Tue 15 Mar 2011
Our New Dog
Posted by Ken Atherton under Daily Life
1 Comment
This is Sarge.
After saying for years that we weren’t going to get a dog, we got a dog. Partly we did this because the kids are old enough to deal with it, and partly it’s just because we love pets, even when we say we don’t. 
Sarge has been at our house since January 23rd. We got him from a local rescue shelter called Retails that has a small shop inside Washington Square Mall. He had been dropped off at the Indianapolis animal control center because his previous owners lost their house.
We had briefly considered getting a puppy from a pet store, but after thinking about it for a while, we decided not to take the chance that we would be supporting a puppy mill. We started by searching on PetFinder, which is a great resource for finding a rescue animal. There are literally hundreds of dogs and cats within an hour’s drive of Indy that can be adopted. We found Retails this way and went over there to look at a different dog, who wasn’t at the store that day.
But that’s how we met Sarge. He’s a four-year-old Puggle (a beagle/pug mix). He’s about the size of a beagle, but his features are about halfway between a pug’s and a beagle’s.
He’s a good dog, and seems to have been fairly well-trained by his previous owners. He was sick the first few days at our house, and got fairly dehydrated. He’s recovered well though, and has moved right in.
Now that it’s starting to warm up again in Indy, we’ve started taking walks with him in the evening, and so far, he’s been able to outlast us. We took him on a 5.5 mile walk the other night, and after we got back, Sandi and I were ready to lay down, but he was still ready to play.
We do have a little work to do, though. We did have a little bit of trouble with making sure he goes outside to potty at first, but he got over that pretty quickly. The one problem we have now is that he like to dig in the trash when we are out of the house. It’s funny because he obviously know he isn’t supposed to do it — that’s why he waits until we leave! When we get back, we can tell he’s been in the trash before we even see it because he greets us at the door, slinking around and acting sorry.
Yeah, this happened this morning.
