Here's a brief update on sweet Carmella

Carmella was an angelic dog--house trained, polite, obedient--but she did not like my other big dogs. She was soooo excited to have people who loved her and took good care of her that all she wanted to do was bask in our attention and be loved...and not share that love with anyone else. She had passed all of her temperament tests with flying colors...but she was really territorial over the space around the people who took care of her when it came to other giant dogs.

I can imagine a lot of reasons why this might have happened. She had been bred nearly to death--the vet who spayed her said her uterus was horribly scarred from so many puppies. It's possible that she had been beaten up by other Danes during mating, and that she'd had bad experiences with them. She was also recovering from surgery, and often when dogs are hurting they get edgy about other dogs being near them.

For whatever reason, she wasn't tolerating the resident dogs at our house. While that's something we've worked on with other dogs in the past, since our dogs are old and Carmella was also old and post-surgery, we thought it safest to move her somewhere else. We will train dogs through a lot, but not if it endangers their health or our pets'.

Thankfully the rescue responsible for her acted quickly and found her a place to stay that was not only safe, but pretty darn nice. Pampered Pets in Hoover is currently taking care of her while Peace Love and Dog Paws evaluates potential homes. Last I heard, they had a very good-sounding potential adopter without other pets.

I really wish I'd gotten to see that poor, sweet old girl all the way through to her new home. In the end, I didn't do nearly what I wanted to, but I'm relieved that she'll be ok.

Fingers crossed that things will work great next time, or that if they go wrong, it will be the kind of thing that I am equipped to fix.

Carmella

Sometimes a dog gets dropped at the pound that "just can't be helped." Often it's a black dog, and often it's an old dog. It's a dog that's sick. It's a dog that has everything in the world going against it.

It usually gets euthanized as soon as it walks in the door and doesn't get thought of again.

I got one!

Carmella is an old black Dane who was used way too many times for breeding. She's only about six years old but looks like she's twelve. She has heartworms. She's thirty pounds underweight. For those who know my dogs, she should be Julie-size but she weighs less than Jackson.

She has entropian in both eyes from being so undernourished. She coughs a lot from the heartworms but she likes to play. She has pressure sores on all her joints from laying on hard surfaces.

Her personality is gorgeous.

She's about to get a whole lot better than she is.

Elvie

It's been a busy time over the holidays. We have been running around a lot, taking the first vacations we've been able to take in several years thanks to the husband's new job, which is going swimmingly.

For that reason and several others, not much new has happened with the semi-feral dog I'm watching. I paid a site visit and talked to some locals. I plan to work on him more later this month.

But of course, we can't do life without a foster dog. So we got Elvie.

She's a puppy who came into rescue after someone spotted her falling out of the back of a pickup truck and stopped on the side of the road to help her. The person driving the pickup never tried to find her again.

She could be a Dane/greyhound mix or she could just be a Dane. She's small bodied and long legged. She's clingy, but will cuddle with other dogs at times and actually leave people alone. She's very afraid of men, but will throw herself on them once she comes to trust them.

My brother in law dog sitting. Elvie is on the left with her laser eyes and Julie is on the right.

She also likes to chew on corners of wooden things, so every wooden thing in my house has its corners covered in bubble wrap and tape and she has to be crated if left alone.

She loves people and wants to go with them whenever possible. She came with me to work today and behaved very well and loved everyone who wasn't male.

She goes to her new home Sunday.