The rest of the story.

We brought Minnie home on Sept 8 of last year.

We loved her immediately. She was so sweet and calm and she just wants to be by your side all the time. A real snuggler! Maxx however, was not so sure.

Maxx has always been a little reactive towards other dogs, so we took introductions slowly. Separate rooms, baby gates, tethers, walks together- all seemed like great get to know you ideas. Unfortunately, we made a few mistakes and had two separate incidents that sent us to the emergency vet for stitches. Luckily only one dog was hurt each time and not both- it was awful and scary.

After the first incident I started looking for a trainer to help us get them together but the guy I talked to told me that he would hang them on a prong collar at any sign of aggression and if that didn’t work maybe they would need to be put down. That’s not happening.

After the second incident, we tearfully signed Minnie back up with the Rescue where we got her and signed up to foster her while we tried to find her a new home through adoption fairs. This really tore us apart as we already loved her so, but we didn’t feel it was fair to either one of the dogs since they have limited freedom due to a rotation schedule, and we don’t want either one of them to get hurt again.

We took Minnie to a three adoption fairs and she had some interest but I was really questioning the Rescue people’s judgement. They seemed more interested in the adoption fee they would get for her rather than actually finding Minnie the perfect home. The first home they wanted to place her in had two small children and we didn’t think this was a good idea since she had been sent away from a home with small kids. Fortunately these people decided they weren’t ready for a new dog since their last dog had just passed away. I was relieved because I didn’t think it was the right place for her.  We took her to a few more fairs but then quit over the holidays due to it just being too sad and stressful.

We were required to bring her to two fairs a month so we had planned to take her back at the end of January. We thought we would keep working with the dogs to see if we could work things out and that was fine with them, they said take all the time you need.. until their policies changed.

The Rescue next called saying they had two perfect applications for Minnie and could we bring her in? We live only a few blocks away from the rescue and my husband works from home so we said call anytime and we’ll bring her over to meet the people, but they never called. When we called them they were evasive about the potential adopters advising us to bring her to the fair, which they had started having at the mall instead of the local pet supply store and I was not interested in taking her there. It is my feeling that people who really want to adopt a dog would go out of their way to go to a pet supply store to go to an adoption fair but at the mall any idiot walking by could decide maybe it was time for a dog. That is not who I wanted adopting her and I was already questioning the Rescue’s judgement. As I kept telling people who asked, we did not want to get rid of her we wanted to find her a new home. So just anybody wouldn’t do.

Then they demanded we return her as she was their property and they were shutting down their fostering program and would be keeping all the dogs in kennels on site. They had lied to us, there were no potential adopters, they had made them up so we would bring her in because they knew we would not take her there to be kept in a cage. To me this sounded ridiculous and suspicious. I follow many rescue groups and people who foster on blogs and the goal is always to get a dog into a home- who would shut down a successful fostering program?

We said no, we would not return her to be kept in a cage when she had a perfectly fine home to stay in.

So we paid to adopt her again.