A Third Dog

Things have gotten settled enough in the new house that we are now actively looking for a third dog. By this I mean that this weekend we visited three different shelters and met four different dogs. None of them were the right dog for us, which is in some ways hard. But I have learned that we have the right to be picky.

So what are we looking for?

• C wants a Lab or Lab mix of some sort. This works for me. Larry & June are 25lbs and 35lbs respectively, and I would like a larger dog- 60-70lbs.
• We do not want a puppy. Two-three years old is probably a great target, though up to six is a strong possibility, given that Larry does not always respond well to puppy energy.
• We want a dog that will play with Larry, at least some of the time. Larry loves to play, and June, though younger than him, does not want to play as often as he does.
• We want a dog that is otherwise calm. Again, Larry is high strung. He feeds off of (and does not always respond well to) the energy of other dogs. We do not need (or want) a perpetual barking machine.
• No resource guarding. Larry has started doing some resource guarding (mostly of “his space” on the bed), and it makes it hard for Junebug. She does not want to walk past him to get to her spot on the bed. He also guards the “resource” of people in the house. Nothing upsets him more than people leaving, not even people coming in.
• The new dog has to be able to get along with both Larry and Junebug. Play with Larry is good. Not terrorize Junebug is even more important.
• The new dog has to be good with kids. Besides Pop Tart and her friends, we are still a foster home. Whatever dog we get has to be okay with kids. (No, we would never leave a child who was new to our home alone with any of the dogs, but this is still a concern.)
• We want a dog that is interested in us. It may seem from the previous list that our goal is to get Larry his own dog, but that is not really true. We enjoyed having three dogs when we had the Howie Monster, and we want to get back to that. We do not need a dog that follows us around the house, but we do want a dog that is interested in us.

With the exception of the last three, none of these are hard and fast. We met a very large Shepherd/Rottie mix this weekend, a medium sized Border Collie/Shepherd mix, and a large Coonhound this weekend. We also spent a little bit of time with a Chihuahua/Papillion (okay, that was never going to happen, but we like doggies, and she was all alone, so we sat with her).

For the record, in order to adopt a Lab in the Seattle area, you apparently have to arrive at the shelter within 30 minutes of it opening, on the day the dog becomes available for adoption. Or at least, not think they will make it until Saturday or Sunday afternoon. (Seriously, all three of the shelters we visited this weekend had Lab mixes we were interested in on their websites when we left our house. None of them were available by the time we got to the shelter.)

We are not set on a shelter. There are a number of reputable rescues in the Seattle area, and it might be that we go through one of those. The truth is, we do not know for certain where our new dog will come from. We do not know what our new dog will look like. All we know is that we will know when we meet our dog. We always have.