So, we adopted Scooby in June 2004 and Betty in August (?) 2004. They are not blood related (we get asked that a lot) and Scooby is about 6 (?) months older than Betty.
Anyway, one day in early 2004, I was reading the Sunday newspaper. I took a look at the Pets for Sale section in the classifieds and saw that someone was selling a beagle. I wanted to call about that dog but I never did. I didn’t want to call on Sunday because people are funny about Sundays. I didn’t want to call during the day because I was at work, didn’t want to call at night because what if they were eating dinner? And then, darn, it was too late to call. If I’d been braver we might have an entirely different dog.
But instead I found petfinder.com and found a rescue group near us. I don’t really remember how we decided upon beagles as a breed, but this rescue group had a beagle. Beagle mix, actually. When I spoke to the lady who ran the rescue group, she repeated herself multiple times that this dog was only a beagle mix (which we could tell just by his record on Petfinder).
So Gene and I went to the vet’s office that the rescue group housed their rehoming effort out of and saw the dog – Scooby. We couldn’t get the attention of the lady who ran the rescue so we looked at the other dogs she had that day. She had a pen of four or five younger dogs and we saw one of those we liked. While we were admiring the other dog, I saw another interested party take Scooby out of his pen and take him for a walk around the grassy lot. A few minutes later I looked back and Scooby was back in his pen and the other interested parties were gone 🙁 They had rejected him. Remembering that makes me sad even today. Not that I would have wanted these other people to decide on Scooby, but that someone rejected my dog. Jerks. We took Scooby to Petsmart before we went home and he was so timid that I had to put him in a shopping cart to get him around the store.
Everything was grand with Scooby, although my heart broke every time I had to put him in his kennel (a travel kennel – we didn’t know any better, although of course we do now). And I have written before about going completely crazy the first time I had to take him to the vet’s office to be boarded (here’s a clue: if you rescue a dog, especially an anxious one, don’t take him to a crappy kennel in the first month).
But, something was missing. We found that something after owning Scooby for about two months. Her name was Betty and she was gorgeous. We loaded up Scooby in my car and drove to the kennel (the rescue group had moved its home base). The lady who ran the rescue group recognized us and Scooby and showed us Betty, apologizing for her not having a collar (“one of the other dogs ate it off her” – uh huh, one of the other dogs!). So we did the same thing again and took her to Petsmart (in the travel kennel since she didn’t have a collar and hadn’t had her rabies vaccination yet).
And then we all went home and it all was like it was supposed to be. And six years later, the two of them run the house.