It's Scooby!

December 20, 2012

Here's a picture of my dog Scooby.

Scooby has been with me for almost four years now.  He is a mutt, but I don’t mind at all.  He is 3/4 Cavalier King Charles and 1/4 Chinese Crested.  Yep, as handsome as he is, a quarter of him is the breed that continually wins the ugliest dog in the world contest.  He is 24 pounds, which is also strange.  Most Cavaliers only get to about 21 pounds at most and Chinese Cresteds are Chihuahua sized I believe.

Scooby was and is my first dog.  I only plan on having Cavalier King Charles’s in the future.  The best living situation I had during college was when I moved away from the dorms and into a condo a long ways away from campus.    I lived there with my roommate and her Cavalier for three semesters.  My roommate insisted that she would never have any other type of dog.  I adopted her philosophy. They are super friendly, almost never bark, and are always loyal companions.  They don’t bite and also don’t eat you out of house and home.  I don’t feel the need to have a massive beast.

When I was on my own, and in an apartment that allowed dogs, I started looking for my own Cavalier.  I wanted a rescue dog for two reasons.  First, I thought it would be great to give a needy dog a home.  Second, I didn’t want to pay the $1,000 to $1,500 that purebred Cavalier puppies sell for.  I was searching through a good website that puts you in contact with available adoptees.  Unfortunately, the first place was a bust.  I had driven all the way from Omaha to Southern Wisconsin for the chance to take a look at an available Cavalier.  I think the shelter was trying to pull a switcheroo.   There was no Cavalier, but there was my second choice of breeds, a beagle.  I was angry at them and didn’t adopt any dog from them.  Maybe if they could’ve explained away why there was no Cavalier when they clearly said they had one just the day before I would have understood.  It was a good thing that I had paired the trip with an extended family reunion, otherwise that would have been a long wasted trip.

My second trip went much smoother.  I saw a picture of Scooby and knew he would be great for me.  He had long hair like Cavaliers are prone to have.  He also has the cutest under bite you’ll ever see on a dog.  I was certain I would adopt him once I showed up.  The strange thing was that the person who was holding Scooby was wearing blue surgical gloves.  I thought nothing of it at the time.  So, this time I drove all the way down to the Ozarks from Omaha.  This place was much better run that the first one.  Unfortunately for everyone else, they had not had much luck in getting Scooby adopted.  He was mangy and needed a lot of hair care.  That was the reason for the blue gloves.  They decided that it was kinda hopeless to get him adopted like that, so they shaved him down the day before I got there.  They give Scooby and me some socialization time in an outside pen.  I was waiting in the pen when they brought him out to me.  Once there and they took him off the leash, the first thing he did was stand on his hind legs and put his front paws half way up my thighs.  It was like a message that said, “Rescue me, please”.  Of course, right after that he decided that it was a good time to take a dump.

During the adoption process it wasn’t clear exactly how old Scooby was.  Most of the paperwork said three years but there was one item that said five years.  Nothing said an actual day or a month.  So, I’ve assigned Scooby 1/1/06 as his birthday.  It does make it easy to remember though.  Only a few more days until Scooby turns 7!