We are now a two person four dog household but there are a time when we were a no dog household. We'll call those the "dark times" because I certainly wouldn't want to return to them. Back when it was just me and Chris, he really wanted a dog. He'd grown up with them and couldn't wait until he had his own house so he could get his own four legged companion. He met me, who'd grown up in a house with cats and wasn't too fond of cats but was tolerant of the idea of a dog. We bought a house (a fixer upper in East Nashville our contractor told us would take 3 months to renovate). It took 9 months to renovate, thus delaying his dog owning dream even more. Finally we were in our house with huge fenced yard and ready to start looking for a dog. Little did we realize, East Nashville was home to lots of dogs needing forever homes.
We contacted Campchaso37206 (Campchaos37206.org) and then brought over a couple of dogs to our house (which I had spent days cleaning and organizing because even though I wasn't totally sold on dog ownership, I certainly didn't want our application to be denied). We met and decide to adopt a brown and white lab mix, then named Moxie. Her fosters named her that because the first day they had her she ran away and kept them chasing her for 6 hours. On the application was a question about who would get the dog should our romantic union collapse. I wrote in big letters, CHRIS. No way, I was ending up with this dog. A few days later, I was IN LOVE with her. I wanted to run over and change the name on that question to LINDSAY. This dog, still without a name, was MINE. Moxie eventually became Daisy. (and yes, she did run away the first day we had her but luckily she came back).
We liked dog ownership and had talked about getting another one at some point down the road. One day in April 2009, I was reading our neighborhood listserv about a doggie that needed a place to go or else he would have to go to Animal Control. He would be put down there because he was part pit. Chris and I volunteered to foster "Sting" for 10 days because we were headed to DisneyWorld but we figured that gave East Can (eastcan.org) ten days to help find him a new place. A few days into our "fostering" I came home to find our roommate at the time rolling on the floor with then-Sting saying "I love you little puppy." "We're not keeping that dog" I told her. Not only were we going on vacation, he was part-pit bull. Sting was the first pit bull I had ever met and he seemed sweet but I had heard things In a few days, I started doing research and asking friends about pit bulls. Turns out what I had been told maybe was wrong. Maybe they aren't vicious killers. So you can probably guess what happened next. Yup, we kept him and his name quickly because Colt. Colt is named after Texas Longhorn quarterback, Colt McCoy, and sometimes if the sun hits his fur just the right way, his fur looks burnt orange which makes this native Texas girl very happy.
After adopting two dogs, we thought we were done. After all, people who had more dogs than people were clearly crazy right? Oops. A few months later we fostered two puppies and we figured out that four seems to be a good number for our household. We've had about 7 fosters come and go.
Colt laughs at the idea that at one time, we thought he was going anywhere but right here.....
We'd already decided to keep him when he destroyed our living room
Daisy loves the dog park
Cupcake is our current foster.
Although I started this blog to talk about our adventures in fostering, I'll also talk about the issues we've had with Daisy and Colt and the many many hours we've spent in training with them as well as our entrance into the world of pitbull advocacy.
