What's your story Dude

Mike and I have talked about getting a dog. We both agreed, that we wanted a rescue and not a puppy. Neither of us have the energy or patience.

We really haven’t put a great effort in to the search, because the timing isn’t right. We’ re going to Denmark in August, so we wanted to wait till we got back.

I have always heard, that you don’t choose a rescue dog, they choose you. I believe that more now.

Saturday morning Mike calls me and tells me that a dog is in our yard.

The dog looks very lost and confused. We don’t recognize him. Mike lured him in with some meat. He was both thirsty and hungry. He is very friendly, even if he is somewhat scared.

Who is this dog and what is his story?

It is clear that he has been neglected for quite some time. He is very matted around his legs and eyes and his nails were very long. But even if he was in pain, he still trusted us enough to let us pet him. That was one of the reasons we believed, that he had until recently belonged to some one. Been some ones pet, even if he had been neglected.

We called animal control. Maybe he had run away from his owner and the owner was an old person, who was not able to care for him.

“What is your story dude”? was the one question we kept repeating, but couldn’t get an answer to. Mike started to call him Dude. The way he looked, it kind of fitted.

I looked in Dude’s mouth and I could see he was missing a couple of teeth and his dental hygiene was pitiful. It made me think that Dude was an old dog and maybe had medical problems.

We decided to take him to the vet. Even if we didn’t keep him, no dog deserves to be treated the way he had been treated.

The vet confirmed he was an old dog. She thought is was about 8 or 9 and he had a heart murmur. But no heart worms. The vet shaved off the worst of the matting and clipped his nails. She told us that it would take at least 6 months for the coat to become this matted. Poor guy.

30 minutes at the vet had costs us $200. We didn’t even know if we could keep him.

But we had done a good deed for the dude.

He was so happy to get rid of the matting and the long nails, that he was jumping around, wagging his tale, looking up at us, as if he said thank you.

The little toothless dude had captured our hearts. Both Mike and I knew, if animal control didn’t contact us soon, it would become increasingly difficult to give him up.

We bought some dog food to last us the weekend, just in case.

We had a dog for the weekend, but what about tomorrow?