We’ve had Moon since 2004/01/20. At the time, Cindy was working in the grooming department at Petsmart. It was one of the Saturdays she had to work, and also a dog adoption day. This guy comes in and says he has a stray, and would they take her? Cindy tells him that Petsmart doesn’t take dogs, and while the dog adoption service might, it was going to be hard, and oh by the way, what kind of dog is it? The guy tells her that it’s a 6 month old Golden Retriever puppy.

At this time, we had only Anvil, my German Shepherd Dog. We had talked about getting another dog, and Cindy really wanted a Golden. So she says “Well, I know someone who might be interested, can you bring her in?”. The guy says “Oh, she’s in the car, let me get her.” The guy brings the dog in, and Cindy decides that the Universe has sent her a Sign, and that Sign is this dog. She tells the guy to hang on a moment, let her make a phone call.

She calls me and relates the story, and I tell her if it’s the dog she really wants, then go ahead. About the only detail that’s wrong is there’s no way this dog is 6 months old, it’s more like 3-4 years. That’s fine with us, but some people apparently have NO idea how to judge a dogs age. There’s this whole back story from the guy about how the dog was roaming the neighborhood, no one wanted her, winter was coming on, yada yada yada.

So for a dog that was roaming, she’s remarkably well trained. She sits, kinda stays, is very polite, doesn’t jump, etc. She has two minor flaws, one of which is that she doesn’t know how to play (which disappointed Anvil greatly), and the other is that off-leash, she tends to decide to take her self for walks. A couple times this meant driving around trying to find her, so whereas at the time I could trust Anvil off-leash, Moon became strictly an on-leash dog. This is only an issue because we live on a two-lane street with a 55 MPH speed limit.

Our guess is that she may have belonged to some older people, and was never allowed to play, or just never learned. She won’t chase a ball, play tug or frisbee, and when another dog tries to get her to play, she seems to take it as aggression, and cuts loose on them. She’s fine with other dogs, and with her disposition, would make a great therapy dog.

So far, Moon has had a pretty good life with us. We did find she had heartworms when we got her, but she’s free of them now. After a few months of treatment, you could really see a difference when she walks up a hill. Whereas before she would slow down and be panting somewhat, now she just keeps going. Other than the skin grafts mentioned later, she’s had no major medical events.