Posts tagged jetty

Ever since Mike and I moved in together (November 2008), I’ve been wanting a small dog, since we live in an apartment. At the beginning of this year we actively started looking for a dog to bring into our home. Mike was being scheduled more night shifts and he didn’t want me to get too lonely while he was working.

We both knew that we wanted to adopt a dog from a shelter or rescue, for two reasons. One, because dogs in pet stores tend to be incredibly expensive and two, the dogs sold in pet stores typically come from puppy mills, cruel facilities that breed dogs in inhumane conditions. Not only did we not want to support any organization that mistreats animals for their own profit, but the puppies that come out of those establishments often have multiple health problems due to rampant inbreeding.

We visited a few rescues and shelters, and finally one rainy Saturday morning we drove out to the Orange County Animal Shelter to look at their dogs. The shelter is not a no-kill shelter, which was one reason we wanted to go there. We wanted to try and give a dog a home before it was slaughtered. Once we got there, I was overwhelmed by all of the faces of the dogs looking back at me. Since it had been raining, they were all wet and pathetic looking, many of them were shivering and bedraggled looking. Jetty was one of them.
(more…)