How a Dog Got a Home

 

Our dog, Juno, has been with us for two years this May.  She has a sad, pathetic, tragic story so I thought I would share it with you.

Two years ago we were talking about getting a dog, and then we were asked to look after a 10-month old puppy for a weekend.  After that we all decided NO DOG.  Way too much work.  So a few months later hubby and I were at a party with our bridge group and I was telling the story of looking after this puppy who was into everything and how we had decided not to get a dog.  The woman beside me obviously thought we could still be persuaded because she asked me if I wanted a dog.  The previous evening a little Yorkie had shown up in her breezeway (and she lives out in the country) all wet and shivering and covered in burrs.  She couldn't keep it so she wondered if we wanted it.  

We went home and discussed it with the kids.  We didn't even know what a Yorkie looked like so we Googled pictures of them.  We saw pictures like this:

and this:

 and this:

Yikes!!!  Apologies if anyone reading this has a Yorkie that looks like these ones, but they just weren't to our taste.  Then we found some that looked like this:

and this:

and we were reassured that they actually were normal looking dogs.  So we decided that we should give this little lost Yorkie a home.  After we picked up our new dog, we called around to the Humane Society to see if she was lost, but the Humane Society told us that another Yorkie (a male) was found in the same general area and they had run ads in the newspaper and noone had responded.  The Humane Society thought that both Yorkies were from a puppy mill and had been dumped together out in the country.  We took our dog to the vet and found out that she was probably about 6-7 years old and had been the mother in the puppy mill.  She has very enlarged nipples, had a lax belly, and had dark marks on her belly that the vet said were likely the marks of an old uterine infection.  So she had probably had one litter after another and now that she was older they got rid of her.  Thankfully the blood tests and her examination showed that she was a very healthy dog apart from being a bit thin.  

We picked the name Juno because we wanted a name that was not too feminine (scared off  by those crazy bows-in-the hair photos), but was still a girl's name.  Juno seemed to reflect the following, in no particular order:

• Juno is the Roman goddess of marriage and childbirth (seemed appropriate given her past)
• William wanted a tough guard dog sort of name so he expanded her name to "Juno-the-war-dog"
• Juno beach given that our daughter, Kate, had just returned from Normandy, France three days before we got our dog
• Juno the movie because Kate likes the movie - a lot - okay that was a weak reason but somehow it still counted
• Juno was easy to say and sounded like a good name for a dog

We have all fallen truly, madly, deeply in love with our dog.   I was probably one of the least keen on getting her and I have ended up being alpha dog.

I have to say that having a dog, has given a whole new meaning to the phrase "working like a dog".  See what I mean, this is what Juno does 23 hours a day.
 

One last photo of our camo-dog at the cottage.