Free at Last

When the 32 Great Danes were seized they owners went to court and the judge found that they were living in squalid conditions, lacking adequate food and water, and prohibited the owners from ever owning another companion animal. The former owners then surrendered 30 of the dogs but appealed the judge's ruling as to two of them, claiming that they were their service dogs. That's complete bullshit, of course, because none of these dogs had any training to be service dogs. Anyway, it meant that two of the dogs had to languish in the shelter for several more weeks until the appeal date came up.

That happened on Friday, justice prevailed, and the last two dogs were free at last. One of them had been slated to come to Green Dogs, so I made the drive over to King William county Saturday morning and brought home Galaxy.

He's said to be about nine months old and that seems like it could be correct. I brought him home and took him out to Daneland where we spent the afternoon together. I brought Serena and Della in with him after a while. They had barked at him through the fence, but that's just the game they play. Once I brought them in with him they mostly ignored him.

The one who didn't ignore him was Karma. She was in the small yard next to the house and could see him. They had lived together, of course, and she seemed to recognize him and was very interested in meeting him. I would have brought her over to Daneland, but she just had surgery a couple days ago and she didn't need to be roughhousing with a young dog. They did meet later when I brought him indoors, however, and it was interesting.

They look a lot alike, both are harlequins with a few stray merle markings. They also both have dichromatic eyes. Karma has one blue eye and one brown one. Galaxy has a blue eye and his second one is yellow or green. I suspect that Galaxy is actually Karma's pup rather than Diamond's as we had been told. When the two of them played together it reminded me very much of Della playing with her pups; she used a paw to knock him down and he readily went down and belly up for her very much like a puppy. Their interaction was much different from when Galaxy met Della and Serena.

Tomorrow I'm going to put Galaxy and Kaiser together out in Daneland in the hope that they will play and entertain each other. Kaiser was very playful with the shepherds in the dog yard today. He's older than Galaxy but the two of them are closer in age to each other than they are with anyone else around here.

Meeting Karma