When my parents came to visit they brought their new dog Lucy with them, which the girls loved. It also reminded us of our promise to get a dog when we had our own house. However, we planned to have a yard and fence first, and had some bills come up which delayed those plans. As a result, we hadn't so much as gone and looked at dogs. That changed when my parents took Lucy back home. Only days after they left, we headed to the local humane society to see what they had as far as labs - since we wanted a family dog that could potentially be trained to hunt. They had so many labs, but most of them were really young and we were worried that they wouldn't do well on the farm without a lot more training than we had time to provide right at first. We ended up looking at a young male black lab, a couple of mixed breed dogs that were nice, and then a pair of labs that were bonded and had to be adopted together.
The mix of them needing to go together and the fact that the male lab was already 8 meant they had been at the shelter for a couple of months already and hardly been looked at. They were so sweet that we had a hard time not dwelling on them the next few days while we tried to find time between swim lessons and farm work to go back and look at them closer.
We went back on July 26th with Steve's Dad to look at them since Ray has never met a dog he didn't make friends with. We learned that they had lived on a farm somewhere in the valley and when the family moved away they surrendered the dogs in May. The shelter then tried to split the dogs up, but the female stopped eating and they eventually agreed the dogs had to stay together, but as a result the 3 year old female was under weight. We took them out and they were so sweet. So, we filled out our adoption papers and brought them home!
Their names were Tally and Whacker, because someone thought they were funny. After Steve making fun of me for not knowing what a "tallywhacker" was, we changed their names to Cally and Tracker. Too bad Ellie remembers everything and tells everyone what their names used to be, which kind of defeats the purpose of changing their names to begin with...
Anyway, they were happy to be out of the shelter. They stayed under Steve's parents' shed for a couple of nights of rain storms until we could get a kennel built and then they came across to our house.
They loved moving pipe with Steve and you have never seen anything as funny as watching two shelter dogs bound and leap into fields of ripening grain. They were out of shape, but our initial vet visit that verified we just needed to put weight on Cally, and we thought all was well.
Then about a week later Cally got hit by a four-wheeler coming down the road. Apparently she heard the four-wheeler and got excited and ran out into the road. She now stays away from the road, but we have to kennel the dogs regularly as we work on getting a fence in because Tracker likes to cross the road all the time and we were lucky we didn't lose Cally. It took several weeks, but I don't even notice any difference in her gate anymore as she runs and jumps. Cally loves to jump on her hind feet when she gets excited. We are so grateful she survived and healed up completely.
Now the dogs love when we go for family walks down the lane to a low spot where our neighbor's over-watered field drains and creates a pond. Tracker loves to splash and jump in the water. Cally loves to eat plants - they will eat green beans, peas, apples, and under-ripe squash that we have learned so far...
Cally also loves playing fetch with a ball and both dogs go nuts attacking a sprinkler. Oh, and Cally loves to chew on and destroy things like plastic pools... When we got some sod laid down in our yard a few weeks ago we also learned how much Tracker loves to roll in the grass. They're good dogs, and we are loving having them. Tracker looks and acts like a lab, but Cally is small and her face is so smiley that we think she has some beagle in her. We'll feel even better when our fence is built and they aren't so penned up. But we are all happy to have our dogs, even me surprisingly. I have to admit I was not excited at all to get the dogs, but I spent part of their first night out in the shed with them through the rain storm, and they are definitely my dogs and I have zero regrets about getting them!
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