Four years ago, I had puppy-fever.
Whenever I saw a puppy, I cooed. I walked unabashedly up to the puppy’s human and said, “May I snuggle your puppy?” I repeatedly, wistfully said to my partner, “I want a puppy.”
At the time, we were living in a crowded one-bedroom apartment graciously shared with us by our 7-year-old dog who my partner had taken in from a rehoming situation only a few years prior and our almost 2-year-old skittish cat that we had adopted from the Humane Society the previous fall.
Let’s be real: It’s their world and we just live in it.
In the time we had been together, his dog became my dog. But wouldn’t a puppy just complete our little family?
“I want a puppy,” I’d say as we snuggled in to watch a movie and a cute little blob of fur waddled into frame.
“Ooooh, puhp-PEEE!” I’d coo as we walked by the pet store’s window display with pictures of baby dogs playing with toys.
One cold November evening, as I waited for my partner to return home from work and errands, my phone rang. “Come to the back door,” he said.
Oh no, I thought, what huge thing did he buy? I looked around the apartment and imagined rearranging for his new indulgence. That’s when I heard strange sounds clattering up the back metal steps.
He swung open the back door and walked in with a gangly puppy, nearly all skin and bones whose paws seemed to go in all directions. I gasped and dropped to the floor. The puppy ran over to me as if he already knew me and crawled into my lap and began licking my face in earnest.
“What’s this?” I asked?
“You said you wanted a puppy,” my partner said, “so I got you a puppy.”
I looked at the wild-eyed thing in front of me. His fur smelled of urine, he was wearing a Thunder Shirt, and every bone in his body was visible – even those under his Thunder Shirt. It would be days later that I learned the whole full story of how my partner picked out this puppy. And for that, I’ll tell it like he – a fantastic storyteller – tells it.
My partner and I both have a dedication to adopting. He decided as we already had one who had been rehomed (and prior to that was a side-of-the road rescue, then a graduate of a prison training program, then an underutilized adoptee) and another who was an adoptee from a no-kill high quality shelter, he would visit “the worst of the worst” shelters: the county pound. He said many dogs – big, medium and little – caught his eye. But there was this tiny strange looking creature in the back of a small cage who met his gaze. Every time he walked by, the dog was barking non-stop. As he and the pup locked eyes, the strange looking dog would stop barking – just for a moment.
“I’d like to see that puppy, please,” he told the shelter attendant.
The attendant – a 6-foot-something burly man with a shaved head and muscles as big as my partner’s head – told him, “That guy? You don’t want him. He’s crazy.”
My partner persisted, he related to me later, and the attended gave in, picking up the tiny dog, a golden miniature pincher, under one arm.
“This guy is crazy,” the attendant ominously warned again. In fact, it turned out, this puppy had already been adopted twice and returned to the shelter after only a couple days each time. A two-time reject. Before that? The scars on his body and in his behavior told the story: there was a healed tear in his ear and old scars everywhere, and they had the dog labeled as a year old. The dog, full of “behavior problems” and deemed unadoptable, was likely to be euthanized.
In a meeting “room,” the puppy bounced off the walls, occasionally pausing in my partner’s lap. But he said, he saw something in the puppy, maybe that he needed the kind of radical love we could provide, that we could provide him with a chance to live or even that the strange creature could provide us with something.
“We’ll take him,” my partner told the attendant.
Again, the attendant warned him off. “This guy? This guy is crazy.”
“Great,” my partner said. “His kind of crazy will fit with our kind of crazy.”
With a small payment and a name and address, the puppy was ours.
At his first physical exam at the veterinarian, we soon found out that dog was younger than a year. We called in a behavioralist and learned it was likely that he had experienced head trauma. The pound had sent him home on trazadone; we worked with first one vet and then another more familiar with traumatized and injured dogs until we came up with a medication regiment right for him. Still, what we knew about our dog is that what he needed most was time and love.
In that first year, the puppy learned how to eat and drink out of a bowl, how to walk on a leash, how to properly potty outside, to bark a whole lot less and how to play. It took two years to get him up to a healthy weight.
Last year, he finally started becoming more comfortable being apart from me, going off to his dog bed on his own to nap whenever he wants.
This November will mark the fourth anniversary since we adopted the unadoptable puppy. He physically and mentally still acts a lot like a puppy. We continue to have trouble with barking inappropriately. He still plays like a puppy. He still gets scared like a puppy. He still flops his legs around like a puppy. He even still looks like a puppy.
In these years, as a family, we have also learned a lot of patience and unconditional love. This dog will not develop on anyone else’s schedule. He is joyous and loving, and very smart, but he is going to grow up on his own timeline. And we’re not going to rush it in anyway.