The Cottage Ladies (and the cats!)

Last week I told you about Cherry, so this week I want to introduce you to the other lovely lady sharing the foster cottage and my office with me.

Gracie Lou is what I call a Miniature Land Hippo. She’s a bulldog mix with a stout, sturdy, roundish frame, much like a hippopotamus. She weighs about 50 pounds and is simply adorable.

Much like her buddy, Cherry, she has spent her life on a chain having puppies. She was rescued when flood waters rose last year and she was found unable to get to higher ground.

I met her shortly after that while on a shelter tour. She was thin, battered, and riddled with mammary tumors. Donors paid to have her spayed and tumors removed, but no rescue claimed her, so she stayed at the outdoor shelter, still living on a tie-out for almost another year.

This past June, my rescue partner Amy and her family pulled her from the shelter, saving her from a summer of heat and insects. They worked all summer to get her healthy, battling worms and skin issues. They also discovered what an absolute lovebug she is.

Now she’s healthy and ready for a home of her own. Here is what I said about her in my posts of social media:

Who is looking for a Miniature Land Hippo of their own? A solid buddy who loves football (especially the Eagles) and would love to while away afternoons, heck, entire days watching football with you on the couch (or basketball or hockey or baseball, she’s an all-season fan)?

Gracie Lou is approximately 4-5 years young, but those have been some long years spent outside on a chain raising multiple litters of puppies. She’s ready for a restful, loving home of her own. This dog has so much love to give and needs a person to give it to.

Having spent a solitary life (with the exception of too many unwanted puppies), she is not sure how to interact with other dogs, so she’d be best on her own with you or with a patient dog who is not dominant. It’s yet to be determined how she is with cats, although so far she is fascinated with watching her foster mom care for kittens (not sure if she’s fascinated in a good way or a bad way).

Gracie Lou is spayed (thank heaven!), microchipped, up to date on shots, and doing great on a leash. She is about 50 solid, squatty pounds. She’s crate-trained, but not a home wrecker. She is house-trained too, and for the most part a quiet dog, although she can snore like an old Fisherman. Gracie Lou loves treats, so she is an eager student. She doesn’t like to be left alone, too much of her life has already been spent that way.

If you’d like to meet this darling little beefcake or apply to adopt her, contact CaraSueAchterberg@gmail.com or call/text 717-577-6180.

Cherry and Gracie Lou have made great roommates despite neither of them having much experience interacting with other dogs.

Gracie Lou’s favorite thing to do is give Cherry a bath. I don’t know if it’s affection, submission, or the fact that she’s spent too many years raising puppies. Cherry doesn’t seem to mind.

I would love to find Gracie Lou a home of her own. Since Amy and I are doing this kind of à la carte, we could use your help getting the word out. Feel free to copy/paste my write up or share the post of Facebook. It will take a village to get this precious dog home.

The kittens + 1, are the newest fosters living in the puppy room. I don’t know the whole story (cats are mysterious like that), but apparently, the five came into rescue together. No one is sure how Cinder (the teenage cat) is related. For her part, she wants very little to do with the others, preferring to spend her days perched in the window watching our barn, probably noting the comings and goings of the barn cats (an expanding herd you can see at the end of this post!).

Just in case anyone is in the market for a cat, here are the options:

Allie, is gray with lovely white markings. She is friendly and loves toys, attention, playing with the other kitties. (I’m much better with dog descriptions, but I’m trying to con my neighbor’s homeschooled 8-year-old into writing bios for the kitties as he would do it much better!)

Trig is a long haired version of Allie physically, but he is a little more aloof. He’s very sweet and playful, but a bit more independent as you’d expect a cat to be.

Geo is nonstop. That’s the best way to describe this kitten. He is busy, going places, aggressively friendly, and easily the most active kitten. The fact that he is like this even while he has an upper respiratory infection we’re still battling with a second antibiotic now, plus a ruptured eardrum, makes me worry that once he’s healthy, he won’t just be active, but hyperactive. He is a love, though, and quickly won over everyone at the vet clinic.

Boots is a beautiful brown tabby with lovely white boots. She’s sweet, mild-mannered, and becoming more outgoing every day. She had a terrible URI, but is almost all better.

Cinder is the +1. We aren’t sure if she’s the mom, sister, or just an extra cat that got scooped up in the net of rescue at the same time. She’s a quiet little girl who prefers my company to the kittens and, for the most part, tries to ignore them (so maybe she’s a big sister).

I know this is getting long, but I have to share the latest in the barn cat saga. Most of you know that we took in four barn cats last spring. They are not a friendly bunch and quickly evaporated once they were set loose. Seeing no evidence of them except the daily disappearance of the food/water we leave out, we periodically put the trail cam on them to make sure they are still there. Here is the evidence that all four of our kitties (two gray, one grumpy brown tabby, and an orange cat) are still hanging around, plus not just the one small possum we’ve seen before, but now two (look at the picture of them under the stairs to spot the second). We also have two interloping cats, one of which is wearing a collar. (don’t mind the mess – this room in the barn is the ‘recycling center’ and we usually toss stuff in there, but even if we didn’t the cats (and heaven knows what else) root through it and make it a mess.

Now my dilemma is—do I trap them to be sure they are spayed/neutered? Neither belongs to my immediate neighbors, but the collar suggests that at least one belongs to someone.

It’s always something. I’m here to testify that rescue is never boring.

If you haven’t checked out the online auction going on right now to raise funds for Who Will Let the Dogs Out, you’ve got one more day. You could be that annoying bidder who swoops in at the last moment and outbids everyone! The auction closes Sunday at seven, here’s the link.

Until Each One Has a Home,

Cara

For information on me, my writing, and books, visit CaraWrites.com.

If you’d like regular updates of all our foster dogs past and present, plus occasional dog care/training tips, and occasional foster cat updates (!) 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 and subscribe to our blog where we share stories of our travels to shelters, rescues, and dog pounds.

If you can’t get enough foster dog stories, check out my book: Another Good Dog: One Family and Fifty Foster Dogs . Or its follow up that takes you to the shelters in the south One Hundred Dogs & Counting: One Woman, Ten Thousand Miles, and a Journey Into the Heart of Shelters and Rescues.

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

If you’d like to support the work we do (and save the rescue and me some money), shop our Amazon wishlist.