Blog the Change: My First Shelter Love

It's time again for Blog the Change. When I was trying to think of what I wanted to write about, I thought I might do a post on Black Dog Syndrome (if you've never heard of it, in a nutshell - black dogs, especially big ones, are much less likely to get adopted than their lighter shelter mates). While I was looking for a picture of Smiley, my sister's very lovable black Lab mix from my youth, I came across lots of pics of my first shelter love - Lazar Wolf:

Lazar, the day we brought her home - 1980

So, I'll have to save the BDS post for another time because it struck me that Lazar had a sort of Abby/Rita quality to her. She's got Abby's long and lean body type, and Rita's shepherdy looks.

Lazar, Abby & Rita: my shelter girls - beauties, all!

What do you think? Do you see similarities? Does it seem that I have a "type" that I fall in love with? (Of course, there were also two beagles interspersed in here... Our dog when I was little was a beagle named Barney, and the first dog the hubs and I had was Bailey the beagle, which explains my penchant for tri-colored pups.)

Lazar (named after a minor character in Fiddler on the Roof, which my sis was in in high school) was a very sweet girl! Like her angel sisters, she hated having a bath:

Lazar sitting on the edge of the tub. (Rita makes this exact same face.)

My dad worked for Goodyear, so she had a special tire she played with. It was technically supposed to be an ashtray, but minus the glass ashtray part in the middle, it made an awesome dog toy.

She also had the life-size version:

Nom nom nom. I love my tire.

As I mentioned above, we had a beagle before Lazar. Barney was a fabulous dog. When he died, we were all devastated. So when the local shelter ran an ad in the paper listing a beagle, my parents sent me and my one sis down to check her out. (You could not have picked two worse family members for this assignment. Of course we were going to come home with a dog. Possibly ALL of the dogs.) This was back in the day when there was no internet, so you couldn't check the dogs out online first. If you wanted to see them - you went to see them.

We got there and asked to see the beagle, so the gal took us back to all the kennels. Lazar was cowering in the back of her cage barking at us - and, as you've already surmised from her photos, looking nothing like a beagle. I have to admit, I was a little afraid of her at first. But when the gal that worked there walked in to the cage, Lazar was all sweetness and kisses and waggy tail. Our hearts melted, and she came home with us.

So, we were sent to bring home another beagle, and we came home with our little shepherd-mutt looking thing. Not quite as much of a case of "mistaken identity" as Thursday's post - but one with a happier ending.

She was a great dog. Who was your first shelter love? Maybe your next love is out there waiting for you??