Honestly, it was a miracle that he hadn’t just been put down. At each stop, his paperwork indicated that the previous owner couldn’t handle his bad habits (many of which were prime indicators of abuse at the hands of his first owners) and eventually sent him packing. In his 6 years of life he had been given up for adoption four times and had spent time in shelters across the country, from Georgia to Michigan to Colorado. In searching through his paperwork for a number to call, I discovered the extent of his sad history. About two weeks after I acquired him, he bit me, deep enough that I probably should have gotten a shot, the first time I had ever been bitten by a dog, which caused me to seriously rethink our arrangement. I was accustomed to training a puppy to behave and Ali came with a set of bad habits that normally would have been broken long before. I took him home a couple of days later and we became fast friends. It came as quite a shock to all of us, then, when Ali, upon entering the room, promptly jumped up in my lap and began licking my face. Before leaving to fetch Ali, she warned me that he wasn’t a cuddly sort of dog so I shouldn’t expect a warm welcome. She informed me that he had been given up numerous times, had probably been abused at some point along the line, and that he was not considered an overly “friendly” dog. I made the drive out to meet the owner of the clinic where Ali was being housed. Through a rescue organization I found Ali, a 6 year-old Sheltie who had recently been given up for adoption. I didn’t have the time to housebreak a puppy and the space wasn’t big enough for a large dog so my search criteria, a small to midsized dog that was housebroken, wasn’t on death’s door, and wouldn’t be embarrassing to walk around the neighborhood with, was fairly limiting.
I found an apartment, got the first in a long line of menial jobs that would come nowhere near to paying off my student loans, and lasted less than six weeks before I started searching for a canine companion.
The plan was to A.) Find an apartment B.) Get a job C.) Wait six months and then get a dog. In December of 2005 I moved back to the Dallas-Fort Worth area, fresh off of four (and a half) years of college and ready to take on the world.
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