My mom is involved in dog rescue. She has been for years. She used to help transport dogs out of shelters with high kill rates, largely in the South, and puppy mills in the Midwest, mostly in Missouri. (Although there's plenty in Pennsylvania. And, if you live here, you support legislative efforts to shut them down. They are horrible, horrible places and I could tell you more heartbreaking stories than any one person has the right to know.)
Ultimately, my parents decided this wasn't enough. They started fostering dogs for rescues and, eventually, opened one of their own when I went off to college. It was called Love-A-Lab rescue and, in the year that it operated, my family personally rescued and found permanent homes for about sixty dogs. This doesn't include the ones that my family ultimately kept when we had to shut the rescue down due to my grandmother's failing health, who lived with us at the time.
Being as I'm an only child, I suspect this was my mother's manifestation of empty-nest crazy, as I came home from school to discover that I had been replaced by a pack of slavering, half-wild wildebeasts otherwise known as my parents dogs. And it's only continued since then, long after I moved home for a few years and moved back out. My parents have a ten acre property in a fairly rural/suburban area and a massive house, so they can manage things like this, but it's almost impossible to walk around their house without tripping over a furry butt, or stepping on a tail, or having some little beastie pounce on you in an attempt to OMG PLAY. And if you're going to visit? You'd best stock up on lint-rollers.
Warm-hearted, generous, mushy people that get in way over their heads in their attempts to do good. That's my parents. That's how they've always been.
So it shouldn't have come as a surprise when I got a gleeful phone call from my mother one day, announcing "I found you a dog!". You see, I had found my breed. While my parents love labradors, and golden retreivers, and papillons - and while they're all good dogs - they've never been the breeds for me. I prefer my dogs a wee bit more independent. After all, my boyfriend and I? We have cats. So my breed was the shaggy, lovable, mud-tracking, slobbering mess known as the Old English Sheepdog. They're smart dogs. After all, they're working dogs. They're painfully loyal to their families. After all, they were bred to spend their days with their shepherd. They're independent thinkers. They have to be, given the tasks they were designed to do.
The trouble with the OES - also known as bobtails for their distinctly docked tails denoting their working status in 18th-Century England, which is a practice I wish they would ban in the US like they did in the UK - is that there's not many of them up for adoption. At least, not in this part of the country. Most of the ones up for adoption are out west or so far north they could probably bark across the Canadian border. And given my family history and all I know about rescue animals? I flat-out refuse to buy a dog. Not when there's so many that need homes. So my boyfriend and I settled on the next best thing - a pitbull.
Yeah, you read me. I said a pitbull. There's tons of them up for adoption in the Philadelphia area and despite what you've heard on the news? They're good dogs. I had one when I was little, named Pete. That dog used to let five-year-old-me feed him his kibble one piece at a time, bare-handed. I dressed him up in my ballet tutus. At one point, I decided he needed "more colors" and the big brute sat patiently still while I colored on him with Sharpies I found in my mom's desk. (The dog was brindle and white and red and blue for a week, at least. My dad still laughs.) Pitbulls are actually so good with kids they used to be called "nanny dogs" and, at the turn of the 20th century, if you couldn't afford a governess? You got a pitbull to help mind your kids. No, I'm not kidding. There's an article on it here . The US even used them as our mascot in WWI and WII. My boyfriend and I had made up our minds. But my mother...
Well, if you tell my mother you're even thinking about getting a dog? Congratulations. She'll find you the perfect furry bundle of love in some sad shelter somewhere. And then she'll thrust photos and heartbreaking stories and guilt-trips that could be in the Guiness Book of World Records at you until you cave. In less than a week and a half, "I found you a dog!" became me clamoring into the back of my parents' pick-up truck with my boyfriend to drive an hour away so that we could meet a professional dog transport service - apparently, there's people who do this for a living! - that had brought him up from a shelter in Missouri. We've heard he came from a puppy mill. We've heard he got dumped at a shelter by an old man taking care of his grandson's dog while he was serving overseas that "just couldn't deal with him anymore". Frankly, nobody knows. He was dirty, and smelly, and rambunctious. And he kissed my face the second I met him. I feel horrible for not adopting a pitbull desperately in need. I still want to, even though we don't have the space...
...But I'm in love. Wildly and absolutely. We've named him Tybalt, after the character from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. He's going to be living with two English majors and three cats. If you don't get the joke, read more. Books make you smart.
We were hit with a nor'easter over the weekend, complete with sleet and slush and freezing rain. And so here's a picture of a very dirty Tybalt, playing in his very first snow. It took fifteen minutes to get that dark, blurry picture. Because apparently, to Tybalt? Pictures should never be taken. Cell phone cameras are not for pictures. They're for licking. I hate having my picture taken, too, so I suppose that's fair.
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