Meet Debi, a husky formerly known as Queenie

This last Friday night, Arisa and I did a rash thing. We adopted a dog from a local rescue, the Berea Animal Rescue Fund. We had gone to visit a German Shepherd, which I love, but came away with a Siberian Husky instead.

Having moved to the west side, we had finally decided we’d get a dog. I’ve wanted one for quite a while but with the long commute it didn’t make any sense - 8-10 hours is way too long to leave a dog home alone in my opinion. Now, however, being just a 10-15 minutes away, we can come home at lunch, we are leaving later to get to work, and we are home sooner. So maybe 4 hours at time alone during the week, broken up by walks at lunch.

So we’ve been looking at websites like Adopt-A-Pet, Petfinder etc. and visited both the Berea facility as well as they Cuyahoga County shelter at least three times. We never quite found the right dog. We were also looking at puppies but couldn’t find the right one, or they were too far away.

Friday night I wanted to head to Berea Animal Rescue because they had a German Shepherd I wanted to see. We signed the waiver that’s good for letting us see animals for 24 hours, and as we were walking out to meet Paulie (the shepherd, they way they were putting away the other dogs made it clear this dog reacted to other dogs. In the neighborhood we are in that’s not going to fly, and it was a *big* German Shepherd, we probably would have had difficulty stopping it if it really wanted to do something.

“Queenie” caught our eye as she was the dog they cleared out from the cage we were going to see

Paulie in. Her tail was so far under her rump, she was clearly terrified. In the end, we didn’t even stay to see Paulie, went to the Cuyahoga County shelter didn’t find anything we wanted. On the way home, we talked about various dogs, and what we were looking for, etc, and we kept coming back to the husky. So we decided to go visit the husky one last time since BARF was open until 8pm on Friday nights. And we found Queenie, aka Debi, sitting in fear in her cage.

We did a meet and greet with her, and decided that we were going to adopt. Arisa in particular really wanted to get her out of that shelter. We decided after some discussion to take her home that night even though we weren’t prepared in order to give her some time to adjust to her new home before we had to leave for a work day. So we took her home Friday night, complete spur of the moment decision.

She is still really skittish though she has begun to eat and drink water, sometimes in front of us. She’s great on walks but is afraid of everything, or any loud sound. She shrunk away from a sewer in the street because the sound of the water scared her. She shrunk away from a tree with several loud and chirpy sparrows. Needless to say she is skittish around us as well.

We are looking forward to seeing her come out of her shell and show us who she really is. Already I can tell she is a chewer, and when she is really comfotable playful. I am also guessing that she is going to cause havoc. She already chewed up one plant, and was playfully jumping around last night. I plan to keep a running “diary” here: Meet Debi