried glaze leave shards. Real ones, sharp ones, and in a working studio they end up on the floor no matter how much anybody sweeps. There is no version of this room where that stops being true.
Mud has been cut more than once.
A dog who lives here, who knows every inch of this place, who has never put a paw somewhere he was not supposed to, still gets hurt on this floor sometimes. That is the honest measure of it. If it can happen to him, it can happen to yours, and yours does not know the room.
Service dogs are a different thing
Service dogs are welcome here, and there is a real policy for them that covers what we ask, which two areas are off limits, and the parts we are blunt about. It lives on the FAQs page rather than on this one, because this page is about Mud and I did not want to turn it into paperwork.
So Mud carries the whole thing on your dog’s behalf. One dog, doing the job for every dog in the valley.
He is aware of the responsibility. He handles it by sleeping.
The part I did not expect
On the bad days, he finds you first.
Nobody walks in and announces it. People come through that door carrying something heavy, and they do not say what it is, and they should not have to.
Mud does not need them to say it.
He just goes. Across the floor, past me, past a dozen people who would happily have made a fuss of him, and he lies down next to whoever needed him. Then he stays there.
He is right about it more often than I am. I am the one who has known these people for years, and I am the one who misses it.
So if you are having one of those days, come find him.
Good luck with that, though. On a day like that, he will have found you first.
Every page on this website is trying to sell you something. Class times, memberships, a glaze you did not know you needed.
Not this one. This one is just my dog.
Say hi when you see him. Check your hands. And if he is not there, he is at home on the couch having a lovely day without a single one of us, which I think we can all agree is a little rude.
Dan
Mud is a miniature Australian Labradoodle and he belongs to Dan Pearce, who owns The Clay Hole in Draper, Utah. He is not a service animal on duty for anyone, he is not for hire, and he has no idea any of this is on the internet.