Welcome, Clarence!

A house without a dog doesn’t feel like a home to me.  (Austin likes having a dog but doesn’t quite feel the same way.)  Ben is absolutely irreplaceable, of course, and that fact is so obvious to me that I know getting another dog isn’t about trying to replace him.  So when I was on vacation last week I started looking at dogs that need a home in our area.  And I saw Clarence.  He’s a 1-2 year-old black lab mix that showed up at high kill shelter near Richmond in the middle of November.  A rescue brought him into a foster home until they could find a permanent home for him.  There’s no history on him, but he seems pretty happy and well-adjusted to me, and was already neutered and house trained by the time he got to the shelter.  I wonder what his story is.

In any case, the day after we returned from visiting my mom in Florida, Tucker and I went to visit him in Richmond, and unsurprisingly, he came home with us.

He is very different from Ben. He’s much smaller—maybe 40 lbs to Ben’s 75 lbs, and as he fills out a little might get up to 50 lbs. He’s also an athlete, so quick that it’s hard to get good pictures, though he is not hyper. He manages the 36” vertical leap up to the kid’s treehouse platform easily. And when he walks around the house he’s light on his feet like a cat. He likes food a lot but he doesn’t inhale it and so far has not eaten a single textile product or other much grosser stuff. He still jumps some, and he chews a lot, everything, all the time. He is quite a snuggler, too.  Welcome, Clarence!