If you are a friend of mine on facebook, you might know that we were looking for a new home for our dog, Reggie. The reasons for that were just the fact that with Gemma around and the baby on the way, he is getting more and more neglected, as well as yelled at for reasons he can't help. I don't want Gemma and this baby to grow up learning that yelling at the dog (or throwing things here and there at the dog) is okay. Pets are to be respected and loved. What a hippocrite, right? Exactly. That's why I felt he needed to go.
We bought Reggie from a breeder in Regina almost 3 years ago. After a lot of research, we decided on a Papillon as they had the size, temperament, and the looks that we were looking for. They are also ridiculously smart. Plus a bonus is that they shed very little due to only having a single coat.
One of my happiest memories is picking him up from the airport. Poor little guy, shaking and so scared from the flight over. He immediately attached himself on to me and cuddles on my lap as we drove home. I was in love with him instantly.
He is my son, my firstborn, i like to call him. I know he is only a dog, but to us he has been much more. We took him on all vacations. He always went with us everywhere unless it was too hot or too cold to sit in the car for very long.
Let me share an intimate childhood tidbit with you. I grew up in a home where pets were not respected at all. in fact, i don't know why we ever had them. For the few years my dad lived with us after we moved to canada, we had three dogs. A huskey named Candy, a toy poodle cross named Happy, and a rottweiler cross named Trident. My dad bought me Candy for maybe my 10th birthday. I never asked for a dog, but that's what i got. He built a fenced off area in our back yard and that's where she lived. She was fed when we remembered and watered when we remembered, which was not often. She was never walked and often dug a hole under the fence to escape. In the winter she probably ate snow to survive and in the summer whatever poor mouse happened to creep inside her fence. She was completely neglected. Yet, she lived for 10+ years in that misery. I was so young i didn't know how to take care of a dog and no one taught me how. In fact, i found it annoying when someone would say to me that i should go give the dog some water. It was another chore for me that i didn't want to do.
A year after we got Candy, we got Happy, the small toy poodle cross. My dad, not having a clue as to how to train her, got fed up with her as she peed and pooped all over the house. She peed on my bed once and i was so angry i threw her little body down the stairs and broke her leg. We never took her to the vet and so all her life she had an atrophied back leg as she would not walk on it. My dad eventually threw her outside to live - on the deck - through every season, including the -40 winters of northern alberta. She was unrecognizable, covered in mats, dirty, and just dying for any and all attention. Finally, my aunt and uncle took her to their home and trained and raised her. She lived with them for many years until she was lost while being dog-sat by my cousin.
We only had Trident for a short while. After many just mere months, she was sent off to my aunt and uncle's gas station about an hour away to keep watch. But while she lived with us, she shared the same fate as Candy as they lived together in the fenced area.
When Jesse and I talked about getting a dog for ourselves, for me it was a way of undoing all the bad that i've done to my previous dogs. To this day, when i look back, i have so much guilt about how those dogs lived while under "my" care.
Well, this single-coated dog never got the genetic memo and in fact has a double coat, which means he sheds. more than he should. At first, it didn't bug me much, but then once i started seeing Gemma pull out dog hair from her mouth constantly, it became an issue. Even though i try to vacuum at least three times a week, it seemed the dog hair was everywhere, all the time. Plus, my mom not being a dog person herself, was always nagging me to get rid of the dog "for the health of the baby". Finally i got fed up with the hair and the nagging and convinced Jesse we needed to let him go where he would be loved more. More than anything, it was important to me that Gemma grow up not abusing animals as i did. I didn't want her to learn these bad things from me.
So after much thought and arguing, we decided to find a new home for Reggie. I talked to a few ladies at my work who love dogs and one of them agreed to talk to her family yesterday. I cried all night thinking about how i failed yet again to love a dog and how poor Reggie had to suffer because of me. I am his family and i was abandoning him.
So i talked to my mom and asked her to stop saying "this dog has got to go". It turns out she has plenty of guilt of her own about the dogs in the past and she felt just the way i did about the way he was being treated right now. We talked long and decided we would change for the sake of this poor innocent dog, who did nothing wrong. We decided to keep his hair supershort so that we wouldn't notice it everywhere as much. We decided no matter what, he is our responsibility and it is our duty to love him.
Sorry for the novel. I don't know why but i felt i wanted to write this in here.
