Dan and I have been seriously discussing getting another pet. Part of it is because we hear news stories about the number of animals being abandoned in foreclosed homes. The other part of it is because I love fluffy animals.
At least I’m honest, right?
Anyway, we had finally decided that Dan would be the next one to pick out the pet. It’s only fair, seeing as how he claimed not to like cats and then I bullied him into getting 3 of them. He decided he wants to get a dog and began researching breeds he liked. After much searching, he decided he wanted a Belgian Malinois. I’m not going to lie-my idea of a dog is tiny and fluffy and has more of a yip than a bark. I was a little less than thrilled at his choice. After some searching online for local shelters or breeders that had his prefered dog, he came up empty handed. He decided instead to adopt a shelter dog.
We had an adult moment where we realized that a third dog would be hard to integrate into our zoo little pet family. Since we’re taking care of my parents’ adult dogs, we didn’t want to find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of them not getting along with the new dog. We also hope to one day integrate our dog into our cats’ lives. This would be impossible since we keep the dogs and cats apart right now. “They don’t get along” is putting it mildly. There is a lot of angry barking and hissing when they see each other through the windows. More than once, I’ve worried that an animal has a broken bone from throwing themselves at the glass.
We went a week with no pet talk. Until I saw an ad for a local shelter…
I started researching being a foster home for cats. They request that we don’t try to introduce the foster animal with other pets. We have lots of empty bedrooms upstairs that the foster cat could sleep in. We only have to pay for food and litter-everything else is provided by the shelter organization. We’d take the kitties to the local Petsmart for the adoption events where we would beat off potential applicants so we could keep each and every single one try to find them their perfect forever home.
When I thanked Dan for letting us take in fosters he replied with “what’s that? Thanks for being a sucker? You’re welcome Sweetie.”
True. I managed to convince him to let me get even more cats even though he knows there an extremely high possibilty that I will be a foster failure. Stay tuned. In about 3 months there will be another post telling you about our exciting adoption of a million cats and our impending eviction for too many animals.
