After the loss of Zoe, my friend Brett decided it would be some time before she got another German Shepherd.  That being said, she recently decided to get a companion for Brutus, her Shi-Poo.  After much deliberation and searching, she finally rescued this little fluff ball.  Her name’s Maizy and, as Brett assures me, she’s quite smart and terribly sweet.

But I will anyway.

I truly do despise finding joy in the misfortune of others.

ROFLMAO!  You thought I was serious?

That is SO not true.  I think finding joy in misfortune is human.  It doesn’t have to be the misfortune of others — but it sure as hell feels better that way, eh?

Here’s the e-mail I got from Nathalie and the picture that shows what she’s talking about.

Glorious! I thought I’d share with you guys what it is like to live in my shoes. This is the scene that awaited me this morning when I woke up. I did not touch anything. It is all my Jack Russell Peyote’s doing. No staging. Just a dog with a vision (I guess!) I had to pry the thing off my seat with a spoon. And y’all thought you had problems…

My friend Brett had some bad news this week.  She had to have one of her dogs put to sleep early Sunday morning.  This is Zoe and here’s what Brett had to say.

Do you remember me mentioning my sick dog last week?  I had to put her down Sun morning at 3 am.  Needless to say, I have been suffering from a SERIOUS broken heart since then.  She was a German Shep and she was 10.  I adopted her from the human [sic] society when she was 8 weeks old.  Her stomach twisted and bloated.  They had to do emergency surgery on her.  When they opened her up, she was diagnosed with liver cancer and she would never have made it out of surgery.  They were having trouble regulating her heartbeat the whole time.

We as humans accept the fact that we will outlive almost all of our pets.  Our lifespan is longer than theirs and we understand from the beginning that we’ll see them grow from babies into adulthood and eventually into death.  It’s a measure of a person’s character when they can go through that and still have enough love and affection for animals to do it again and again.  Rescues like her are even more difficult in that sense as we adopted them to save their lives.

At least Zoe is no longer in pain.