Well, I’ve told you a little bit about my pet snakes, and my pet rats, which means, I should probably let you meet my mutt! Bear is a 7-year old German Shepherd/Basset Hound mix that my family and I adopted in 2013 after our purebred Shetland Sheepdog, Rex, unfortunately had to be put to sleep.
Bear came from Orphans of the Storm, an animal shelter here in Illinois, which is where we met him for the first time. It’d been a few months since we’d lost Rex, and me and my family were finally ready to start looking around to see if we could finally find ourselves another family pet. We tried out a couple different shelters, knowing that we would rather adopt a shelter pet before even thinking about looking into buying one, and we ran into a lot of dead ends. There were so many dogs out there, and a lot of them were really cute but, we didn’t really click with any of them.
I remember the day we were going to Orphans of the Storm, that morning we checked out their webpage and scrolled through their available dogs. I had my eyes on a couple Huskies, a Malamute, and a Samoyed, and mom was looking at a couple Shepherd mixes. Bear, who was named Bert when we first adopted him, was not on their website at all. So, we went, we visited with the dogs that we wanted to check out, and we kept coming up with nothing but dead ends. The dogs were cute and they were friendly but, once we took them out into their little outdoor kennels, where you could really let the dogs off the leash and see how they act, they didn’t want anything to do with us. They wanted to run and play but, not with us, they were more concerned with being off the leash and out of their little kennels.
Then as we were doing one last walk around, I saw Bear, and his little clipboard was empty. His sheet said that he was a Shepherd/Basset mix, and that’s about it. There were no notes about the toys he liked to play with or anything else, just that he hadn’t been there that long yet, and his name was Bert. I thought he had a cute face and I asked if we could take him out and mom said yes. When she bent down to take him off the leash to let him roam around a little bit he knocked her over into the mud and started licking her face. Anyone who knows my mom would know that this is something that would’ve pissed her off right away. First of all there was mud, second of all, she doesn’t really like “kisses” so I was expecting her to say it was time to bring him back and we’d leave the shelter and try again somewhere else at a later time.
That isn’t what happened at all. My mom decided right then and there that “Bert” was the dog for us, and that he was the one we needed to get. So we did, and up until the time she died, he was her baby. He spent all day with her on the couch watching TV, playing with his toys, and sleeping with her. He got the last bite of everything she ate, and she loved him so much.
Now, he’s my baby. He sleeps on my bed every night, whether I want him to or not. Because if you try to lock him out of the room, he’ll sit at the door and cry, whine, howl, and if you still don’t let him in, he’ll lay there and pout. When you finally do let him in, he’ll bring you his favorite toy, which is his llama. I think this is because he’s trying to “apologize” for whatever he did to make you “mad” and lock him out in the first place. Though, usually, I just lock him out when I’m trying to eat something and don’t want him to beg, especially when its something he can’t have,
Stay Safe & Healthy
-Sky
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