Pup Date Winston
It’s been some time since I have done an update on the pups! Overall, the pupa chinos have been doing well. Vinny my little sock goblin has taken up nibbling on the floor in my bathroom. It’s obviously not good for him, however he is so sneaky we don’t always make it to him to stop it from happening. And Evie, my little smarty princes has been doing well at doggy training at our local Pet Smart. It is great for her and my husband Nick to have something to do daddy and doggy daughter together.
Mr. Winston found his forever home with a family where I could not be happier. He has a new human brother, and his new mom is always around to spend time with him. Here is what happened. After having Winston for about two months, we got him mostly healthy, his hips and wobble was coming along nicely. He still had diarrhea, which we were working with our vet to try and get cleared up. However, the one thing that we had not accounted for was the way in which Evie and Winston seemed to dislike each other.
At first, when we brought Winston home, we had to keep him away from Vinny and Evie as he was healing from being fixed and needed a bath desperately. Then it was the other way around! With Evie and Vinny needing time to heal from being spayed and neutered. All this meant that Evie, Vinny, and Winston did not have the opportunity to interact for almost a full month after bringing Winston home. Dogs can be territorial, and I believe this started off the bad blood between Winston and Evie. They could smell each other but did not have the chance due to medical reasons to get to know each other.
When Winston and Evie had the opportunity to finally meet after that first month, it was clear he was going to be bigger than her. I don’t know if she felt threatened by him or something else. However, the two of them never seemed to get along. They would wait and ambush each other and go from playing to outright vicious in the blink of an eye. Where we ended up having to pull them apart more and more frequently.
The braking point for me was after spending time with Evie and Winston training them together. We had been spending time working on building positive associations between Evie and Winston. During this training, I could not get them to focus on anything other than each other, not even their favorite treats. I was getting more and more upset because I was spending all my free time wrangling dogs.
My special little guy Mr. Vinny both Evie and Winston seemed to like. I believe this was because he is so easy going and little compared to the other two. Evie and Winston were between 24-30lb, and Vinny was only 9lb. I was spending so much time focusing on Winston and Evie that Vinny kept getting put aside. Needless to say, finding time for Vinny was difficult. When I found myself taking my frustration out on Vinny because he was jumping up on my lap asking to be held, I knew something needed to change.
Nick and I had a hard conversation and decided that we needed to find Winston a new home. A home where he would have more space to run, hopefully with no other dogs and a family that may have kids he could play with. It was not an easy conversation, after all we had taken on this life as our responsibility to love and keep healthy. However, with the space we had both Nick, and I did not feel that we were living up to this responsibility.
We know that as dogs get older, they have less and less of a chance of getting adopted. With Winston still a puppy we also knew he would have the best chance to find a caring loving home if we stepped up and made that hard call to re-home him. However, we were not willing to take him back to the shelter. So, on my next day off I made the phone call to the place we adopted him from. I left a message and let them know that we wanted to foster Winston until he could find a new home.
The next day I got a phone call back from the Humane Society and with their help we did a kind of in-home foster style adoption. Where we as the family who adopted Winston got to pick out his new forever home. They asked me to provide some information and we put up a profile on petfinder.com for Winston. I had so many people contact us about re-homing him that we decided to do a first come first serve approach to finding him a new home.
With in no time, we had located a home for Winston that was almost as if it was made for him. They had a big fenced in back yard, a son that was around 9 and a mother that was a full time stay at home mom. So, Mr. Winston would have someone around all the time to love him.
We set up an interview to see how Winston would react to the family and then we set up another one. To make sure Winston was healthy and ready for his new home Nick and I took him to the vet for a clean bill of health. During the last meet up Winston got to go home with his new dad, mom, and brother. I miss him still but feel positive knowing how much he is loved.
The images of Winston looking dapper are images that his new mom took. It warms my heat to see him so grown up!
