The More The Merrier

The More the Merrier

I have a sweet and demanding pack of five furry babies. That wasn’t the plan. I wanted a Husky and had looked at shelters in and around Portland OR. I would check the shelters website regularly and when I would see a likely adoptee would go to visit them. By the time I got there…. every time…. for weeks, they had already been adopted. I started to think that I wasn’t meant to have a dog.

One day I was out running errands in a small town about two hours away and happened to pass an animal shelter. On a whim, I stopped in. There was an all-white, male, Siberian Husky that had been there for three weeks. They brought him in for me to meet and I fell in love immediately. One look in those intelligent blue eyes and I was hooked. He was so sweet, friendly, and playful. The squirrels that inhabited our yard were less than pleased at the new arrival.

Aspen loved his trips to the dog park, walks, and going for runs with me but it seemed clear that he would be a much happier dog if he had his own doggy friend at home. So, I went back to the local shelter to find him a friend. I, of course, loved all the pooches but …there we could bring only one home to be his new “sibling”. So, we took him to the play area at the shelter to meet a few of my favorites. His high energy was intimidating to most of the dogs but not to the little Basenji. Vance soon became our second dog! Bright and energetic, Vance is the mother hen that likes to clean and herd the other dogs. He has a crazed addiction to balls

Both my husband and I started to think that two was manageable so why not three. There are so many dogs in the shelter that need homes. My husband had made a habit of browsing through their website to look at dogs up for adoption. There was a litter of American Eskimos that were rescued from a bad situation and many had been adopted except for one very anxious one. We watched her go in and out of the shelter as people tried to adopt her and returned her because they couldn’t deal with her. We decided to go meet her.

It took us 3 hours of being vetted before we could talk them into letting us meet her. She had been through so much. She had initially come in on the brink of death, only to be bounced from home to home. She was a furry little ball of trauma. They warned us that she would not come near us and would likely hide in the corner. If we moved too quickly it would probably result in her urinating on herself.

We sat as still as we could on the bench when they brought her in. She ran over to us, sniffed me, sniffed my husband, then hopped into my husbands lapped and curled into a ball and wouldn’t leave. The women’s jaw dropped. Every time one of the other shelter workers walked past the rooms window, she pointed excitedly to Crystal laying on my husband’s lap. He tried to hand her to me, and she climbed onto his shoulder and buried her head in his hair. She has been in love with him since. We have, since, become good friends too.

Our fourth puppy was a surprise. I wanted a cat. I love cats, so we stopped at the shelter, but they were restricting visitors to the cat area that day. We couldn’t visit the shelter and not see some furry faces, so we stopped by the dog area. Amidst the large dogs barking loudly and authoritatively was one tiny eight-pound terrier looking at the floor with his little ears and tails drooped…he looked so sad. We asked to see him. He was just the sweetest little thing and he liked us too. We brought our dogs back to meet him and they got along despite the size difference. So, Mongo (Destroyer of Worlds) joined the family. He is smaller than my cat.

I came home one day to find my husband talking to one of our neighbors. He was a young guy with a Husky of his own. He was telling my husband that he was getting recalled to the military soon and he didn’t know what he was going to do with his dog Raiden. I left them to chat while I went into the house to make some coffee. Shortly, my husband joined me and informed me that he had told our neighbor if he could not find a home for Raiden that we would take him so he would not have to take him to a shelter. I came home two days later, from the dog park to find our neighbor standing in our driveway with Raiden. He was in tears. He had to give him up. We took in our fifth furry baby that day and our pack is now, hopefully, complete.