Charlotte's Story

Pet's name: Charlotte
Adopted by: Heather Dalton
From: A shelter in Columbia, Md.

I first saw Charlotte on a Thursday night in April 2008. I was regularly volunteering at a local shelter, and I was there to photograph the new dogs for Petfinder.com. It was cold, it was raining, and although I didn't know it at the time, Charlotte had just been surrendered by her owner several hours earlier. It wasn't the best first impression—she was soaking wet and seemingly unimpressed with everyone, as she didn't beg for attention or have as much personality as most dogs did. She wasn't even my favorite new dog of the night, so I had no idea yet that she was meant to be mine!

Two days later I was back at the shelter to help out at Saturday's open house adoption day, and I wanted to get a better photo of Charlotte for her Petfinder profile. I went into her kennel and sat near her. She didn't jump on me or run away from me; instead, she just came close to me and stood near me as if she were seeking protection. I realized she wasn't an uninteresting dog—she was an incredibly sensitive, intelligent, and frightened dog! I knew right then I wasn't going to let just ANYBODY take her home. At the end of the day no one had filled out an application to adopt Charlotte, so I offered to take her home until the next adoption day so that she wouldn't have to sleep in the noisy, smelly shelter.

The first thing Charlotte did when she got past my front door was to turn on her back and do a happy dance right there in the foyer. I guess she was already sold on me! Meanwhile, I found out that although she had less than NO leash manners, she was an incredible houseguest (and continues to be). She never touched a single thing in the house that wasn't meant for her, stayed off the furniture, and was already crate-trained. Score! Not everything that first week was easy, but before I knew it, I wasn't willing to give Charlotte back. She never set foot inside of the shelter again: she stayed home the following week while I went in to fill out her adoption paperwork.

Since then, she has been by my side at every step—she’s my shadow, and I couldn’t lose her if I tried. She’s a heck of a swimmer, a lightning-fast sprinter, and can turn on a dime. She loves riding in the car but makes for an absolutely terrible passenger. She sits six inches from the fireplace all winter, sleeps all the way under the covers at night, and loves to eat apples, kale, and broccoli. She protects me against absolutely everyone whether I want her to or not (including my very own parents, much to their dismay). She can learn a new trick in a weekend or less, will chase anything else that has fur, and peeks in all the shop windows when I take her on walks. She reminds me when it's time to feed her if I haven't already, and she knows she always gets one last treat every night before bed. She's smarter than I ever would've guessed, and much snugglier, too. She's everything to me, and I love her to pieces. I couldn't have picked—or, depending on how you look at it, simply happened upon—a better dog.

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If you adopted a pet from a shelter or rescue group and you'd like to share his or her story, please email me. I'd love to hear from you!

Angel's Adoption Story

Best friends

Pet's name: Angel
Adopted by: Karen and Jennifer Kali
From: Maryland Pug Rescue (now merged with Mid-Atlantic Pug Rescue)

A divorce in Angel's previous family brought her to a rescue group when she was a young dog. She recently celebrated her seventh birthday in her new home.

Before adopting our pug, we swore we would rename any dog that came to us as a “Pugsly” or a “Buster” or any other cutesy name. And while “Angel” is not our preference, it most definitely suits our sweet 7-year-old female pug. Angel came into our lives when she was 2.5 years old. We adopted her in May 2007. Even then she was more of an old lady than a young adult, content to sit and nap on our laps instead of run and play with other dogs. We immediately fell in love with Angel’s sweet, cuddly personality after meeting her briefly at an adoption event in Wheaton, Md. We submitted our paperwork and knew she would be ours, but that didn’t stop us from telling others at the adoption event, who openly talked about adopting her, that Angel was taken.

Angel was put up for adoption because the couple she called her family was getting a divorce. Angel went to live with one-half of the couple. (We never knew if she ended up with the husband or wife.) The expense of a dog for someone on a limited income proved to be too much, and Angel’s owner specifically cited the cost of having to pay for an apartment with a pet fee as a limitation to his/her finances. Thus, Angel was put up for adoption.

She was originally going to go to a shelter, but a friend of the owner suggested Angel go to Maryland Pug Rescue (now merged with Mid-Atlantic Pug Rescue) instead. Shelters are great places in terms of giving animals another chance, but they can also be terrifying places for some dogs. Knowing Angel and how anxious she can get, she would have been extremely upset in such an environment.

Luckily, she went to live with a Mid-Atlantic Pug Rescue foster family in Ellicott City, Md., that included two adults, three kids, three dogs, and one other foster pug awaiting his turn to be adopted. We were told that pugs typically stayed in a foster family for about a month to assess any behavior and health issues before being listed for adoption.

Overall, the adoption process—from submitting our first application to finally adopting Angel—took about three months. Before Angel, we were denied by various rescue groups along the east coast for various reasons. We found a pug at a shelter in Prince George's, Md., and rushed to adopted her, even leaving work in the middle of the day, but just as we were about to pay our adoption fee, her family came in looking for their lost pug. Because we found the process so frustrating, we reached out to the Maryland Pug Rescue for some advice. The president was very helpful, and over our conversations, she told us about Angel.

When we picked up Angel at her foster home in May 2007, she had no qualms about us. She rubbed up on us, happily jumped in our laps, and bolted into our car for the ride home. Her foster mom said that she could tell that Angel was meant to be ours by how happy she was to go home with us. With all our adoption misadventures, we feel the same way. Angel was meant to be ours.

When we brought Angel home there was a period of time that we had to work on housebreaking, walking on a leash, and even playing with toys. Apparently her family never walked her, because she would constantly wrap the leash around us, as if she had no experience with it. And she just couldn’t quite figure out what toys were—which seemed really sad to us. We also discovered that prior to joining our family, Angel probably had a broken bone in one of her paws that was left untreated.

The only regret we have with the adoption process is that we weren’t able to get any photos of Angel as a puppy. Having some photos would give us some idea of what she was like as a puppy and make us feel like we hadn’t missed out too much on those first two years. Still, it was our preference to adopt an adult dog that was already housetrained over those cute puppies.

Four and half years after bringing Angel home, she is still everything we could want. She’s cuddly, sweet, and extremely nice to our toddler. We just celebrated Angel’s seventh birthday. Our daughter specifically asked to have a birthday party for Angel, so that’s just what we did. Angel is such an important member of our family; we can’t possibly imagine what it would be without her.

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If you adopted a pet from a shelter or rescue group and you'd like to share his or her story, please email me. I'd love to hear from you!

Harry, Sally, Zico, and Diego's Adoption Stories

L to R: Zico, Harry, Diego, Sally

Pets' names: Harry, Sally, Zico, and Diego
Adopted by: Kate A. and family
From: The Animal Welfare League of Alexandria (Virginia) & Lollypop Farm, Humane Society of Greater Rochester (New York)

I used to be a dog person. I had grown up alongside dogs (an Irish setter and Labrador retrievers), and I certainly never expected to get a cat. I wasn’t crazy about the idea of having litterboxes in the house or feline footprints on the kitchen counters, and cats didn’t strike me as very interesting or friendly.

Today my family has four cats and three litterboxes.

Back in 2006, my husband and I were living in Maryland, not far from D.C. We had recently moved from a “no pets allowed” apartment to our own townhouse, and we wanted to get a pet. After briefly thinking about adopting a greyhound (well, I don’t know about my husband, but I considered it), we decided that we just didn’t have time for a dog. One day at work, I was talking to a cat-loving coworker, and she suggested adopting a cat. I don’t know why that conversation made such an impact on me, but I started thinking, “Yes, let’s adopt a cat!”

After we decided to go for it, I spent for hours online looking for the right cat. We went to a shelter nearby, the Montgomery County Humane Society, but we didn't "click" with any of the kitties. Then we tried the Animal Welfare League of Alexandria, and there we met Brad and Angelina, a pair who had come in together when their former owners moved. They were cute and seemed friendly and playful. We considered another pair—two orange brothers—but after spending a little time with everyone, we filled out an application for Brad and Angelina, and soon, we brought them home. We had filled a sheet of paper with possible “pair” names (“Brad” and “Angelina” definitely had to go), and we finally settled on Harry and Sally. (I love using “people names” for pets—how about you?) They settled in quickly, and soon ... I became a cat person.

"I'm Zico in a box. I'm Zico in a cardboard box."

Two years later, we were living in New York, and I was working at an animal shelter (where I still work today). Two four-month-old kittens named Cadbury and Snickers—they’d been abandoned and brought to the shelter—were temporarily living in my office, and I quickly fell in love. Now, I LOVE kittens, but I’ve met many kittens since, and none of them have produced the same reaction as these two, which was “MUST. ADOPT. THEM.” And soon, we had doubled our cat population. Cadbury and Snickers became Zico and Diego—we named them after soccer players because of the way they played with their cat toys.

So, in a span of several years, I’ve transitioned from “dog person” to “person who lives in a home with more cats than people." (The ratio is four to three.) Although we spend a LOT of money on chicken-flavored cat food and have found fang marks in many of our prized possessions, I don’t know what we’d do without our cats.