Dog’s Name and Age: Zoey, 13 years
Nicknames: Angel Face, Big Girl
Adoption Story: We had lost our 11-year-old Lab/Shepard mix to cancer and needed to fill the hole in our hearts. I looked for a young dog on Petfinder.com for a couple of months and when I came across the picture of Zoey (she was initially called “Miss Dixie” by the rescue group that had pulled her out of a high-kill shelter.) I knew she was the one. Something about her little face just spoke to me. I contacted the rescue, filled out an adoption application, and scheduled a time to go meet her. She was 4 months old and when I first saw her, she was running around with several other dogs in the foster’s backyard. She stopped and looked up at me, I picked her up, sat with her on my lap for an hour and never put her down until I buckled her into a doggie seat belt in my car. I still have a vision of her little face watching me the entire drive home.
She loves going for walks and meeting people. We call it “taking Zoey for a sniff” as she loves to smell every odor on the ground or in the air. When we lived in California, she loved going to the beach. Since she needed a lot of exercise, I decided to start training her for agility when she was 18 months old. My naive and unrealistic goals for our very first agility trial was to first have at least one clean run and secondly, to qualify a run. We did both!
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We participated in agility trials until she was 4 years old and diagnosed with epilepsy which ended her agility career.
She has wonderfully expressive eyes and always looks happy. She is the best companion I have ever had. Right now, we are taking every day we have with Zoey as a gift. She was diagnosed with a tumor in her lower right lung in August 2020. Because of her age and since she doesn’t seem to have any pain (just a slight cough), we elected not to put her through the trauma of surgery to remove it.