Bad Dog’s real name is Jacob.
Yesterday was an ugly cry day.
It started with a text from my husband that said I’m taking Jacob to the vet at 3pm. I called right away because I knew what that might mean.
Let me roll back time for a second. A few days before Thanksgiving, our older dog stopped eating. Since then, he’s eaten a few pieces of roast beef, but over the past few days, he wouldn’t even do that. He was losing control of certain bodily functions and was becoming less able to get up and go outside. When he did go outside, he would lie in the grass and just survey the back yard. Peacefully, as if he was satisfied with the life he’d lived.
Meanwhile, my son and I are a thousand miles away in Vermont, which is another story all together. So I told my husband that I’d support whatever decisions he needed to make about Jacob, and yesterday, it was decision time.
My husband’s 3:22pm text to me said He is running on the beach like he used to. Jacob’s rainbow bridge took him back to Qatar, his homeland and birthplace, where he loved the hot sun and the sand at the Inland Sea.
So I wanted to share the story I wrote several years ago about how Jacob aka Bad Dog came to live with us…
When we moved overseas, Smarty Boy and I spent some time at the Qatar Animal Welfare Shelter (QAWS) walking dogs. Qatar isn’t known for it’s love for domestic animals, so some of these guys were in pretty bad shape. Especially one brown-eyed, blond-furred charmer with a cone on his head.
At that time, he was pretty sad looking with that “lampshade” around his head to keep him from chewing and licking his wounds–a cut on his head and a softball-sized swelling on his leg. Wounds that were filled with maggots when he was brought to the shelter after having been dragged under a car.
We talked to him through the fence on his run because he wasn’t well enough for us to walk him. Believe it or not, he came up to the front of his kennel and tried to lick our fingers through the mesh. Once, like the goof he is, he got stuck in the doorway of his kennel because he couldn’t get his head through with that cone on :-). But he kept smiling that doggie smile and wagging his tail.
Jacob loving the hot sand at the Inland Sea.
When QAWS put Bad Dog’s story on their website and people began calling because he’s part Labrador Retriever, I knew we needed to find out what it would take to bring him home with us.
And now, we’re pretty sure he doesn’t remember life on the streets in a country hostile to dogs. What he does remember, however, is breakfast is now served at 6am, dinner at 5pm and he’s the undisputed king of our house.
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Today, please give all your fur babies an extra scratch and a cuddle. Tell them it’s from Bad Dog.
