So why is the new pup called Ada? Well first up we wanted a short name easy for her to learn, Ada fitted the bill, but it didn’t just come from nowhere. The first impression this lovely pup made was that she was highly intelligent. She had a cautious curiosity, interested in everything but not the kind of pup to rush in blindly, she would investigate her surroundings and people with the same intense curiosity, studying her options before proceeding with testing the environment, that was how she behaved the first time she was bought into the meeting play pen at the RSPCA to meet us. So we wanted a name that reflected her clever nature. We are steampunk fans, so the next thought was maybe a steampunk kind of name. A real figure from history who has featured in a number of steampunk works is the remarkable Ada Lovelace. Ada, a brilliant mathematician is generally considered to be the first computer scientist, working with Charles Babbage on his analytical engine, the first computer. She was the first to publish an algorithm designed to be carried out by the machine. Ada features as a character in the seminal steampunk novel, The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Stirling. She is also the subject of Sydney Padua’s graphic adventure The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. And she features in the drama The Frankenstein Chronicles.

The real Ada Lovelace was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron and his wife, her mother also was a mathematician of note. Byron gave her mother the pet name “the princess of parallelograms”. Lord and Lady Byron had an unsurprisingly tempestuous relationship that resulted in separation. It was as an antidote to her father’s wildness and perceived insanity that her mother encouraged Ada’s interest in mathematics and logic.

So Ada seemed like a good name for our smart little pup. At four months of age her personality is still revealing itself but aside from the occasional outbreak of puppy naughtiness she does seem to be very much still defined by that cautious curiosity and natural quickness that we first noticed. Today we discovered we are going to have to come up with a much better harness if we are going to defeat her Houdini skills in the car.

While the RSPCA were under the impression she was the product of a German Shepherd mum and a staffy dad we are also beginning to wonder if the description of her ancestry is quite accurate. German Shepherd pretty definitely, but we are wondering if dad might have been a staffy crossed with something else, like maybe a Bull Arab or a Rhodesian ridgeback. I have had a few people suggest that she looks more ridgeback or bull arab than staffy, so now we are playing a wait and see game to see how she turns out. She seems to have a finer more athletic bone structure than the staffy. I would have liked her to mature as a medium sized dog but it is looking possible that she may in fact turn out to be much larger dog than first expected. No matter what Ada is, I feel very lucky in our choice as she seems to be every bit the perfect companion dog.

If anyone would like to hazard a guess on her breeding please leave a comment below, I would be very interested to see what others think.