Hope Is Weird

If you haven't met our dog Hope, she can be a little strange. We excuse her oddities because we know she had a rough life before she came to live in the comfort of the Luce household. It's kind of long, but here's the story of how she came to live with us:

When I first saw Hope at the shelter in the summer of 2005, she was in the holding area (not available for adoption) nursing a litter of puppies. My friend JoAnna and I were just looking through the holding area to see what dogs would soon be "moving up" to the dog adopt area. When we got to Hope's kennel and saw those sad hound eyes, I immediately fell in love with her. Then we walked around to the back side of her kennel and saw her information card, which said HEARTWORM POSITIVE across the bottom. My heart dropped and I almost burst into tears, because we knew that a positive heartworm test meant that she would be euthanized as soon as her puppies were weaned. Treating for heartworms is expensive, and the shelter just doesn't have the funds to do it. Since Chad and I hadn't had a foster dog in a while, I went straight home and told Chad that I'd found our next rescue. When I told him that she was heartworm positive, he of course asked who was going to pay for her treatment, to which I replied, "Uh...that would be us." Chad wasn't exactly sure this was a good idea, so I dropped the issue for the time being, since I knew I had a few more weeks to work on him while she was weaning her pups.

For the next couple of months, every weekend when I was at the shelter I would go visit Hope, who was actually named Shelly at the time. On each visit, I would tell her that I was going to name her Hope because I hoped she would survive her heartworm treatment and find a wonderful home. One weekend my dad was visiting and came with me to the shelter, and when I took him back to the holding area to see Hope, I'll never forget him saying, "That's the saddest dog I've ever seen in my life."

So by August, Chad had agreed that we could foster her, and on August 22, 2005, we finally brought Hope home. Immediately we noticed the many scars, emotional and physical, that this sweet little girl had. She cowered pretty much every time you wanted her to come to you, and if you used a stern voice at all she would just freeze in terror. She had big chunks of flesh gone from both ears and a wicked scar around the knee of her back leg. Not only had her previous owners clearly neglected her--evidenced by the fact that she hadn't been spayed or put on heartworm preventative--but it appeared that they had mistreated her as well.

After a few days of getting her settled, we took her to the vet to start her heartworm treatment. She stayed at the vet's office for 2 days while they injected her with arsenic, and then she got to come home for the 30 day resting period that follows. During that time, she had to be kenneled while we were gone and could only go outside on a chain so that she wasn't able run around. If her heart rate were to go up while her body was killing off the heartworms, the decomposing worms might get pumped through her veins too quickly, causing a dangerous clot (gross, I know). During her 30 days on a chain, we noticed how agile and deftly she moved while tethered (as opposed to Steeler and Celtic, who would manage to get themselves tangled in about 30 seconds), and we decided that she must have spent much of her previous life tied to one. In fact, as we inspected the scar on her back leg more closely, we realized that it looked like the indentations of a rope or a chain that had dug into her skin after a particularly bad entanglement.

Although it was a big of a struggle to keep Hope subdued for 30 days, at the end of the month she went back to the vet for a final injection, and was able to come home and be a normal dog. Housebreaking went pretty well considering her age (which was estimated at 5-7, even though now we think she's a little younger), and her other house manners were remarkably good for a dog who'd lived her whole life outside. The boys seemed to really like her, more so than most of the other fosters we'd had over the years. We started actively looking for a permanent home for her, and a few weeks later we took her to visit a potential family. They seemed to really like her, but I wasn't too sure about them. I cried the entire way home from their house because I didn't want to let her go. Thankfully, the family decided to get a puppy instead.

Many more weeks went by without anyone showing much interest in Hope. Chad and I talked a lot about how much we loved her, and discussed the idea of keeping her, but we realized that if we adopted Hope there was no way we could ever foster again, because 4 dogs would just be too many. Then sometime in early December, a really nice couple came over to meet her as a potential playmate for their Lab. We really liked them and we took Hope over to meet their dog later that week. The dogs seemed to get along, the couple was really nice, and Hope didn't even seem to notice their cat who was perched up on the furniture. We left her there for the afternoon, thinking that we'd finally found the perfect home, and decided that if this perfect family fell through, she would definitely become our dog. A few hours later they called and said that once their cat got up to move, Hope started chasing him, and they couldn't get her to stop. As much as I had liked them, I was secretly so happy! I didn't even care that we'd never be able to foster again because we loved her so much and she fit so perfectly into our family. A few weeks later, we signed the adoption papers and she officially became Hope Luce. :)

Now I actually started this post because I was going to tell a story about Hope's weirdness, but clearly this has gotten way too long, so tune in for her weirdo story tomorrow.