Dora and Dominic are like Me and Mini-Me. Her body really doesn’t look like a Pointer’s, but her markings and the shape of her face is so much like his, she could be a mini version of him.
Over the last few days, all the dogs have become friends. Ruby was suspicious of Dora at first, and looked at me reproachfully whenever Dora got in my lap. But now she and Dora are great friends and they play together enthusiastically. Dominic joins in, and he is especially exuberant. Actually, he is a bit too rough with her, chasing her and tackling her to the ground. But she is tough. She rolls over and then jumps right up and chases him.
Dora loves us very much and has turned into a bit of a Velcro dog. When I am working in the office, she has been jumping up and sitting behind me in my chair. When we are sitting on the couch watching television, she comes and sits with me or Gary, or climbs on top of us. She has slept in the bed every night. Like Dominic, she tries to get under the covers.
She is starting to smell a lot better, although we still haven’t given her a bath. She runs around in the grass, and rolls, and she is beginning to lose the odor of the shelter. Little by little, her behavior is giving us clues to where she came from and what her life was before the fire.
First, she definitely was not a farm dog. She clearly had never seen horses before, and she started out fascinated with them. She does not understand that they could hurt her, and we have to make sure she does not get under their feet. The first day we had her, she followed us when we rode our sets of horses around the farm. She kept looking up and me and wandering in front of one of the horses I was leading. Finally, I had to put her in a crate. I was afraid she might get stepped on, and afraid she might wear herself out running.
Second, she did not know about cats when she got here. Three of our four cats have had to bat her in the head to discourage her from being overly curious about them. The fourth cat, Tiger (aka Sheldon) is way too nice to the dogs, and has allowed her to nibble his ears and chase him. The other cats and I are trying to teach her not to chase them. She is getting better, but I am still watching her closely.
We think she was probably in a family with a child, and she was the child’s dog. We’re pretty sure she slept on the bed. Someone may have taught her to sit once, but she is not used to that. Her trick is to stand up on her hind legs and beg. It took me a few days to turn that back to sitting, which she does pretty reliably now.
She loves the other dogs and she loves us, but I can’t say I think she is totally happy. She has expressions sometimes that make me feel like she has memories. Are they bad memories of the shelter? Is she remembering a family that she loved and misses? Am I, perhaps, projecting too much?
I wonder what happened to her family, and I wonder if there is a child out there, wondering what happened to his or her little dog. I wonder how much the family knew about her chances at the shelter, or if they had any option besides giving her up.
On Facebook, the people involved in rescue berate the “owner surrender” people, as if those people really knew that giving a pet to an “animal shelter” was like sending it to a concentration camp and that it probably would be killed. But I really don’t think people do know that. When we were at the shelter in Greenville, we saw the man bring in the two nice cats, and the punk kind bring in his “homey’s” dog. Maybe the paperwork they signed said on it somewhere that the animals would be killed if no one wanted them in a few days. But the lady at the desk certainly didn’t say anything about it. On the shelter website, it cautions people who want to give up animals that they are “unable to house surrendered pets for more than a few days.” But it doesn’t say that it’s going to kill them.
I really don’t think people know. They think it is a shelter.
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