my thanks to all of you for your wonderful advice - i will take everything that you all have said into consideration before making a decision - however my wife and i have decided that our grieving over the loss of our 4 year old is not over yet so we are going to delay any decision until we can get past this point - with that in mind, and realizing how difficult these discussions have been for me, i am going to unsubscribe myself from this site until such time as we can come to better terms with our situation - again, my thanks to all of you for trying to help - Manny

thanks for the feeback - it pretty well follows what others have told us - here's my problem with getting a puppy - i'm 71 years old and i do not want to outlive my furry kids - that's why i would prefer a 2 - 4 year old as a playmate for our 2 year old - any additional thoughts?

Manny

Hi everyone - my first time posting so here goes - I have been a Basenji owner since 1969 - just love the breed - won't have any other - we had 3 Basenjis up until this past May - thats when our 4 year old came down with a very agreesive type of cancer and despite all of our efforts and those of several vets and hospitals we couldn't save him - before his death we had 3 Basenjis - a 12 year old male - a 2 year old female and the one we lost, a 4 year old male - the 2 and 4 year old played and ran all the time - the 12 year old joined in occasionally but mostly watched - the 4 year old is now gone and the 2 year old doesn't get a lot of excercise any more - we would like to add another Basenji but not a puppy - but we can't decide whether it should be a male or female - we have gotten so many opinions from breeders and other owners that we are hesitant to do anything - you know the stories, you can't have 2 females in the same house or another male will challenge our 12 year old for leadership and we don't want that.

So my question is what has your experience been in a situation like this? We want to enhance the quality of our 2 year olds life but we do not want to add any dificulty to our 12 year olds life. Suggestions? Opinions? Experiences?