Do You Want a Dog?

Something amazing happened this week. For the first time in my girls' lives, we got a new dog. Our three-legged German Shepherd and two Corgis were here long before my babies, and my husband and I pinky swore years ago that we were going to work our way down to one old, heartworm positive Labrador that would just lie on the porch and sleep. Since my husband works at the animal shelter, there is more than an adequate supply of those! But nonetheless, as I was grocery shopping this week, my cell phone rang. It was my husband, getting ready to do his least favorite and most difficult part of his job as a shelter vet. "Do you have any use for a really old, sad English bulldog? One eye is really cloudy and looks bad, and she has some teeth missing. Her tongue hangs out on one side of her mouth. She's real skinny. Looks like she has had several litters of puppies, crawling with fleas. She's going to be euthanized today." Hmm, not exactly what my girls had in mind when they were begging me for a puppy last week. But I have to emphasize just HOW rare this phone call was. As in, in a year and a half of shelter work, it's never happened before.
I have often marveled at what I like to call the mangled animal phenomenon among veterinarians. Nearly every vet I know has a collection of blind, crazy, crippled, or otherwise mangled animals that no one else wanted. At one time we had a three legged dog, a three legged cat, a runty, parrot mouthed horse whose twin died, a cat who was dropped off for a bath and never picked up, and a dog who had been run over at least four times. The run over dog was accidentally picked up as a "stray" right across the street from his house! He was given to my husband at a feed store in town, and after he lived and slept with us for a year, his original owner turned up. He was an older man, who came to our office, surveyed the situation, and decided to leave his dog with us! And that was a good thing, because I had already told my husband to get out the checkbook, because I wasn't about to lose that sweet little dog. He did, however seem to think he was a cat with nine lives. He had surgery three times while we had him, once to repair a diaphragmatic hernia and twice for dietary indiscretion (he ate sodasorb, which is an adsorbent that goes in an anesthesia machine, and garbage) and ultimately met his demise crossing Highway 78 on his way home from raiding the neighbor's garbage.
So as I said, the phone call asking if I wanted another dog was exceedingly rare. I thought to myself, "He must want this one bad." Why not? We have extra horses around here, we might as well have an extra dog. "If you want her, bring her home." And so, sweet Zoey has come to live with us. She has terrible breath, she snorts like a pig, she snores, I'm still not sure that we've gotten all the fleas off of her, and she needs to gain a lot of weight. But she's ours. The kids adore her, and we get the satisfaction of knowing that we saved one deserving animal from certain death. She seems to know it, too. If there's such a thing as gratitude in a dog's eyes, Zoey has it. I guess it's going to be awhile longer before we are down to just that Lab.