Me with Georgia, a Retriever Who Loves to Fetch Logs
Hi. I’m Dan Lutts.
I’m a freelance writer by trade and an animal lover by choice.
I became an animal lover later in life.
Growing up, I never had any four-legged companions. But when my brother, Ralph, who is a naturalist and environmentalist, moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Meadows of Dan, Virginia, he acquired a kitten that a friend of his had found compacted in a bale of trash at the town dump. Ralph adopted the kitten and named him Fate.
When I went to visit Ralph, I fell in love with Fate and wanted to have a cat of my own. But I couldn’t because my landlord in Watertown, Massachusetts, wouldn’t allow pets in his apartment building.
And then I met Lisa, my future wife. She’d had cats as companions all her life. When we moved to the Adirondack Mountains in New York, where Lisa became Director of Marketing and PR for Fort Ticonderoga, we rented a house. Our landlord had a cat and was more than willing to let us have a cat, too.
So I became a cat lover.
And then I became a dog lover as well. Faith, our fearful dog, brought this change into my life, when she showed up at our house in Tennessee after spending a month in the nearby woods. She was a starving Lab/Rotweiller pup whose so-called “caretakers” had dumped her in the woods when she was two months old. We couldn’t call the animal control officer to get her and take her to the pound because they euthanize animals that aren’t claimed or adopted after three days. And we didn’t think that Faith, who was an innocent little pup, deserved that fate.
Since then, Lisa and I have adopted another dog, Mac, from a fostor home and also rescued several dogs and helped find homes for them.
I’ve had a steep learning curve about dogs because of Faith. When she first came to us, we thought Faith was shy and — with a little love and attention — would become a normal dog who would go for walks and for rides in the car with us. But it turned out that Faith is a fearful dog who’s afraid of just about everything under the sun.
Being Faith’s guardian has opened me up to the larger picture of animal welfare. It really bothers me the way people treat and abandon the dogs, cats, and other animals that depend on them for food, shelter, and love. And the recession had made things worse, as people whose homes get forclosed abandon their dogs and cats when they leave. No-kill shelters can’t keep up with the influx and kill shelters euthanize huge numbers of innocent and helpless dogs and cats each month. (The municipal shelter here euthanizes several hundred a month.)
Four of our five companions — two dogs and two cats — are rescue animals. At least we’re making a difference in their lives.
I created Dog Tidbits to share with you some of my experiences with Faith and Mac and some of the knowledge about dogs and information I’ve found related to dogs.
These are my “dog tidbits” — juicy morsels I hope you will enjoy reading.
