The Saga of Mabel

This is not so much a saga as it is a short story, but The Short Story of Mabel sounds stupid. It's a story about a small black lost dog.

We live in the Stray Animal Capital of the World. I don't mean Las Vegas, I mean our house. On Saturday, a couple of kids came by and knocked on our door to ask if the dog they had with them (small and black) was our dog. This is not even the dog my story is about. That dog doesn't have anything at all to do with this story. I'm only telling you so I can illustrate to you how our house is a vortex for lost and abandoned animals. Seriously, people. We have taken in one cat, found homes for three, briefly kept a rabbit, and nursed a bird back to health.

Five minutes later I looked out the back door and said, "Oh look, there's that dog those kids had," because I saw a small black dog walking around owner-less at the park. And (because I hadn't seen the first dog) I was informed that this small black stray dog was, in fact, a different small black stray dog. Of course, the girls all went outside and started playing with the dog through the fence. Of course, Saren came to me crying and saying that the dog was pregnant (she wasn't) and we just *had* to help her because what about the poor puppies!?! And Pat came to me and said that it looked so cute running back and forth with Irina, one of them on each side of the fence.

Somehow, and I'm not even really sure how it happened, we ended up with a dog in our backyard, with a bowl of water, and some old towels and blankets in the dog house that belonged to the house's previous tenants, and please don't ask me why we haven't ever moved that dog house in the 7 years we've been living here.

Let me just stop here and say that I am not a dog person. I say I don't like dogs, but really, I don't have anything against dogs as long as they aren't in my life. The neighbor's barking dog doesn't bother me; I just tune it out. When other people's dogs come up to me when I'm visiting them and stare at me and drool on my pants, I just send them go-away vibes in my mind and try to repress the memory after I get home. But I do not and never will* own a dog because dogs are just not my kind of people.

My daughters don't feel the same way. I don't understand it, but somehow they ended up with the dog-loving gene and they were all over this dog. They had that dog in the backyard for five minutes before they gave it a name: Mabel. They ran around with her, they pet her, they loved her. And I knew I was getting myself into trouble, but couldn't see how to extract myself.

The girls put up signs in the park and out on an adjacent street and we got one call from someone who was looking for a small *male* black dog (maybe that other one?). We bought some dog food for her so she wouldn't starve. They kept asking me how long she could stay and I didn't have a good answer for them. She spent the night out on the porch and didn't bark at all.

Now I know that all the no-kill shelters around here are filled to capacity and that they wouldn't take her in. The girls were extremely distressed about the idea of sending her to the regular shelter because they basically see it as a killing factory. (It's not my idea of a great place for a lost animal either, but I feel like they do have some chance of finding either their true owner or a new one. The girls don't really see it that way.) The only thing left was to keep the dog at our house until either we found the owner or we found her a new home. I was not terribly in favor of that idea because keeping a dog at our house is just not practical. She was constantly trying to get inside, which is no good because we have three cats, and it's too hot to keep her outside (actually it wasn't during the time she was here, but it wasn't going to stay that way). Also, and I think I may have mentioned this, I don't want a dog. I don't even want a temporary dog.

So when she escaped from our backyard, that clinched it for me. If we couldn't even keep her contained, we needed to find a different option. Pat called animal control to come and pick her up. This did not go over well. The dog stayed around our house even though it no longer was in our yard. Pat and the kids went outside (I was taking a shower at this time) to wait for the animal control guy to come. The dog barked at everybody but us. It took that dog about 3 seconds flat the day before to decide we were her new family. So when the neighbor's sister came by and Pat and the girls told her the story and she said, "We'll take her," the dog wasn't really down with that idea. The neighbor's sister drove away.

But she came back! And Saren picked up the dog, soothed her, and handed her over. They drove off. All's well that ends well! Everything always works out great for me! And Mabel! And Saren and Harper!

Epilogue: The animal control guy didn't even knock, he just drove by twice, didn't see anything, and left.

*Please, universe, don't make me eat my words someday in the future.

Moral of the Story (for me): Never say, "Hey look, there's a dog," unless it is on a leash, with its owner.