echo the pedigree shelter dog

this boy echo from the pedigree dog food commercial changed my life. who remembers the commercial? it first aired during the westminster dog show. the boy's name is echo. he just broke my heart. if you will recall he is in the shelter and he does not know what it is he did to get there. and some people walk by and he jumps up to smile at them and they pass him by and keep going and he slumps back down confused again as to why he is in the pound. the narrator of the commercial says that for every dog that is adopted from a shelter, there is one who is not. oh damnit that broke my heart in pieces. i could not stop thinking about it and then there it was every single day saying how if you buy a bag of pedigree that the company would donate a dollar to a shelter or something. i did not know yet that 5 million healthy dogs and cats are killed in homeless shelters every year for nothing more than being homeless, but i knew i had to do something.

so i started out looking on petfinder and i wrote to some rescue groups in my area and asked how i could help. to be perfectly honest, i wanted to throw some money at the shelter and run like hell. i was not looking to get involved with dogs and cats, but maybe send some cases of papertowels, bags of cat litter and bleach or something. perhaps give a couple hundred dollars a year to the shelter from guyster, spark and slinky. the answers i got to my emails asking how i could help were not what i was expecting. they asked me to go and walk the dogs and make photos of them and email the photos to them so they could advertise the dogs. they asked me to maybe give a dog a bath or write up a list of the dogs personality traits and send with the photos, so they could get them the right homes. and the person who wrote was my friend christine from the rescue for the love of the underdog bully breed rescue and she wanted specific information about the pit bulls GULP!

so i signed up to go dog walking and i begged bill to come with me and he said no, the whole animal shelter thing was too traumatic and he did not think he could go and so i went alone and i was immediately addicted to the dogs and felt like i needed to be there all the time. the first time was really scary and the dogs were barking and jumping at the fence and i could not tell who was begging me to get them out or who was threatning to eat me alive because it was so loud. the place smelled bad and there was poop in the kennels and it was terrible but i felt like if i just could sit and talk with a dog or take one out for a walk it would make their day nicer. it did make their day nicer and it made my life full of purpose.

i walked all the dogs except for the pitbulls. i was just so scared. but there was this little white pit pup sitting nicely and just being quiet and looking at me walking by her kennel. she did not bark or jump up and try and get me to come over. she did not look scary or threatning to me at all so i gathered all my courage and i got her out on a leash and we walked and i FELL IN LOVE! her name was snow and she was deaf. and beautiful as a dog can be! spending time with snow changed my feelings about pit bulls. after a while she started playing and dancing around and getting comfortable and if i had not been afraid the sparky would be mean to her, i would have adopted her and brought her home. i am pretty sure that if a pit bull can be incited to violence...

it would be because sparky drove them to it! so i never ended up bringing one home furever but i did get sort of comfortable taking them potty, giving kisses and bellyrubs and treats, and getting kisses and love in return. it is a longer story than this blog will be, but we ended up building a rescue group and getting between 200-300 dogs to adoptive homes, foster homes or rescues.

i will get into it more later because i am exhausted and need sleep so badly and it is hard to sleep a whole night thru because now that i know what i know about animal shelters, i wake myself up brainstorming. i do just want to leave you with some pics of of sparky the menace, the one i am sure would drive a big dog to riot! i mean he trapped a bear in our back yard once when he was like 5 months old! he is way more extreme than what is required for badger hunting i am sure of it!
i know he does not look mean in this picture but i am pretty sure he is tired here from torturing the other dogs or something. and he is sleeping in my 40 dollar chiropractic pillow. i got the pillow for my migraines which the chiropractor thought was because my c1 and c2 were out all the time so i had to get this pillow. i never got to sleep on the pillow one single time because when i got home with it, sparky was a newborn 8 week old baby and he immediately claimed it for his baby bed.

here is a picture of sparky when the first brought him home. what a sweet sweet boy he was for a minute. and how in the world could i make him get out of my migraine pillow?