FAREWELL, FINEST OF FRIENDS
On St Valentines Day, Rick and Libby said goodbye to Zack. For a dog who loved life, loved his master, and who was himself loved even more again, there was something poignant about the date.
“I want the biggest one”, Rick told Rachel back in 2012 when Katie was expecting a litter of pups. If only all such random choices delivered such remarkable results. Full of character, intelligence and energy, Zack’s appetite for life was matched only by his appetite for food and chasing balls. He wasn’t averse to a bit of fox or bunny hunting either and the shrill notes of his yipping rising from some impossibly distant wilderness were a familiar sound. The hunt was always in vain. His legs were probably just too short.
Zack was born in June 2012, just three months before Kinnegar Brewing was incorporated. He was with us for every step of the journey. Joined by his 4-years younger brother Pico in 2016, he’s a familiar character in Kinnegarland and features on many of our can labels, from Big Bunny to Low Tide and DL to Limeburner.
But it was in his friendship with Rick that Zack had the greatest impact on Kinnegar. Many a long and impossibly arduous day in the brewery was made good again by an hour of Zack’s loyal companionship in the evening. Getting up and doing it all again in the morning suddenly didn’t seem quite so impossible.
For almost two years Zack had been battling an obscure auto-immune condition that played havoc with his skin. He was a warrior to the end, helped in his fight by his wonderful vet Susan and her team. On St Valentines Day we just ran out of road. The void is enormous but we can look back on nearly 13 years of pure pleasure and the happiest of memories, content in the knowledge that Zack is now up there with Rusty, happily hunting rabbits in heaven.
