A Girl’s Best Friend

On December 24th, my sweet fur baby Ava lost the battle with IMHA.

She fought hard to overcome the disease and as much as I wanted to ask her to keep fighting, she was just too tired.

I’ve thought so much about her these last few days, what she brought into my life and what I hope I brought to hers. So, I wanna tell you a story about a beautiful, stubborn, clumsy, temperamental mutt that found me and made me her human.

When I moved away to college, one of the biggest things I missed was having an animal. So several years ago when I said goodbye to apartment living and moved into a house, I started looking for a dog.

I checked a few different shelters, met and played with a lot of dogs, but I knew I didn’t want to take home the first wriggling ball of fur that caught my eye. I wanted to find the dog that would truly be mine.

At one shelter I wandered around and petted a few pups but none of them connected with me. Right as I went to leave I decided to take one last look around…and there she was.

Sitting in a cage barking at me and wagging her tail was a shepherd-looking dog. The sign posted outside her cage called her Melena and told me she was about 9 months old. There was something about her that vaguely reminded me of a dog I’d had as a kid. I took her into a little yard to play. She ran around the enclosure, jumping and grinning the way only a dog can, playing tug-of-war with a toy.

At some point she stopped and walked up to me and I knelt down to pet her. She just laid her head in my hands and sat there. I knew she wanted to come home with me.

Through the adoption process, the shelter hinted that she hadn’t been in the best shape when she first came to the shelter. She has also previously been adopted out but returned a couple of weeks later. I couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want this sweet girl. But I was going to find out.

I renamed her Ava and she became the world’s best cuddle buddy. It wasn’t long before I found out that as much as she loved me, Ava was not a people person. Introducing her to people soon started to be accompanied with the warning,  “She’s never bitten anyone but…”

In fact, the first time I took her with me on a visit home my little brother was determined to play with her. My mama and I both warned him several times to give her space. He ignored both our warnings and her growls, so she eventually snapped in his face. It took months for them to stop being afraid of each other.

Ava wasn’t exactly the “people person” of dogs, but she was undoubtedly my dog. While I was discovering the general distrust she had for people, I also discovered she was fiercely protective and extremely possessive over me. While play fighting, my then-boyfriend (now husband) caused me to cry out. Instantly, Ava began barking and growling at one of the few humans she liked. When Scott would bring his dog Jackie over, I was not allowed to pay attention to her. If I did, Ava immediately shoved her way in-between. It was clear that as far as Ava was concerned, I belonged to her and no one was allowed to mess with me.

She earned many nicknames over the years, one of them was Houdini. A few days after I got her, I got a text from one of my roommates while I was at work. She had come to find Ava sitting on the porch instead of shut up in our fenced backyard. I checked all over the yard for holes or gaps in the fence but found none. The next day, she did it again. So I put her in the yard, closed the door, and stood near the backdoor out of her sight. A few minutes later I heard the latch on the gate clatter and around the corner she came. Ava had figured how to work the latch and let herself out. But she never went any further than our front porch ( and I figured out how to put a lock on the gate). She also once figured out how to open the door on a dog crate to let her sister Jackie out (Jackie had injured her back and needed to be created while she healed). Perhaps the most mind-boggling trick she learned was how to unlock and open the dog door on her little sister Lady’s dog pen. The latch on this door had a button that had to be depressed and then twisted to release the lock. We never figured out how she managed that one.

My stories about this dog are as endless as my love for her. She was my Big Baby, my cuddle buddy, my guardian, and my best friend. Making the decision to end her suffering was the hardest choice I’ve ever made. What I know is that it wasn’t my choice that day at the shelter, it was her’s. She found me when I needed her and my life was never the same. I don’t know why she picked me, but I hope she knows how lucky I was that she did.