April Birthdays

Cali and Duke 

 Our dogs Duke (right) and Cali turn 9 this month. It's hard to believe even they, being the youngest of our dogs, are seniors. It doesn't seem like that long ago when we found them. I remember it well. It was a cold January day in 2003. We made a trip up to our ranch taking our two dogs Einstein and Ellie with us. Our property is way out in the country. The mile long, dead end gravel road that leads to it has only a few scattered houses along the way. (Dead end roads are notorious for people dumping pets.) Some of the houses (like ours) are just weekend houses. As we pass the house just before you get to ours, we noticed 2 small red dogs huddled together on our neighbor's porch. Our neighbors were not there and we knew these dogs weren't theirs. We immediately thought "uh-oh...what are those dogs doing there?" We went ahead to the house & let our dogs out of the truck. We went for a walk around the property and as we returned to the house, here comes the two red dogs. We put our dogs inside the house. Cali came up first wagging her tail. Duke followed behind, cowering and ran under the porch only sticking his head out periodically. They were about nine months old, hungry and scared. Both apparently from the same litter. Duke had an injury to his head and back end but other than that they seemed pretty healthy. After petting them and giving them something to eat, we let our dogs out to meet them. Ellie started to chase them off but we told her to stop and she obliged. They did their dog greetings and there was no problem. We figured someone must have dumped them off on our road and they went to the first house they saw (where other dogs didn't chase them off). We don't know how long they had been there. We usually only went on weekends. We couldn't leave them there. We had to take them back home to the city with us!


Once we got them in the truck and then back home, we noticed that they did not have much experience traveling in a vehicle, had ever been inside a house (everything was new and scary!) and were not used to the city life. They were country dogs. We took them to the veterinarian right away to get checked out, their shots and they got spayed and neutered. The original plan was to find them a home as we already had two dogs. Well, it didn't take long at all and that plan went out the window. We fell in love with them and couldn't give them away! They settled into the indoor-city-life just fine!

Chloe

Chloe turns 14 this month. She was 3 years old when we adopted her from our veterinary clinic. They had several cats that were needing homes and Chloe (formerly known as Ethel) caught my eye. She came from a home that had too many cats. They took her out the cage for me to hold and that was that. She found her new home!.