Dog Adoption, part 2

[Part 1]

Once we got approval to adopt a dog, we were assigned a case worker. She emailed us to let us know that she'd been assigned to our case, but I don't think she really did much after that. She answered Kevin's questions, but she wasn't particularly pro-active about helping us find a dog. Or maybe it was just that we were so pro-active that she didn't need to be.

Kevin and I went through the website and found a bunch of dogs that we were interested in. The majority of them were two-year-old females. After emailing the foster owners, we found out that all of them would be at an adoption event pretty close to us, so we went to that.

At the event we learned that one of the dogs had already been adopted. Another had been living in isolation and needed other dogs to model her behavior after. Since we don't already have dogs, the foster mom didn't seem very willing to let us adopt that dog. This left two dogs: Kina and Mystique. Mystique was younger, but also more energetic. She was really sweet, but we decided that she wasn't really a good fit for us. Kina was older (five), and whether it was because of this or just a different personality, she was much more laid-back. She was also reportedly better with cats

Once we decided that we wanted to adopt Kina, we contacted the foster family and set up a sleepover. See, we can't just take the dog, we have to double and triple check that everything will work out. This makes sense. They don't want the dogs bouncing around from one house to another forever. And it's good for us to figure out what we're getting in to. But it definitely made the process drag out even longer.

The sleepover was a lot of fun. Kina is a very laid-back, low energy dog. She sort of knows basic commands, but could definitely use some work in the form of obedience training. She can sit and shake if you have a treat ready for her, but if you ask her to do more than a couple of things she gets confused and excited and tries to do everything at once.

She also doesn't quite understand fetch. There are some baseball fields behind our house. We took her up to one of those and let her off her leash. She had fun running around and sniffing anything. If we threw a stick she would take off running. And she didn't always go in the direction of the stick. But I bet we can teach her how to fetch with a little work.

The only other worrisome bit was that she had some trouble with the stairs. Since we live in a three story town house, this could definitely become a problem. But what we initially thought was a hip problem may have just been nervousness about being in a new house. By the end of our time with her, she seemed to be getting more comfortable going up and down.

The biggest pro is that Kina seemed to get along well with our cat, Onyx. At least as well as could be hoped. She didn't chase Onyx or bark at him. She was curious and sniffed him a little, but she kept her distance. Meanwhile Onyx kept up a steady stream of howling, growling, and hissing whenever Kina was in the same room as him. But since Kina never pushed Onyx, the cat should get over this in a few days.

Kina hanging out in the living room

All in all, Kina seems like a really good fit for us. So we're going to move forward with the adoption. There's some more paper work to fill out. We also need to double check that she's been spayed before we can take her. Hopefully it will just be another week or two before we have a dog. And hopefully Onyx doesn't get too mad at us when she moves in permanently.