Denver’s Dog Love Affair
September 7th, 2009 Categories: Life In Denver
My sister often says, “you can’t live in Denver without owning a dog!”
She’s only half exaggerating. Her two passed away a few years ago, and with a traveling job and two young children, she’s decided to hold off on adopting another.
I married a cat person, and since my dogs were also long departed, it made no sense to add more chaos into our blended family. Actually, my husband is an animal person in general, he just so happened to have cats when we met.
Last year, I was taking my son to the sporting goods store for a few things, and we noticed a doggie adoption clinic going on next door in the parking lot. It was the weekend of Hurricane Ike, and most of the dogs had been brought up from Texas. I told Joe that we could go say hi and give the dogs some love, but we wouldn’t be taking one home.
One took us home.
Duke was the cutest, and saddest dog I’ve ever seen. He reeked of depression and desperation. He looked up at us with his big brown eyes and said, “Get me the hell out of here.” The other dogs were doing flips and handstands to get the attention of anyone willing to take a chance on them. Duke was laying in his cage with his back to it all and didn’t move a muscle, even with flies crawling on his face. Joe said, “Mom, I like this one!” So did I.
I called my husband and he said, “Where are you and what’s all that noise?” I asked him to come see if he liked this dog named Duke who needed a home immediately. He declined coming over, suggesting that if he came we’d be taking them all home. His only questions was, “Does he look like he can run with me?”
Duke has been in our family for one year now, and I think my husband loves him more than he does me! We all love Duke, he gets loads of attention, lots of exercise and he’s totally come out of his shell. He’s truly the best dog we’ve ever had. He walks off leash and would never run, he stays in our yard, he listens, he plays well with all other dogs and never tries to get into a pecking order battle and he gets protective when he needs to.
We’ve entered Duke into the Cutest Dog Competition as a way to bring attention to rescue dogs. While I love full-bred dogs, for sure, I think this mutt is king. We had him DNA tested and he turns out to be a Golden Retriever/Shar Pei mix.
Please go to Duke Faber’s site for the cutest dog and vote for him every day this week. The voting started yesterday and ends on Saturday 9/12. There’s another dog way ahead, so we need to get out the vote! You can vote once per day for the same dog, and they’ll ask you to register first with your email so they can tell that the voting is fair.
So help out needy animals and vote for Duke!
my sources tell me that Denver loves only CeRTAIN dogs, not ALL dogs… unfortunately, DENVER routinely KILLS and has BANNED certain BREEDS of dogs, or mixed breeds of dogs, sad, instead of criminalizing abusive dog OWNERS, Denver has banned and killed innocent DOGS…
Sue Grace’s last blog post..cici is plum silly?
Hi Sue,
You do have a point about that. Most people here love ALL dogs, but there has certainly been controversy about one breed.
Your dog is adorable, and I’m sure a sweetie.