I spend a lot of time making excuses for my dog.
She cowers away from friendly, dog-loving people who simply want to scratch her head or kiss her face — and nearly everyone wants to because she’s very cute and she’s a yellow Lab and Labs, of course, are lovers.
Yet mine does not want their freely offered love.
It makes me sad. Because she really does love — well, love and affection. She adores kissing a face, having her head scratched and her belly rubbed.
But she wants to kiss my face. Or my husband’s, or my kids’, or a few select others who spend regular time in her world.
Probably not yours — not right away, at least. Stay with us a couple of days, though, and she’ll come around.
She has trust issues.
Pat Pinkham, Bangor’s animal control officer, picked her up as she hobbled pitifully around a rough Bangor neighborhood during a brutal stretch of 20-degrees-below-zero weather about four years ago. She was 2 months old, frozen, and had a broken front leg.
She clearly had been badly abused, and Pat tucked her into her truck and took her to the Bangor Humane Society, where staff cared for her and a vet pondered whether to amputate the badly injured leg.
Instead, they opted to keep her confined with limited movement for six weeks to see whether the leg would heal on its own. It did, sort of, and in time her picture was posted on the humane society website as up for adoption.
The next day I was standing at the shelter waiting for the doors to open and after a meet and greet and some paperwork, Cupid, as they had named her, was on her way home with me and renamed Abby.
Today the Bangor Humane Society is full of cats and dogs. Some, like Abby, have been saved from abusive situations, some are there by circumstances of an owner’s death, relocation or economic reasons, and some simply were abandoned.
Summer’s a tough season at an animal shelter. “Kitten season,” for example, doesn’t just run through the spring. It lasts into September and with the kittens come the moms, all in need of homes — a second chance.
Employees at animal shelters work hard to do all that they can. They face situations that would be too trying and emotional for many of us.
But no animal shelter is ever going to solve the problem of pet overpopulation, abuse and neglect.
That takes a community and neighbors willing to intervene when they see the man down the road living with 25 cats, many of them sick.
It takes financial commitment to support low-cost spay and neuter clinics.
It takes generosity from those who can afford to donate pet food and kitty litter to organizations that help lower-income pet owners keep their pets through economic hardship.
It takes meaningful legislation with the appropriate funding in place to allow the state of Maine to actually inspect breeding facilities and to effectively investigate and prosecute those who run puppy mills.
And it takes people willing to choose adoption and rescue.
Those are the conversations that need to occur in order for anything to ever change, even a little bit.
Abby might never get to the point that she showers strangers with dog kisses, but she’s made progress in four years. She still barks when throngs of teenagers blow through the house, pretty much every day, but they ignore her and she lies down with a heavy sigh.
I know she is a good girl.
We provide foster care for mama cats and their kittens, and Abby gladly accepts each and every one and has on a few occasions proved her patience by allowing a kitten or two to nap on her back or nestle into her belly.
I suppose to many she’s not perfect. To me she is, and when I see her snoring peacefully at the end of the bed I know that she feels safe, and even now, four years after her terrible ordeal, that warms me up inside.
She loves my kids, she wiggles her bum off every time we come home, she’s my very best walking companion, she obeys beautifully most of the time, and she keeps my feet warm in the winter.
So, please, excuse her if she seems a little afraid if you reach for the top of her head — like her limp, it’s just a remnant of her past.