The dogs, cats, birds, rats, rabbits, and other animals that we surround ourselves with are more than just companions. For many, a beloved animal is a member of the family. But some animals don’t always get to live in their forever home, at least not at first. Here in the Midwest, helpless beagles end up abandoned, injured, and neglected. Next week, I will be joining an army of car journalists and rescue organizations to give two dozen dogs new homes across the country in the Pacific Northwest. This is Operation Frodo, and it might be the most heartwarming thing you’ll read all week.
The Midwest has a growing problem that’s hiding in plain sight. The beagle is adored by millions of people all over the world for its cute looks, friendly attitude, and playful nature. Beagles also have an exceptional ability to track other animals by scent, making them a favorite of hunters. You’d think that nobody would want to cause harm to such a lovely creature, but there’s a dark side to America’s adoration of beagles.
Here in the Midwest, beagles are pumped out of puppy mills, bred for medical research, and used for hunting. Thousands of these dogs end up in tragic situations. When hunters are done for a season, sometimes they abandon their beagles. Meanwhile, the hundreds of dogs flowing in from puppy mills aren’t always sold, and the ones that are not often get abandoned. Other dogs live in dire conditions in research facilities, are used for medical experimentation, or are disposed of when they’re no longer productive breeders. To give you an example of what it’s like out here, last month, ABC News Nightline reported on a testing facility in Wisconsin that activists have been trying to free thousands of dogs from for a decade:
As ABC 7 Eyewitness News reported last month, Big Dog Ranch Rescue and the Center for a Humane Economy purchased 1,500 beagles from the facility. Thankfully, over 700 people have already stepped up to the plate to adopt those dogs, and the organizations believe they will be able to find those animals fitting homes.
Operation Frodo
There are many other beagles out here in the Midwest who are also looking for their own forever homes. Many of those beagles will be able to find their forever homes thanks to an army of car journalists, rescue organizations, and cars graciously loaned by automakers.
Back in 2021, auto journalist Nik Miles, whose work can be seen on NBC Sports, WPIX, KTLA, Fox5, and WGN, had a hole in his life after his own beagle, Joey, passed. As Nik searched for a new friend, he discovered the Bassett and Beagle Rescue of the Heartland (BBRH), which had a lovely beagle named Frodo, who needed a new home.
Coincidentally, Nik’s other dogs, like Samwise, were also named after characters from the Lord Of The Rings. Taking it as fate, Nik decided to bring Frodo home. Only, there was just one problem, as Frodo was in Nebraska while Nik was in Oregon. So, he hatched an idea to embark on an epic quest, just like in the Lord Of The Rings, to get Frodo to Portland. I will hand Nik the mic here to tell the rest of the story:
My husband Lowell and I saw the need after bringing him home. What started as one rescue quickly became something much bigger. During that first journey, we faced some of the harshest conditions imaginable — minus 70-degree wind chills in Wyoming, closed highways, dangerous ice, and a tragic moment when an ambulance that had passed us was later struck by a truck, resulting in the loss of two paramedics. That trip changed us forever and revealed just how urgent the rescue crisis had become across the Midwest. The Midwest faces a growing problem with abandoned hunting dogs, overcrowded shelters, puppy mills, and dogs released from testing facilities. Operation Frodo was created to help move dogs from overcrowded Midwest rescues to loving homes and rescue organizations on the West Coast, where adoption demand is higher and more resources are available.
Today, Operation Frodo has grown into a multi-state rescue mission involving volunteers, journalists, rescue organizations, and automakers donating vehicles for these life-saving journeys. This year’s rescue convoy includes the Cadillac Escalade IQ, Kia EV9, Hyundai IONIQ 9, and Lucid Gravity — quiet, climate-controlled electric vehicles perfectly suited for transporting rescue dogs safely and comfortably across long distances. Everything begins with Basset and Beagle Rescue of the Heartland, the core Midwest rescue partner that gathers dogs from across the region and coordinates many of the transfers. From there, dogs are transported to partner rescues, including Cascade Beagle Rescue in Oregon, Seattle Beagle Rescue, and Utah Beagle Rescue, where many find permanent homes and second chances.
In that first Operation Frodo in 2022, Nik, his partner Lowell, and journalist Javier Mota rescued four dogs. The next year, Operation Frodo expanded exponentially, with Ford, Hyundai, Nissan, and Subaru all providing vehicles for the growing number of journalists and the 12 dogs they rescued. The team then rescued seven more dogs in that same year. Since Operation Frodo began and had grown into an impressive beast of its own, a total of around 100 beagles had been rescued from the Midwest and delivered to the Cascade Beagle Rescue in Oregon, the Seattle Beagle Rescue, and the Utah Beagle Rescue.
Operation Frodo is not Nik’s only grand plan to save as many animals as possible. In 2018, he also founded Animal Rescue Rigs, a 501(c)(3) charity non-profit whose mission is to customize vehicles to be specially prepared to save animals from natural disasters. The first rig, a 2018 Nissan Titan XD Gas PRO-4X called ‘Paws One,’ has all kinds of off-road gear, built-in animal crates, and even a deployable inflatable boat for search and rescue operators.
This year, the Autopian is honored to take part in this important mission.
This summer’s Operation Frodo is special, too, as every vehicle provided by an automaker is an EV. Tomorrow, I will drive a Hyundai Ioniq 9 from my home in Northern Illinois to Omaha, Nebraska. Then, on Sunday, Operation Frodo will officially kick off as our all-EV convoy marches west.
The volunteer journalists won’t just be driving cars, either. We’ll be stewards for the rescue animals and take care of their every need. They will even be sleeping in hotel rooms with us. Nik has already kicked off his coverage of Operation Frodo, which you can check out by clicking here. Amusingly, the Ioniq 9 featured in that broadcast is on its way to my apartment.
The entire journey will take four days and cover 1,720 miles of America. Add on the 469 miles that I will drive just to get to the start point, and I’ll be covering 2,189 miles before flying home on Thursday. Given that I recently drove our Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet about 4,000 miles in one week, I’m so ready for this.
You can help the Operation Frodo mission out by visiting the Animal Rescue Rigs website, as well as the named rescues in this story. You can also follow the Operation Frodo journey on social media. This year, we’ll be using “#FrodoEV26” on our posts. As for me, you can expect daily updates beginning on Monday.
Again, I am so thankful and honored to be a part of this journey. It’s more than just driving cars, but making a difference in the lives of animals that have been injured, abandoned, or otherwise discarded. It’s bringing smiles to faces and, maybe, I’ll end up changing my own life along the way. Being able to drive the hottest EVs on sale right now is only the icing on the cake.
SOooo cool! Our family pup, Johnny B.* Goode, is a ~4 year old Beagle. He was in a foster home, and came to ours last year a little skittish. He’s now fully part of the family (more to the point, we now make up his pack), and I can’t think of a sweeter animal.
I had plenty of different pups growing up, but never a Beagle. Super sweet, but also incredibly powerful and dense (all muscle) for their size, and 100% driven by scent. This dog sniffs more than any I’ve ever seen. (and snacks.. boy does this dog love his treats). IIRC Beagles are especially good for being trained to sniff out humans with lung cancer! They can smell it in the breath.
Breaks my heart thinking someone would willfully abandon such a loving creature. Keep up the good work!
* Beagle
That’s awesome! I feed anything that comes to my door. We ended up taking in one of the feral cats that kept stopping by, a really large tabby and he’s part of the family now, the big goober.
I worked at an animal shelter for almost 10 years, so I saw plenty of scumbag people come through the doors.
Thanks for doing something awesome and sharing that with us.
This is awesome, thanks for participating and helping to raise awareness Mercedes! If anyone is in the Milwaukee area, I believe MADACC has or will have a bunch of those poor beagles that were rescued from that medical testing nightmare place. I really want to take one in, but just can’t right now.
Sounds like an exciting and interesting mission.
The only experience I ever had with beagles when was I was travelling everywhere for my job which involved testing MRI rooms for RFI/EMI interference. I was sent to GlaxoSmithKline near Philadelphia to test a room that they were using in their beagle research laboratory and there was an onsite kennel where the beagles lived. The people there actually seemed very concerned about the beagles.
Maybe they were just blowing smoke while I was there, but they had local 4-H kids and scouts helping with the beagles, and the technicians there took the time to explain to me how the beagles’ hearts and circulatory systems were the most similar to humans, and they were testing heart medications on the older dogs with heart ailments to try to help them live longer and hoping that they could use what they learned to help come up with medicine that would help humans as well.
I know that drug companies are primarily in it for the $$$, but the scientists, technicians, and volunteers seemed to really love what they were doing. And at least while I was there, they seemed to treat the animals with decency.
On a side note, I also got to test research MRI rooms at Jackson Laboratories (mice) near Bar Harbor, Maine and Proctor & Gamble (feminine sanitary products of all things) near Cincinnati, OH. Otherwise, most of my testing was at hospitals and clinics.
Just my 2¢. Hope your mission is a success!
Beagle Freedom Project is another worthy beagle rescue organization. In our experience, the laboratory rescues are either hyper friendly to humans or are so traumatized it takes months for them to warm up to people. It’s very satisfying to see a rescue develop self confidence and approach visitors voluntarily.
Bless you for this. And a curse on hunters who abandon their dogs. I certainly hope these assholes are outliers and pariahs of the hunting community. May they suffer tragic, extremely painful life altering hunting accidents.
Double curses on puppy/kitten mills and anyone who supports them. They are a blight on humanity.
Hell, people dump dogs on the street just because they’re moving houses and don’t want to deal with bringing the dog, people are assholes
I know. I’m not a fan of those jerks either.
I want to preface this with an emphatic statement that every animal deserves a good home, and I think that this is a wonderful cause and one The Autopian should be justifiably proud to be partnered with.
The thing is, having grown up with a beagle, they can be very challenging dogs. The thing a lot of people don’t know going into beagle companionship is that, while they are absolutely friendly, funny, and loving dogs, they also have some traits that make them more difficult than other breeds, especially for inexperienced owners.
That incredibly sensitive nose for which they’re famous, for instance. Beagles have an exceptionally-powerful sense of smell even among dogs. That means that whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re telling them, it’s less interesting than what they smell at any given moment. Training a beagle requires a lot of patience. They have a reputation as being stubborn or willful, but I don’t think that’s actually accurate. They’re very smart, but so much of their brains are dedicated to making sense of the firehose of data coming in from their sniffer. Try to imagine if you were attempting to learn a new procedure at work, but the whole time there was a five year old constantly asking you questions while their seven year old sibling recounts, in detail, their last six Fortnite matches. That’s the level of input you’re competing with when you try to teach Snoopy to sit on command.
Beagles need a lot of reward and repetition to be reliable at command training. Unlike some other dogs, you probably won’t be able to leave them unsupervised for long even after they mature. That nose is just going to keep leading them to more interesting places.
Growing up, our beagle (who, again, was a good dog but a big challenge for two parents who both worked full-time) quickly demonstrated an aptitude for escape artistry. We lived, at the time, a ways out of town on a small ranch. Our nearest neighbor was about two miles away. Nevertheless, our intrepid beagle would get out of his enclosure at night, slip the fence, and trot off to someone else’s house to see what he could find. What was he looking for? Well he wasn’t particular. We would wake up to find him loafing about the yard, with toys, baseball mitts, bats, discarded garbage, car parts, and all sorts of other things he’d just found interesting. On one particularly memorable occasion, a long-suffering neighbor drove all the way up to our house to ask if our dog had absconded with his cooler, in which he’d packed his lunch for the next day to save time. A cursory search of the yard revealed that, yes, our little scavenger had gotten out, made it nearly five miles down the road, stolen the little cooler from where it’d sat, and somehow made it all the way home, despite said cooler being very nearly larger than he was.
The last issue that prospective owners should know is that beagles, properly speaking, are hound dogs. Along with a general sort of problem-solving intelligence and the aforementioned nasal acumen, that also means that beagles are considered a “baying” breed.
They howl.
They bark.
They let out long, drawn out, mournful cries.
They do this almost exclusively during the night.
There is very little you can do to change this behavior.
Our dog was, it must be said, a virtuoso in this regard. He would call to the moon like a wailing blues singer, wrapping up all his angst and frustration at a world that constantly stymied his canine ambitions and letting it fly loose toward the cold light above, crying out for justice in an uncaring universe. In another world, he would have had a recording career. In ours, it just meant none of us got any sleep.
These are all things I wish we’d known to look out for before we got a beagle, but of course, I was too young, and besides, I am ashamed to admit, he had been something of an impulse buy. My mother, having just taken my younger brother to have braces put on, and seeing the pain and terror in his eyes as our sadistic orthodontist gleefully ratcheted his metal restraints with all the care of a medieval torturer at four P.M. on a Friday, gave into his sad pleading and bought him a puppy.
Beagles can be fantastic dogs, and I would never blame the breed for not being something they were never meant to be. But, like other high-maintenance breeds such as huskies, prospective owners should be aware of what they’re getting into. Beagles deserve good homes, and that includes owners who understand their needs and can work with them on their terms. Someone living in a small apartment who works full time is going to come home to ruined furniture and irate neighbors sick of the noise.
This is very well-written. My late-dog, Honey (named after a Mariah Carey song by the same name), was a pit/beagle mix, but I think more of her personality was beagle.
Whoa. I like them a lot but had no idea of the downsides.
All pups have their own personalities. Fwiw ours doesn’t bark very much, and the only time we’ve heard him howl was when he joined in with the family as we all sang happy birthday! I will also point out that he is a bit of a Houdini. He gets loose if not leashed, if he does, he wonders the neighborhood, then comes home.
You will get no judgment from me! Thank you for the useful firsthand experience!
It seems there are some parallels between beagles and some species of birds. Green-cheeked conures like my Janeway and Tuvok have a relatively affordable upfront cost (around $600), so a lot of kids and adults end up with them.
Thing is, these birds are a total handful. They screech loudly (up to about 100 dB), love to bite, enjoy nibbling, and have the craziest obsessions. They poop on everything, and anything made out of wood will get destroyed over time by tiny, cute beak marks. Training? Ha, it’ll take months of non-stop work and the little diabolical fella might just decide to disobey you, anyway.
Janeway, for example, loves dive-bombing on shoes and feet, which is totally dangerous for her because it could lead to her being stepped on. She also hates bottles, pickles, and anything that’s bright green. If you are holding something that meets any of those descriptions, she will open that beak and chomp down on ya. I have a few conure scars on my body. You sort of just have to work around your bird’s quirks. I know to never eat a pickle in her presence, never to cook around her, and never, under any circumstance, drink anything out of a green bottle. Sheryl hasn’t quite gotten the hang of it, yet,
Then there’s the fact that, if you want your conure to have good mental health and to live for a long time, you have to give them constant attention. That’s easy for me since I work from home and can have her on my shoulder all day. But people with jobs and kids? Sometimes their birds stay in their cages all day.
Another thing to consider is that a well-loved conure can live to nearly 30 years old. While not as huge a commitment as a large parrot, that’s still a lot of time! My first conure lived to 21. He was there through my entire childhood.
You’re not just buying food over that time, too. Birdy healthcare is crazy expensive, and a lot of people either just neglect their birds’ health needs or they give up and get rid of the bird.
Some apartment dwellers also get conures, thinking that a tiny bird is a good alternative to a dog. Then, the bird yaps nonstop, pissing everyone off. Thankfully, my modern apartment building has thick walls, and my neighbors don’t report hearing any animals. Whew. Add it up, and lots of these birds end up neglected, rehomed, or intentionally released into the wild. Of course, a companion conure has no business in a habitat it was never indigenous to, so that’s basically a death sentence for many birds.
Places here in the SFBA like SF and Sunnyvale are now home to flocks of wild parrots, thanks to jerks who found it easier to toss their birds outside rather than deal with their personalities or find them a new home.
On the bright side those birds are probably happier this way.
That stacks. I remember my Beagle being quite challenging to train, but when I finally got it, he had it. When he was young, he didn’t sleep during the day. He was probably 5 or 6 when he finally started to take naps. That was hard.
I also remember there was a stunning amount of loud in that small dog. He’d howl like mad when I practiced harmonica . . .
Looking back, one of the most shocking things was digging. Not that he did it a lot – I managed to train it out of him early. It was how effective he was – like watching a jet boat throwing a rooster tail.
Nice! My sister was involved in greyhound rescue but nothing on this scale.
I’d offer to stop by to say hello but I’ll be heading to Denver to work as safety staff at a Lemons race. Maybe next time.
Trained hunting dogs are serious money, and serious training into them.
I’ve one colleague that “has” two trained hunting dogs that live semi-permanently (in the off-season) with the trainer. Odd situation all around to me, and I haven’t a clue how well/poorly they’re actually kept. But it costs him a small fortune.
Cost is a big reason why I don’t have an attack dog.
If your employer provides a match for donations, why not donate to this venture and possibly double your impact? My employer provided a 100% match for my donation to Cascade Beagle Rescue through our company’s “Giving Portal” website.
I actually have no idea how we handle donations like that! I’ll ask.
I was just pointing out that some companies have a method of getting a corporate match for personal donations to accredited charitable organizations. So, folks might want to see if their employer has a program like that. Not just you, Mercedes – all of us can help by donating! You’re already helping a lot!
LotR-based dog names? Please tell me there’s a Sméagol the Beagle!
We all know that Samwise is the real hero sticking by his friend even through the worst.
I’ve heard he likes potatoes.
Good on you for doing this!
To keep my comment car related, one of my favorite ever movies scenes involving a dog had a beagle.
I had a Beagle from 8 weeks to 16 years. He was a wonderful dog, and it makes me sad to hear people treat such wonderful animals like that.
This is a great, worthy and charitable cause. Thanks Mercedes for bringing this news to us.
You are doing a great thing, Mercedes. I’ve read that many dogs have the mental capacity of a one to two year old child. It takes a special kind of a$$hole to abandon an animal that is fairly intelligent and specifically bred to depend on people.
True. My current dog was abandoned three times, before the age of 1. The first two owners had the decency to drop him off at the municipal shelter; the last person left him in a field and he was identified because the shelter always microchips dogs.
The shelter named him
Dracula; I didn’t change the name. He’s an adorable, friendly pit/lab mix. I’ve had him since October 2021.
Just had to mention the dog I’ll never forget. Growing up we had a dog or two at a time – ones that just showed up to our country plot and we took care of them. My grandma always said ‘there’s no dumb dogs, just dumb owners’. We’d just love them and let them follow us around as we did our daily work, and before you knew it they were well behaved and reasonably socialized.
The shelter two towns over noticed us and asked us if we’d take in a hard case. A stunningly beautiful full size collie. She had a skin infection and behavior problems, but they knew we always had somebody and some other dog around to help her get with the program.
After the first night she was perfectly behaved. We wondered for a year what had happened that she was branded a problem dog. But then a salesman appeared at our front gate, wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. The poor dog yelped as if she had been struck and ran out of sight. I found her dug down into some hay, pulled in as tight as she could be, whimpering, and had soiled herself. Guess we know what her abuser looked like.
I sat with her for a good long while before she was ready to uncurl, then get up, then down to the pond to swim and get clean. Fortunately going through her old memories with us got her through her fear and it did not happen again. She was that dog afterwards – the one that you will always remember.
She passed away peacefully from old age during an afternoon nap a couple years afterwards. Forty years later I was going through photos after closing out my parents’ estate and found a polaroid of her – and just bawled for a few minutes. Yes, some dogs are incredibly smart.
That’s awesome. Glad you were able to give him a good home. Our dog was a rescue that seemed to not have much contact with people but maybe hung out with cats. Interesting to have a 60 pound dog laying next to you on the couch and “purring”.
Damnit, why do you want to make me cry on a Friday afternoon. Thank you for the work and the piece, and for the entire organization. I lost my dog this spring, and my sister keeps on telling me to take on a beagle. Not yet…
I adopted a beagle from BBRH back around 2010. He was fostered in the KC area. Unfortunately, Barney the Beagle Boy lost a long fight with a respiratory ailment about 5 years later. I’ve wanted another Beagle ever since, but our current dog (a rat terrier) isn’t terribly accommodating of other canines!
I’m sure a lot of Beagles get dumped/given up just because they won’t shut up! You have to be a fan of howling to have one.
Unfortunately happens with a lot of breeds that people don’t understand before buying, even worse when some pop culture exposure turns them into a fad for idiots who can’t be bothered to look up the breed’s needs and characteristics beforehand.
I grew up with toy rat terriers. They are feisty!
This is awesome, I had a feeling you were helping the Ridglan dogs when I read your article on the best pet vehicle. There’s so many that need a good home (we already have 3 rescues from other places, no more room right now), I’m glad you get to help them!
Bring earplugs anytime you get more than two beagles it turns into a howl contest
Or any animal transport. During Game of Thrones everyone wanted a husky and animal rescues ended up with lots of them. You can always tell when there is a husky mixed into a breed, and so can your neighbors.
My Schnauzers sing the song of their people when we get within 4 blocks of the groomer,vet or dog park
We had a “pure blood Doofus” that was 1/8th everything. One of the 1/8ths was Husky. He would howl regularly. But being so little husky, he was completely tone deaf. He would howl in the key of Trainwreck Minor on the 7th. Not since Brook Shields sang about perfume was anything that off-key.
I miss him and his weirdness.
I’d like to know more about the logistics of this. How many dogs per car, solo driving or with a dog wrangler, are the cars prepared in any way such as seats removed, etc.
The Ioniq 9 I just received is totally as it would be delivered from a dealer. I think the dogs are going to be crated for travel and then get frequent breaks.
I’ll let you know for sure on my first update!
Not sure if these would be waived, but there are rules about transporting dogs en masse across state lines. My wife just sent two dogs on transport to the Northeast from the South. The companies use large work vans and the are inspections to make sure the vans are clean, the kennels are properly secured, that the animals get breaks every so many hours, that there is water available, etc. The pet transportation companies drive with two people per van, one of which can go and check on the dogs and listen for signs of distress.
It really is an amazing process and the people that do it are wonderful.
I am not particularly religious, but the only phrase that comes to mind for this is “doing God’s work.” Thank you. Mercedes, for taking this on.
Came here to post this, but you beat me by two minutes. Thank you, Mercedes!
This is awesome. Our local Humane Society go a few dozen of those Beagles.
We have worked with Rhodesian Ridgeback Rescue for over 20 years.
Everyone should pick their favorite dog breed and support the breed specific rescue. It is so worth it!
…
The hell is wrong with people?!?
Where would you like me to start? It’s a long list.
The short answer to “what’s wrong” is normally meth where I live.
However, the key is to know the good stories outweigh the bad. By a wide margin. For example:
So far, 1 asshat, 1 unknown. Easy to get a bad opinion on humanity there. However, the story does end. The vet refused to put down the dog, A vet tech took in the dog to take care of it and found my wife was willing to foster it.
So when the dog came to us, there were already 2 great people involved.
Then for adoption, a family contacted us specifically because they wanted a small child friendly small, old dog to give them the best end of life possible. They knew that this older dog wouldn’t be around long, but having a loving family for him was something important to them. We had discovered this old dog liked children and gave it a shot. So, here’s family of 2 wonderful parents and 3 wonderful kids giving an old guy a shot.
So, now it’s 7 wonderful people, offset the actions of 1 asshat.
But the story doesn’t end there. We don’t know this dog’s real history. As he recovered from the infection and was in a home with children, he blossomed. BIG time. 5 years later, and we get videos of the “old guy” absolutely sprinting around the back yard chasing bubbles with the girls. We get pictures of him snuggled under the blankets with their youngest. He’s a handsome little terrier and it’s hard to believe he’s 5, nevertheless 5+ whatever age he was when the owner tried to put him down. He seems to be aging in reverse.
That horrible person that wanted to put down a dog that just needed medication, good food and some love is more than outweighed by the rest of the story. That makes working in animal rescue worth it.
And this is one of dozens of stories about good overcoming evil that I can share.
Ok, I nominate this for #COTD because you turned my off-the-cuff remark into such a good story. So I’ll give you mine:
My wife is also like this. We went to adopt a cat and we are reasonably well-off financially so she wanted a cat that otherwise would not be adopted.
We found one that had had surgery for bladder stones and the stones came back so the owner dumped her at the county shelter. She was 4 years old at that time. We took her in and have plans to address the stones but our vet doesn’t want to disrupt her life other than giving her a special diet. At least until things seem to change for the worse. We’ve now had her for seven years and she’s a great pet!
Our dog and his entire litter were dumped on the side of the road just after birth. A local farmer found them and brought them to a shelter where they were rehabbed and adopted out. My wife had to know what kind of dog he is so she did the DNA test and he is mostly a poodle/beagle mix. A lot of random hunting/hound dog DNA in the mix too. So my best guess is there is a breeder north of us that breeds poogles (poodle/beagle mix, which is apparently a thing), and perhaps there is a mutt hunting dog on the property that spoiled one of their precious crops of designer mixed breed dogs.
Anyway, they were all adopted out and because multiple people did the DNA test we all found each other and they even see each other every once in a while and it’s great fun. And he’s the best damn dog I’ve ever had to boot.
The cat and dog are named Leeloo and Korben, respectively. After characters in one of our favorite sci-fi movies, The Fifth Element.
So, it’s good to hear there are some good people. Here’s hoping the jackasses don’t outnumber us!
Yeah, I can give dozens of stories. As for DNA, my favorite story is a personal dog. He seemed to be made up of random parts of dogs that weren’t supposed to go together. He was not ugly, just.. strange, like a skilled drawing by a child, who still hadn’t figure out proportions yet. We got curious and did the DNA. What they found was that every single one of his 8 grand parents was a purebred dog. A couple were IDed as show line even. None of the 8 breeds repeated, so he was 1/8th everything.
Which was a lot of fun. I went into a store and asked if I could bring in my dog. They said “sure, what is he?” So I replied he was a Chihuahua mix. Because he was as much Chi as anything else.
The looks on their faces when I walked in with a 93 lb barrel shaped black block of a dog with a curled tail, a underbite and a weird gait because of missing part of his hip was memorable.
Then, he, being the pureblood doofus he was, sat in front of them, and shook himself into a blur out of excitement. Just like one of his grandfathers’ would have done (I’m assuming a male there because a step ladder makes more sense than a female giving birth to mixes with a Lab).
“Some old woman (?) had a dog. She wasn’t taking care of it, but with dementia, this can be excused. “
That’s what’s happening with a cat named Shelby who belongs to my neighbors across the street.
Shelby is a sweet older Tabby Cat who used to be fat and would spend days lounging on a chair on their front porch. And if I went to the foot of their driveway and called her, she would come to me and enjoy having me pat her.
She’s quite social.
I think it was the daughter’s cat. But the daughter moved away.
And the mother has dementia that I think has been getting worse lately. And the father… well I think he’s okay, but he clearly doesn’t care about the cat.
One day I saw Shelby on my front lawn after not having seen her for a while and she had gone from being fat to super skinny. She was clearly desperate and starving.
So I started feeding her and I’ve been gradually getting her to get more comfortable about coming into my house.
I suspect I may eventually adopt her.
At the very least, I’m not gonna let her starve.
How much time have you got? Because answering that will turn into a loooong story…
I could swear I just read an article about this, C&D maybe? I choked up more than once.
(Maybe R&T? I try to buy random magazines for lunch reading occasionally.)