Love Has No Age Limit When It Comes to Rescue Animals: Giving a Senior Dog a Second Chance by Pilar Clark
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Turns out love at first sight is a thing. It happened while I was casually scrolling through Facebook posts from friends, rescue pages and the like, totally not looking for a dog to adopt, mainly because our resident rescue, Haggis, is the furry love of my life.
Yet all of sudden, there he was ... Fergus, the sweetest frosted fox I’d even seen. I was smitten with every single graybie on his cute little 15-year-old head and knew without a doubt that I loved him. Once I showed his adoption profile to my family, we all knew he was meant to be ours. That he was blind, deaf and toothless didn’t even matter. Welcoming him to our family did.
He came to us with a laundry list of ailments – a missing lower jaw, terrible spondylosis, a spine that zigged and zagged like the lines on a road map, grade 4 luxating patellas – all stemming from a lifetime of neglect and abuse. But you’d never know it from the way he gently rested his scruffy, pink-tinged snoot on our faces as we’d lay on the floor nose to nose to sing to him or how he’d press his forehead against ours, leaning deep and long against us. He smelled like vanilla cupcakes and coconuts, with fur so soft it felt like dreams.
The night he came home, we made him a promise: to make whatever time he had left the best damn time he’d ever had. And I’m so happy and grateful that we did. We only had Fergus for two weeks, but in that time he experienced all kinds of firsts:
- A family who deliriously loved him.
- A dog brother.
- Christmas (with his own stocking!).
- A sweet 16 birthday party.
- Walkies with wheels (in his very own doggie stroller).
- A warm bed.
- Good food.
- All the kissies and ear skritches he could ever want.
You could tell he knew he was loved, and that in his heart of hearts, he understood it was safe to let go. We knew that adopting a senior dog would be challenging, and never asked for, nor expected, guarantees regarding Fergus' health or longevity. We only asked to love him for whatever time he had left on this earth, and are at peace knowing that we did that and more.
Meet you at the rainbow bridge, sweet boy. You were so brave.
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