Where we live, I’m finding out, is an excellent place to drop off  an unwanted pet. Two Saturday’s ago, we are watching TV at night time and heard a noise on the back porch. Assuming a raccoon had come down out of the woods, I grabbed my flashlight and looked around but didn’t see anything. The next morning returning from church, there he was, Dog.

I am not a pet person. Here is the deal. If you have a pet, I can pretend to like your pet for just about one day and then I revert back to my private person mentality. This critter has destroyed my little ecosystem. My squirrel problem has disappeared mainly because my squirrels have disappeared. I don’t think that dog ate them but I do believe that he has scared them off.

I have no idea how old dog is but my guess is six to ten months, and please don’t ask me why I came up with that number because I don’t have a good answer. I have been calling him Buddy, among a few other things but I think my wife has given him the official name of Rusty. Rusty has obviously been badly mistreated and wants constant attention. We have a basket full of shoes on the front porch and another on the back porch. He spends his nights sleeping in the same chair on the front porch and when he is not sleeping, he is dragging every shoe from the front porch and back, into the yard. So he has already taught us to fetch.

Rusty has chewed everything that can be chewed and a couple of things that can’t. He seems to really love a certain pair of shoes that I also thought a lot of, so even though they are badly mangled, they are the one thing that I miss that this puppy has destroyed.

Rusty has had his ears cropped, tail docked and he has been neutered. When I weigh keeping him against taking him to a shelter, I honestly don’t know why he is still here, except he seems to need to be here, and the older I get, the less value I place on shoes, and patio furniture and the more value I place on just being a decent person.

We shall see how it goes.

ws