Mia’s Very Own Adoption Event

I’ve come to realize that pictures are more powerful than words. And video is even more powerful than pictures. I can write and write and write about a subject, but seeing it in action always has a bigger impact.

This month marks one year since Mia entered our lives. It astounds me that she is still here. I remember watching her with her puppies and with the people she met and thinking, “It will be so easy to get this dog adopted.”

Of course, at that moment in her life she was nursing ten puppies, full of hookworms, underweight, and completely confused as to how she had ended up in our puppy room. She’d been pulled from a shelter that was closing because of the pandemic, her only other option euthanization. After OPH pulled her and I agreed to foster her, she’d then been loaded in a crate without her puppies, driven to an airport, put on a tiny plane, flown north, and then finally reunited with her puppies in a strange home where nothing was familiar.

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As she recovered her health and her energy, she also recovered her true personality—absolute ham, incurable love bug, who is, as a friend said, “ferociously happy.” Her enthusiasm knows no bounds. It has also gotten her into plenty of trouble this year, including being returned by adopters twice.

But this dog! This dog is such a sweetheart. She equally drives me nuts and endears herself to me. So much energy, so eager to please, to be involved, to play, to go-go-go. I will freely admit that Mia can be a lot of dog.

She plays hard with the other dogs and after two disastrous placements, I’m pretty sure she needs to go to a home without other dogs. While she has never seriously hurt another dog, her enthusiasm is hard to contain and must be managed. She also needs to go to a home that can give her the time and attention she needs, and is willing to do the work it will take to assimilate her into a new household. I’m absolutely certain you could teach this dog anything—even algebra. She’s crazy smart, incredibly coordinated, eager to please, plus massively treat and praise motivated.

Nick and I have both said again and again, she’d be a great dog for us—if she were our only dog. I love running and hiking with her. He loves snuggling with her on the couch. She loves to do either.

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Otis adores her and Fanny loves her (but not all-the-time-in-my-face). Gracie grumps at her, but tolerates her (and that is high praise from that experienced foster-fursister).

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We all appreciate her enthusiasm for life and her endlessly happy waggle. And she’s incredibly entertaining.

She’s such a great pup, so why is she still here, waiting for her forever life to begin?

I’m not sure. So I’m determined to do whatever I can to help her find her family. Because of her over-the-top enthusiasm, she has not been able to go to adoption events, so we’ve decided to create an adoption event just for her—virtually!

This Saturday at noon, I hope you’ll tune in to meet Mia in person during our LIVE event on Facebook. It won’t be a long event, but we hope to show you just how special she is. I’m also going to take the opportunity to showcase a few of the training aids we’ve utilized to teach her not to pull and to control her when her enthusiasm gets the best of her.

If you know of anyone looking for a dog of their own, please do share the event with them. I’ll be taking questions during the event, so comment and participate and since you all know her pretty well at this point too, feel free to remind me to share anything I forget about how wonderful Mia is.

We’ve never done this before, so we will be making it up as we go along, and since this is Mia, you just never know what might happen!

Hope you’ll join us at noon this Saturday March 13^th on the Another Good Dog group page. If you RSVP to the event, you’ll get a reminder when we go live. And if you miss it altogether, you can always watch the replay.

And speaking of moving pictures being more powerful than words, I hope you have checked out the Kickstarter for the film, Amber’s Halfway Home.

Who Will Let the Dogs Out has joined up with Farnival Films to create a short documentary film about rescue in the TN dog pounds (where Fanny and Otis came from!). We’d love your support. Please visit our kickstarter page and share it far and wide. We have only until March 31 to raise 20K!

Thanks for reading!

Cara

For information on me, my writing, and books, visit CaraWrites.com where you can also find more information on my book, One Hundred Dogs and Counting: One  Woman, Ten Thousand Miles, and a Journey into the Heart of Shelters and Rescues, (Pegasus Books, July 2020) and my latest novel, Blind Turn (Black Rose Writing, Jan 2021)

If you’d like regular updates of all my foster dogs past and present, plus occasional dog care/training tips from OPH training, be sure to join the Facebook group, Another Good Dog.

And if you’d like to know where all these dogs come from and how you can help solve the crisis of too many unwanted dogs in our shelters, visit WhoWillLetTheDogsOut.org where you can follow the blog that shares stories or find the link to our podcast!

Our family fosters through the all-breed rescue, Operation Paws for Homes, a network of foster homes in Virginia, Maryland, D.C., and south-central PA.

If you can’t get enough foster dog stories, check out my book: Another Good Dog: One Family and Fifty Foster Dogs. It’s available anywhere books are sold.

I love to hear from readers and dog-hearted people! Email me at carasueachterberg@gmail.com.

Many of the pictures on my blog are taken by photographer Nancy Slattery. If you’d like to connect with Nancy to take gorgeous pictures of your pup (or your family), contact: nancyslat@gmail.com.