Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Chucky

Told by Rachel

Our daughter is a registered veterinarian technician. We had conveyed to her that we were looking for a companion for Buster, our Boston Terrier who was one year old at the time. He too is a rescue dog. He looks forward to playing soccer almost every day with a beach ball of the same size. Somehow inspite of all his activity we sensed that he was in need of a four footed companion. She called us and said that a dog ten months old, had been brought into the clinic and the owners had given him up to be adopted. She said it was a pug and he and Buster would do well together.

We knew nothing about the pug's background. For starters we didn't know he was trained to do his business indoors on newspapers. You can only imagine the frustration for us and Chucky. To him, outdoors was our indoors and indoors was his outdoors. Then one day my husband noticed his attraction to a sheet from the newspaper and Chucky enthusiasm to mark it. Now we got it. The process of training him outdoors began. It took a month of close observation but now no more guessing.

The second phase was chewing. It seems he was weaned too soon and to this day he will roll a part of the sheet into a nipple and suck. It didn't take too many days before we realized that we had a challenge before us. We are very thankful that we were here for his rescue. I can only realize what his life would have been, to be repeatedly taken from one family to another. With time and patience his obsession of chewing is diminishing. Our veterinarian would not put him on meds and in retrospect I now know he was right. Chucky's drive to chew has lessened from when he first came to us three years ago.

Chucky and Buster

Chucky and Buster are inseparable. Where ever we are so are they. They are a smaller version of our shadows. We are fortunate to have found each other. Yes, Chucky is a 29 pound lap dog and will be four years old in October. He will maneuver his body to accommodate a comfortable position on our lap. Yes, everyone is his friend.