Pet Talk

by Cathy Davis
    My dad is a 5-foot, 11-inches, 190-pound retired contractor. He has raised walls, carried beams, walked on roofs, fallen off roofs, run heavy equipment, mastered power tools and has run his own business. He is a “man’s man” who golfs, fishes, served in the Army, loves football and a good steak. That’s why I have to laugh right out loud when my big strong he-man father talks baby-talk to my dog. 
    “You’re a bad dog Scruffy” I hear him saying in this squeaky little baby talk voice, “bad dog” and then Scruffy jumps up on grampy’s lap, flips himself over so he’s resting in the crook of his arm like a baby, and grampy rubs his belly.
    Pets do this to us, they turn us into mush, they make us act silly, they get away with things our kids would never have gotten away with. Imagine if your son Joey chewed the end of your coffee table! At the very least he’d have gotten a time-out, but Scruffy, he just gets the baby-talk scolding “bad boy Scruffy” you hear, and he looks at you like “ah, I know you love me and I know you don’t mean it” and off he goes to grab a toy to bring to you to throw for him.
    My dog has chewed my two best and favorite pair of shoes, the pine cone basket that I have for decoration on my fireplace hearth, the ends of my handcrafted blanket chest, he has dumped the bathroom garbage and then proceeded to chew everything in it, dragging it down the hall, into the living room, and finally settling in to comfortably destroy empty cardboard rolls in his favorite spot on the carpet.  He has chewed the rungs of my foot stool, he has jumped on the cupboard and eaten my sister-in-laws beautiful princess birthday cake, he has devoured an entire pound of Houlton Farms Dairy Butter (can’t blame him there, it is the best in the world), and managed to steal my father’s chocolates, eat them, and survive. He must have the stomach of a goat.
    But my dog makes up for all of this because he is a sweet, funny, gentle little man who will look at you with big brown eyes, raise one eyebrow, tilt his head just right, jump up in your lap and curl up to comfort you if you’ve had a bad day. He doesn’t bark, or beg at the table, he doesn’t mess in the house, and although he sometimes terrorizes the cats with a game of “chase”, he is very gentle with them and they adore him.
    Scruffy is a Shelter rescue. I tell you this story because Shelter dogs make wonderful pets but they do sometimes come with “issues” and we don’t know what they are at the Shelter because they are not in a home environment.  Sometimes a new family will take a pet home and a week or two later call to see if they can bring him back. It doesn’t always work out, not every pet fits into every household, and I want to make sure that you don’t feel bad as an adopter if you have to return a pet to the Shelter.
    We would rather that you do that, than try to make a pet “fit” your lifestyle. We would rather that you return a pet than try to re-home it yourself, as we then lose that “chain of ownership” and if Rover happens to get loose and come back to the Shelter, we might have a hard time returning him to the owner if he’s been through several homes. 
    We would rather you return a pet than abandon him, and although this doesn’t happen often, it has happened, and that’s just not how things should work out.
    The return policy does have some common sense rules. If you adopt from the shelter and four years later you are moving and can’t take the pet with you, that is not a return, that is an owner animal issue that we can help you with in many ways, connect you with folks looking to adopt, etc., but that’s not a return. A return is when you take Rover home and after two or three days you realize he’s just not going to stop attacking your other dog or your cats, you realize that maybe Rover shouldn’t be around cats, or other dogs, and then you call and ask if you can bring him back, and yes, the shelter will take him back.
    A return is when you adopt your first cat ever and realize after several days that you, or one of your kids, is highly allergic.  
    So please don’t feel bad if it doesn’t work out. It almost always does but maybe one out of 50 adoptions just isn’t the right fit. You are not a bad person, the animal is not a bad animal, it’s just not the perfect match for either of you.
    If you are interested in adopting, please be sure to call the Shelter, check facebook, check our web page, or check PetFinder.com to see what is available for adoption.
    If you would just like to help us take care of the animals until they find a new home, we are still in desperate need of financial assistance. You may make a donation online, mail us a check, buy a lunch next week during the box-lunch fundraiser, or host a fund-raiser of your own.
    Many thanks to the students and staff of Southside School who recently hosted a fundraiser for Houlton Humane and presented us with $300 to help toward expenses. That will pay a lot of vet bills or buy a lot of cat litter and we really appreciate it!