Pomeranian

A Pomeranian comes out well in every photo and is the only one in the house with no idea what it looks like. At a time when people retouch their faces before anyone has seen them, that is a talent rarer than a pedigree. Its owner's phone gallery usually looks the same: two thousand photos of the dog, a few of the family and one of the owner, for an ID card. In joint selfies the dog comes out brilliantly. You, somewhat less so.

It took a long time to become a star. The name of the breed simply means “from Pomerania”: its ancestors kept watch in Pomeranian farmyards and weighed somewhere between ten and twenty kilos, sometimes more. Everything changed with Queen Victoria, the breed's first influencer. In 1891 she showed her small Pomeranians at Crufts in London, and the English, who loved the queen along with everything that belonged to her, wanted exactly the same. Her favourite, Marco, weighed little more than five kilos, so breeders quickly understood which way fashion was heading. In Victoria's lifetime the breed shrank by half, and it went on shrinking. Everything in it shrank except the coat, the voice and its opinion of itself.

That opinion is, in fact, out of all proportion. A Pomeranian lives in the body of a two-kilo soft toy and behaves like nightclub security. It reports the intercom, the lift, the courier and the neighbour who dared to come home from work. It barks at a dog four times its size in a tone suggesting the other dog has some explaining to do. Its voice is several sizes too big, as if left over from its former dimensions. It is also bright and extremely keen to learn, so all that zeal can be directed into tricks and play before it finds itself something to do.

There is one period in its life without a filter. The English call it the puppy uglies. Around the fourth month, the ball of fluff whose photos collected more likes than all your holidays starts to lose its coat. First the face goes sleek, then a thin stripe runs down the back, and the legs suddenly look two sizes too long. The dog looks as if someone started clipping it and went off to lunch halfway through. Friends stop asking how it is and start asking what breed it actually is. At two in the morning you type “pomeranian losing fur is it normal” into a search engine, and Instagram falls silent. The dog, meanwhile, parades around the neighbourhood like a show winner. Around the tenth month, out of the balding adolescent grows a cloud of fur, and in the middle of that cloud sits the same dog with the same expression. It did not notice any difference.

The puppy uglies are not cured with food, so don't switch foods in a panic and don't add oils or vitamins on your own. A complete food that suits the dog is enough, together with brushing in sections, from the skin to the tips. And don't give it a teddy-bear cut, however cute it looks in photos: after clipping, a Pomeranian's coat takes months to grow back, grows back unevenly, and sometimes not at all.

This dog's real form is measured in grams. An adult Pomeranian weighs two or three kilos, so two hundred grams of excess weight means as much to it as six kilos to a person. A single slice of cheese is almost a third of its daily calories. And every surplus gram presses on the two weakest points of the breed: a delicate windpipe and small knees. The kindest thing you can do for it sounds contrary: put it on the ground. A dog that fits in your arms is easy to carry instead of walk, but it has four perfectly good paws and is not a fashion accessory.

Everything around us is supposed to look good these days: breakfast, the flat, the holiday and the face. Photos are retouched before anyone sees them, and people look into mirrors more often than into each other's eyes. Right in the middle of that world lives a dog that looks like a finished shot and could not care less. It doesn't take its confidence from a reflection or from likes. It takes it from the fact that you are there. And it looks at you in exactly the same way: without a filter.

Your phone holds thousands of photos of it. It has not a single one of you and has never needed one. It knows you with your hair all over the place at six in the morning, with a fever and in your old school tracksuit, and still greets you at the door like a star on the red carpet.

To this dog, you always come out well.