Editor's note: Teacher's Pet is a Ball State Daily News series featuring university faculty/staff and their pets. If you have any suggestions as to who we should feature next, send an email to features@bsudailynews.com.
“I’m eating a nasty pot-pie; it’s like I live here.”
Watching Rai Peterson eat her microwavable morsel at her feet is Roscommon, an Irish wheaten terrier, who goes to work with her.
Peterson is a professor in the English department at Ball State and instructs an immersive learning class that teaches students to bind books at the Books Arts Collaborative building across form Cornerstone Center for the Arts in downtown Muncie.
Peterson, who has had four wheaten terriers, got Roscommon, or Ros, from the same breeder she got her third wheaten terrier from.
Her other dog, Tilly, is actually Ros’ great-great aunt, but she treats him like her own pup.
“We brought this puppy into the house, and I think that after a few days, she started to think that she had mothered him and she started treating him like her own child,” she said, “You know, nipping at him if he did something naughty and reigning him in and helping raise him.”
Tilly even kept a watchful eye on him.
“Some days, we would watch him because we were house breaking him, and I’d need to go do something like laundry or something,” she said, “So I’d say, ‘Tilly would you come in here?’ And she’d come in and I’d say, 'Tilly would you watch this baby for me?’ And she’d keep him in the room.”
Now that he’s a little older, Ros' laid-back personality is really starting to show.
“He’s a very chill dude. His father’s name was Wolftone, and his father was actually dead before Ros was conceived,” Peterson said. “He was conceived from bank sperm. His father was really legendary for having that temperament, and that’s why the breeder used him.”
If he wasn’t so “chill,” Peterson probably couldn’t take him into school with her, which would make some students very sad.
“I have a class at 3 o’clock on campus, and the kids love him, so I take him in,” she said, “because he likes to go to that class. It’s a big class, and it has 25 students in it, so he spends like the first 10 minutes by greeting everybody and then he lays down in the front.”
Peterson got Ros purely on a whim and said it was the best impulse decision she has ever made.
“I knew the breeder and she called me and said, ‘I’ve got the perfect dog for you,’ and I got thinking about the fact that I’d have three dogs, and then I thought that hoarder begins at five, so I got him," she said.
When he’s not working with mom, he likes to spend his time kayaking and sailing with her.
“There’s that saying that it’s nice to have a dog in your life, but don’t forget that you are the dog's life,” Peterson said, “They’re my family.”
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