Dog Stories: Bella, the newest new dog

Bella (aka Blondie, Goldie, Lily) was a stray who showed up at a young couple's property out in the Timbuktu that is Pleasant Grove on Sand Mountain outside of Guntersville. By the time I saw the plea for someone to take her on my facebook feed, the couple had already tried once to find someone to take her in. They didn't want another mouth to feed and she wasn't getting along with their dogs.

She seemed like a perfectly good dog to me, if not a full-blood lab, close to it or crossed with something very similar, like a Golden retriever. It always amazes me that perfectly good dogs get ignored in terms of requests for rehoming. So I went out to meet her. I saw some play behavior that was overbearing but she seemed like a pleasant, social dog otherwise. As a bonus, she had marks that looked like she had been spayed.

As it turns out, she's the most normal of the 4 dogs I currently have and probably the most normal dog I've had since the one I raised from a puppy, Wicca, many years ago. I suspect she was someone's family and hunting dog who followed her nose too far and got lost. However, there's an awful lot of dog-stealing and dumping, especially in that area, so perhaps someone took her with nefarious intentions and then decided to dump her.

She is shy of anyone trying to take hold of her collar. She has also shown an odd aggression toward other dogs while on a leash. I call it odd because when she was introduced to my dogs, Rufus was immediately hanging his head over her shoulders and trying to mount her incessantly (now I know how he exhibits overexcitement--and that he leans toward dominance). She never protested. She and Ginger were congenial. Zippy tried to attack her but backed off when Bella gave a spurt of gruffness and stood up tall. Her hair was never raised.

So why, when a dog barks at her from yards away when she's on a leash, does her hair go up? I tried to let her say hello to a harmless, though authoritative (it's her property after all), dog that is on the neighborhood walk and Bella lunged at her. It made me wonder if she wasn't nabbed by someone wanting to use her for dog fight bait, who then discovered that she'd been spayed and dumped her.

So she's not a perfect dog but she's not as rough a diamond as Rufus or Zippy. I recently discovered that one of her bellissima characteristics is that she loves children. She got wiggly on one neighborhood walk when there were toddlers up ahead (soon ushered onto a porch). Today I took her to the park where there was ball practice in progress and a group of youngsters wanted to pet her. She was happy to be fawned over. I could do that with Ginger, but Rufus would be terrified and I couldn't trust Zippy not to snap at someone (I truly have some work to do with Zippy).

Also, while walking, Bella just naturally stays at my side. She has picked up her pace some since our first walk and is livelier overall, but she has never come anywhere near pulling except for when she thought she needed to lunge at a harmless dog that wasn't threatening her. And there was once that she wanted to chase a robin and forgot she was on a leash.

She's fitting into my pack well and is proving an excellent playmate for Zippy. Rufus has long since gotten over the thrill of the first meeting. So I'm glad to have her and to have such a near-normal dog to take out. She gets only mildly car sick, whereas Ginger poops/pees in the car, Zippy is usually frantic and Rufus emits long sheets of drool.

Yet, I feel like there is some family out there that she is missing, some farm where she used to play fetch with kids, chase robins and squirrels or even go hunting with a man or a boy. I'm feeling like an unconventional, reclusive old lady with a Norman Rockwell dog. She's in the wrong painting. I'm more of a Whistler.