Guest Post: How I Learned to Love Rescue Dogs by E C Bell

How I learned to love rescue dogs.

I grew up on a farm where dogs worked, and were definitely not pets. Then one the day Mom took us all to the SPCA. (5 kids in a station wagon, can you imagine?) I think she was taking cats in for adoption, because people dropped them off at the farm with great regularity, but I can’t be sure. Because all I do remember is us going to the section where the dogs were caged, and meeting King.

He was large and reddish gold, with the best dog smile you can imagine, and we all fell desperately in love with him. So, we badgered Mom into taking him home with us.

Now, you have to remember that this all happened back in medieval times when there were no cell phones. And Dad was out in the fields, so Mom couldn’t call him to tell him about the dog she was about to bring home. 

We were instructed to keep our mouths shut, until Mom could show Dad the new dog. And then, she put King in the basement. King promptly dug his way through the basement door and escaped, so Dad came home to a wrecked door and 5 inconsolable children. Oh yeah, and a wife who was nearly beside herself by that time, too.

Dad fixed the door, probably thinking he was off the hook pet wise, but King came back three days later, and he never left us again. He was the best dog in the world.

King was my introduction to rescue dogs. However, when I moved into the city, I didn’t think about getting a dog, because raising a dog in the city wouldn’t be fair to the dog. 

Or so I thought.

How I learned to love city dogs

22 years ago, my husband called me from Vegreville, a town about 2 hours east of Edmonton, where he was doing some work for the municipality.

“There’s a puppy here,” he said. “At the water treatment plant. One of the guys found him walking on the side of the road, and they want me to take him. What do you think?”

I heard a tone in my husband’s voice, and knew how my mother must have felt that day at the SPCA. It was the same tone we kids had had, when we’d first met King. My husband had fallen in love.

“Take him to the vet,” I said. “And make sure he’s healthy. Then, bring him home.”

I won’t tell you about meeting Bear for the first time. (He was a black lab cross, still at the squishy puppy stage, so you can probably guess how hard I fell for him.) And I won’t tell you about my husband disrupting my daughter’s volleyball practice with that puppy. (She played high level volleyball, and the coach was definitely not impressed when her well run team devolved into a cadre of giggling teenage girls, all wanting to pet the puppy.) 

But I will tell you that Bear taught me that a dog can do very well in the city. Can be the best dog in the world, in fact. And he was.

When he died, a couple of months after my dad, we decided not to get another dog. We decided we’d travel. We had lots of time, because our daughter had moved out and we were alone. But we didn’t. We just lived in a house that felt dead until, on my birthday, we went to the Humane Society. Just to see who was there.

“But no working dogs,” I said. “Having a working dog in the city isn’t fair to the dog.”

That’s when we met a four month old border collie cross who’d just had one leg removed after he was hit by a car. That’s right. A border collie. One of the smartest working breeds in the world.

What can I say? I fell in love.

I won’t tell you about what it was like at my house after we took him off the pain meds and met the real dog for the first time. Or how badly he freaked out every time we took him back to the Humane Society for puppy training. (We finally figured out it was the smell of the place.) Or how we rescued Millie, a middle aged Shih Tzu , so she could be a buddy for Buddy, and how badly that turned out. Or how easily Buddy trained us so he got the best spot on the couch. Nope, won’t tell you any of that, because he’s a great dog, and I love him.

That’s the thing about rescue dogs. You just fall in love. And, with work, they are the best dogs in the world.