Beautiful! Good on ya for adopting an older dog. No potty training to deal with! Yay! I have two rescues. My black Lab Lucy I found at the duck pond. She was on the skinny side, but not too bad. No collar, no tags. She adopted me when I was sitting in my car, trying to get hold of my husband on the phone, to tell him we were about to have another dog. She jumped over my lap and got in the car. Take me home, mama! She was spayed already, and housebroken. I think she had been abused though, because she is afraid of certain things, like a brush.
My second adoptee was a rescue from the neighbors down the street. They weren’t treating their little Bichon very well. He was running loose with no collar, but liked to play with Lucy. One day I mentioned they shouldn’t let him run loose like that, and they chained him up in their garage with no water or food! I felt so sorry for him, that I offered to buy him from them, and they agreed. They had three children under four, and both had full time jobs, so no time to spend with him. We named him Ernie, and got him fixed and groomed. (We told the former owners that their kids could come visit anytime, and they have come down several times to play with him.)
Sorry to ramble - I love my pups! I also have an aging Sheltie who puts up with the younger dogs.
I once met a woman who said her dog was a Georgia Mountain Dog. They’d found her in the mountains in Georgia. She also said that some people would say, “Never heard of that one!” and stuff like that. Hee.
Thanks for the compliments, everyone. I’ll be sure to pass them along to her when we get home in a bit.
It still boggles my mind how she could be in the shelter for so long. She was obviously owned by someone who trained and housebroke her. So she presumably had a decent home for 5 years or so, and there’s little chance that she got to be too much for anyone to handle. But in 7 months, the original owners never found her at the county animal shelter after she was “lost”? That can only mean they didn’t try. I’ll never understand how that could be…she’s far too sweet to give up voluntarily by any decent person. But she’ll never have to worry about that again.
Sometimes people give up dogs non-voluntarily. With homes forclosing left and right, it may be a case where the family that owned her couldn’t take her to their new place. Or her previous owners may have gotten ill - a lot of times the pets of the elderly end up in shelters when they have to move out of their homes.
Yeah, but the shelter said she ended up there as a stray. If someone dropped her off at the SPCA because they couldn’t keep her anymore, that would make sense. But in this case, if giving her up was voluntary, it means they just let her go out on the streets instead of taking her to the shelter. And that makes me sad.
And if she was simply lost, it shows there wasn’t much effort to find her…since she was in the most obvious place to look! And that makes me sad, too.
When you meet “your” pet, you just know. When I went looking for a kitty almost 4 years ago one of my father’s coworkers had a batch of young kittens at home. I went over to his house and walked into a room with a momma cat and 4 tiny 8 week old kittens. 3 of them ran at the sight of me, hiding under the bed or desk. Joey walked right up and stuck his little claws in my jeans and started climbing. He knew he was supposed to go home with me!
Joey doesn’t normally look that ticked off. He was waiting for me to open the window so he could smell the birds through the screen.
She very much resembles a friend of mine’s dog, who was a Doberman-lab mix. In fact, down to the overweightedness, I would have said it was the same dog! Not that that’s definitive… your Laika could be a little bit of all kinds of things. It doesn’t really matter, though, because to her, the most important thing is that she’s yours.
Congrats on getting an older dog, and on her being such a good, pretty girl!
My parents adopted a 7 year old beagle this summer. He’d lived in a kennel all his life, and undergone all kinds of procedures and testing by veterinary students (they gotta learn somehow, unfortunately). Free, vaccinated and healthy, but ZERO guarantee as to behaviour, trainability or level of housebrokenness.
Turns out he’s the sweetest dog ever, well behaved, and only one accident when he wasn’t let outside soon enough (he doesn’t ask to go out… yet… so it’s up to my parents to keep track of things!) He just settled onto the couch next to my mom (she’s healthy and active, but she loves her TV shows!) like he’d always lived there, and is enjoying his “retirement” immensely. I want one of my own now!
She is stunning. I was sure she had some kind of hound dog in her (look at the nose. she could probably track a serial killer across four states on a whim) but now I don’t know. In any case, it doesn’t matter. I am sure you will forever a dog having person once you have her a little longer.
'Round these parts, we see a lot of “Oregon Brown Dogs”. My dog is a rare breed; the national club has a standing joke that when (some) people ask what kind of dog it is, we say it’s a “Jamaican Beer Dog”. They were bred to guard the beer fields in Jamaica, you know.
She’s lovely. She looks like my Grandmother MacDonald–stern, big bosom, big heart. I bet her ears are SILKY to fondle. I want to reach through the screen and try it myself. Congratulations for your family finding your dog!
Last October, my husband found a yellow lab that had been abandoned in the woods. He kept telling me how calm the dog was, unlike our black lab. Turns out he was anemic and, once treated, was bouncing off the walls like a proper lab.
Good luck to your girl and good on you for adopting her.
She was spayed already, and housebroken. I think she had been abused though, because she is afraid of certain things, like a brush.