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| Meeting Ellie at the shelter As most of you know from reading our blog, we lost our beloved yorkie Lexi earlier this summer. During our exhaustive search for her, my husband and I both had our eyes opened to how many dogs in our area are without homes. I’ll admit when I got Lexi I wanted a particular kind of dog with certain qualities so my parents got her from a breeder. At the time, I never really considered anything else. After tearing up every time I entered one of those shelters looking for Lexi, I knew I’d never buy a dog from a breeder again. There are too many abandoned dogs, too many dogs that will be destroyed if they don’t find loving homes. We both decided that our house was too quiet without a canine companion so we began searching the shelter websites to see if they had any dogs that would be compatable with what we were looking for. Finally, we just decided to spend a Saturday morning visiting the shelters. First, we went to a shelter where they had 3 lab puppies, 2 of them were brother & sister. They were so sweet and fluffy, but we weren’t sure we could separate them...and we certainly weren’t sure we could handle 2 puppies! Then we went to a large shelter downtown and found several sweet dogs, but our favorites were these 2 cattle dog mixes that were inseparable. For the second time that day we were faced with the decision, can we handle 2 young puppies?? While we debated that decision, we headed out to check out one more shelter. This place was special, it was a small shelter that only took on a limited amount of dogs, dogs that were set to be euthanized before this shelter rescued them. As soon as we walked in we saw her laying there, cuddled up in the corner of her crate. They called her Reba because of her red coloring. She was a little sad because her sister had just been adopted. After taking her outside and playing with her, trying to get a feel for her disposition, we knew we had to have her. |
She was about 3 months old, 10 pounds, and had already been spayed. Although we obviously don’t know what all she has been bred with, she clearly has a majority of American Cattle Dog, Red Heeler, in her. Probably with some lab mix. We brought her home, went to PetsMart to stock up on all the necessities, and got her settled in! We decided we weren’t a fan of Reba, so after days of debating, we finally settled on Ellie (my husband calls her Ellie Mae!).
She’s our little ball of energy and can play for hours, but also loves to cuddle. She’s in her second training class already and her intelligence continuously astounds me. She already weighs about 25 pounds and is finally looking really healthy. She LOVES to eat! More to come on adventures with Ellie...I’m sure we’re in for an exciting ride!
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| Ellie loves her big bone from Gma & Gpa! |
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| Graduation from Puppy Class! |
