Rescuers have to keep celebrating our successes to stop ourselves from feeling completely overwhelmed. Fortunately for us - the happy endings have been coming in left and right this week.
Velvet came to us as a stray. As the shelter was full - she sat in boarding for months and months without anyone giving her a second look. She is such a gorgeous girl - we could not understand her being overlooked. Fortunately - Velvet finally was able to go to rescue and found her dream home!
Below are pictures and an email update we received from Velvet's new family. We are so happy for her!
Juno (previously Velvet) is doing great and we are so grateful for what you and everyone else involved did so that she could come to Boston to be our dog. The day we went to meet her at her foster home, she leapt upon us, licking our faces like crazy...she rarely gives kisses or jumps on people, so I feel like she really chose us and knew somehow that we were her new family. Everyone who has met her says she is just the sweetest dog they have ever met. She is so calm and gentle with people of all ages and loves attention from anyone who will give it to her. Her very favorite thing is when we hug her (unusual for a dog, I know) and she will come over and then when we hug her, will rest her head on us and try to give us her paws to hold.
She loves everyone she meets and will lean on strangers on the street and gaze at them adoringly if they pay attention to her. We have a couple of friends with babies and she is great with them as well.
Juno is also very smart, and learned her name and to sit, shake, and lie down within the first month of being with us. Now she knows how to play some games, which is fun, and she also knows to sit for meals, to get her collar on, and to go out the door. She has learned about playing with stuffed animals, too, which is adorable.
One of Juno's favorite things is going for rides in the car, and she will sometimes wait at the door of cars that look like ours when we are out for a walk. Amazingly she does not have a single bad habit in the house. No chewing, no barking, no pulling trash out, no jumping on the furniture...nothing. In her previous life, someone obviously trained her well (though someone obviously punished her for jumping on the furniture--we have tried to teach her to lay on the cough with us, but she is terrified to be on the couch, bed, etc.)--I don't know how she ended up as a stray; she seems to love people so much that it is hard to imagine no people loved her at some point. When we first got her, she pulled a lot on walks, but that has improved tremendously.
She is doing well with other dogs, after a slow start. It seemed like she hadn't been very well-socialized as a puppy, because at first she didn't get doggie signals and another dog could be snarling at her and she would pounce down on the ground trying to play. She's mostly figured it out now, though it's become clear in the almost 8 months we've had her that she is really a people dog, and can take or leave other dogs. As an aside, it takes us forever to walk anywhere with Juno because people are constantly stopping us to tell us how beautiful she is and ask us about what breed she is. Our current guess is a mix between a weimeraner and a karelian bear dog. She looks the most like the latter of any breed we've seen, but she is grey instead of black and has floppy ears. At some point, we might do the doggie DNA, but right now we figure she's what she is and we don't care.
Anyway, here are some pictures of our little family and the furry baby herself. When we got her, she weighed 42 pounds, and she gained about 8 in the first 8 weeks we had her, so she's really quite filled out and muscular now, underneath her fluffy fur (which has also filled out a ton!) She hates getting bathed, but we couldn't resist taking these adorable pictures the last time she was in the tub.
Thank you again! She's an amazing dog and we adore her--the only problem is she is so good, we fear we'll never be able to get another dog!
Take care,
Alana
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