www.houltonanimalshelter.com
by Cathy Davis
Loss of pet breaks owner’s heart
When I first saw her, I fell in love with her face. A Beagle mix, she was brown and white with the most expressive eyes you ever saw. Her ears were too short to be pure Beagle and her head was too small for her body and her legs were tiny sticks compared to her overall proportions but to me she was beautiful. She was in the cage to the left of the Shelter door and I asked if I could take her home and show her to my family.
She was at least a year old, probably older, had had a litter of pups, and her family had decided to keep one of her pups and give her up. How they could do this is beyond me, but then there are a lot of animals given up for reasons I don’t understand.
I took her home with me and showed her to my husband. “She’s the ugliest dog I’ve ever seen,” he said. “No dogs” was his response to my imploring look of “please let me keep her.” I took her back to the shelter, disappointed and depressed.
The next day I was back. “Can I try again?” I asked, and took her home again. My father laughed, he thought she was just funny looking; my husband gave me the same lecture – no dogs.
Several days later, I’m running around setting up for a family function at the Littleton Snowmobile club and my husband is late and I’m starting to fume when he pulls in and jumps out, turns around and lifts out my birthday gift. He had gone to the shelter and adopted this dog for me.
I named her Shannon and she became my constant companion, following me everywhere. She was housebroken, had good manners, and only chewed one of my belongings before being told, ‘no, it’s only yours if we hand it to you’ and from there on she never touched anything unless we said “this is for you Shannon.”
Her one downfall was the Beagle in her. Beagles are known for several traits – one, they listen to nothing or no one – they follow their noses. When the nose is engaged, the ears are turned off. I can remember many occasions when Shannon would take off across the back field, my father chasing her furiously and yelling at her, and Shannon, nose to the ground, was totally deaf to his calls.
I enrolled her in obedience school. We both flunked out. She was too much a social butterfly, more concerned about what all the other dogs were doing than in making any kind of attempt to learn to sit, stay, or come when called. Ninety percent of her failure was mine, she wasn’t stupid, she’d have learned if I’d have been persistent.
Another trait of a Beagle is that they will eat themselves to death if you let them. I didn’t know this so when she came home and ate like she hadn’t had a meal in a month, I thought she had been deprived at her previous home. The more she ate, the more I gave her. She ended up 20 pounds overweight before I realized what was going on. I spent the next 12 years trying to get five pounds off her as her skinny legs were not built to carry the extra weight.
Shannon adored me, everybody else in the house, and everybody else in the family. She loved kids, cats, other dogs. I never once heard that dog growl.
Shannon was pretty much fearless except for turkeys, that dog was terrified of turkeys. If there was a turkey in the back yard and it was quiet, Shannon was fine, but if the turkey gobbled, she would find a hole the size of a quarter and squeeze through it, heading up the road to get as far away as possible.
Over the years Shannon developed cataracts, but following her Beagle nose, was able to get around quite nicely. Then, over the New Year’s holidays, she just shut down. She stopped eating, her legs and feet started to swell, and straight to the Vet she went. Shannon was in full blown heart failure.
I lost my precious Shannon Monday night. She died in my arms, my tears falling on her beautiful soft body. My heart is broken, but there are so many wonderful memories to keep Shannon alive for me in so many ways. I can still hear her at night, walking across the floor to flop down in front of me. I still reach down to pet her. I still look behind me to make sure I don’t trip over her in the kitchen. I still have her bed on the living room floor and her food in the cupboard. There will never be another dog in my life like Shannon, I will miss her always.
