(I'm not sure this is the correct sub-heading, but - since I was her 'doggie-mommie'...)
This is in tribute to the best doggie we’ve ever had, Sheeba.
I first met Sheeba in the autumn of 1997. I’d been driving past the local county’s animal shelter – the ‘dog pound’ – for several years. We’d lost our other dog, Ted, several years earlier, and I just hadn’t felt open to a new dog.
But every day I drove past that dog pound.
So one day I stopped in.
I looked at the date stamps on the cages. I was drawn to 2 dogs that had been there for 4 weeks.
One of them was Sheeba. She was a German shepherd–border collie mix, but was kinda mopey, didn’t seem to have much energy.
The other dog was another German Shepherd-mix with boundless energy. It was jumping to the top of the cage – a good 7 feet, at least.
I settled on Sheeba, but had my neighbor put the other dog’s I.D. number and contact information on the internet, as a “frisbee” dog. I didn’t realize it at the time, but “frisbee” dogs were – perhaps still are – in great demand. They even had cash-prize contests for the best “frisbee” dogs – and no pedigree required, either!!
The other dog found a home, and Sheeba waited in the pound while they scheduled her spaying. I visited her in the pound every day, greeting her and talking to her during the half-hour I had before they closed for the night.
At one point, after talking to her exclusively for several days, my attention meandered over to another dog. Sheeba immediately reacted possessively, barking and pawing at the chain-link fencing as if to say, “Hey! You’re supposed to be MY doggie-mommie now, so pay attention to ME!”
Then came the day I brought her home. Hubby, as usual, was grumpy and refused to have anything to do with her. She tried making friends with him, but within her first week at home, she chewed the earpieces off of his glasses.
Boy, did she and I hear about THAT! Hubby threw a hissy-fit, yowling that it was going to cost “A Hundred Dollars!” to fix his glasses. So, I dragged him down to an optics place, explained what happened, and the very nice optometrist fixed his glasses for free.
That shut hubby up. Soon, within three weeks, hubby was cooing at Sheeba and feeding her scraps. I knew then, that she’d begun to win him over.
I had to nurse her through a nasty cold immediately after I brought her home, but she got stronger and healthier quickly. But it was 'fun' following her around with kleenix for a few weeks - she reacted like a human toddler to having her nose wiped!!
She was a great watchdog with “radar” ears. BEST hearing I’ve EVER seen in a dog, and yet she wasn’t sensitive to the sounds of sirens. She NEVER howled like the other neighborhood dogs when a fire engine went by; she just took it in stride.
She protected us and watched over us, especially when we were hiking. She’d try to ‘herd’ us, if she felt we were getting in over our heads, like she did on Handies Peak at American Basin, when we were hiking in a snowstorm wearing far too few clothes for the weather conditions. She kept bugging us and bouncing around us, trying to get us to go back down. Apparently, she could sense that we were getting in over our heads.
She patiently put up with our sight-seeing, too, as in the photos below, where she's resting while we look at some Puebloan ruins on the Escalante River...
She herded the cats, too – and as hubby always teased Opal – and Velvet – we knew that if either cat was trapped in a burning building, Sheeba would run in and rescue them. She broke up countless fights between our cats, and seemed to protect the losing cat from being picked on, no matter which battle was breaking out.