(This post is part of the April A to Z blogging challenge.)
That Duncan was ever unwanted blows my mind. He was a high energy puppy with some bad habits, no doubt, but he had such a desire to work with his person. I think he would have excelled in almost any working home, or any pet home that had kept his mind active.
That Duncan was ever unwanted blows my mind. He was a high energy puppy with some bad habits, no doubt, but he had such a desire to work with his person. I think he would have excelled in almost any working home, or any pet home that had kept his mind active.
Finding Duncan was a bit of work. His
shelter was over the state line. I'd been rejected from adopting in several
places. I called ahead to Duncan's shelter and asked about all the reasons we'd
been rejected.
1) We had a fence, but it was only 4ft.
(They worried more about people leaving their dogs alone than the dog hopping
the fence.)
2) Not all our dogs were desexed. (The
dog I'd be adopting world be, and having intact dogs didn't bother them, as
long as the shelter dog and our dogs got along.)
3) I wanted to train the dog for service
dog work and take it with me to another state while school was in session. (So
long as the dog was with me, that was fine.)
Everything that had been an
insurmountable roadblock elsewhere was fine with this shelter. So I went, and I
looked, and I took notes. I hauled my parents along, and we looked at some 5 or
6 dogs. Duncan was last, and best suited. He met our dogs at the time (Blaze,
Star and Ocho.) He did very well with all of it, and I wanted to do the
adoption. We'd run out of time, so I put a hold on him, completed the paperwork
later, and took him home a different day.
We spent 3 months working on the basics,
traveling to my uncle's farm, starting public work, and then we were off to
college. The first semester was a steep learning curve for us both. He did
well, and I came to rely on him. He got me around campus, carried my books to
class, and paid more attention to some professors than I did. It was some 6
months after I adopted him that I changed his name from Floyd to Duncan,
because it took me that long to be sure of him.
He went to my first job post-college, on
a number of interviews, saw Cirque du Soliel, rodeos, horse training clinics,
lectures, movies, meetings, classes, restaurants, parks, tow trucks, malls,
museums, aquariums, banquets, murder mystery dinners... anything I did in life
from doctor’s visits to a night out with friends to a cross-country roadtrip,
he went with me. He helped raise Twist, Sunny and Strider, he's helping Keeper
learn the job. He's retired, but he didn’t want to be, and turned himself into
a house helper.
I wish all the parts of his body were as good as
his mind and his joints. (His hips are OFA good and elbows are normal.) After breaking
a toe in December 2012, he tore his left CCL, and had a TPLO to repair it in January 2013. April
1st, 2014 he had a molar pulled.
For a $99 shelter find, he's had a hell
of a life. May 30th will be 7 years he’s been in my life.
I
hope he is around for a long, long time. What he means to me, what he has done
for me, is priceless. I remain grateful for him every day.
No comments:
Post a Comment