Blog / Random thoughts and musings.

Sophie

We got Sophie soon after she came into the LRR system. The director actually only had Sophie for a few days to check temperament and get her fixed and tatooed/microchipped. Sophie was a stray taken in by the shelter. She already had some basic obedience and knew sit, and down. She was only about 50 lbs, so definitely quite a difference from Webster. However she was also a big lapdog. She loved nothing more than to snuggle right next to you and lay on her back while you just keep petting her. When she first came here, she was quite timid, but I think playing with our dogs, she’s learned a lot more confidence. Whoever had Sophie before LRR really spoiled her. When we first got her, she didn’t really eat her dog food much and would be the first in line for our human food scraps, so we think her last family probably gave her lots of human food. However she learned pretty quickly that if she didn’t eat her dog food, she was going to go hungry. Now she eats her food almost as fast as our dogs do. But she still begs like a champ.I think she’s the first foster we’ve had that’s shown absolutely no interest in the tennis ball! I find it so hard to believe. When we first got Quinn, he wasn’t interested in the ball, but after a while, he started to love it, so I figured after a little while, she’d start to show more interest in retrieving….nope, not at all. She does love to antagonize our dogs when they’re fetching though. She’ll run right at them and body slam them if possible and block their way back to us. It irritates Sheba to no end, and Sophie has knocked Quinn down a couple of times because of his bad leg. But she settles down after about 10 minutes of playing and will just wander around outside sniffing things.

We’ve noticed that she seems to want to move up in our family pack hierarchy. She keeps trying to dominate Sheba and she’s marked a couple of times in the house, but crating her during the day seems to have fixed the problem. Sophie is such a silly girl and is definitely a velcro dog. She’ll stick close to whoever is at home. She climbs (not a good jumper) onto any couch or bed you’re on to lays right next to you for security. Whenever we’re petting a different dog, Sophie will come right to us and butt her way in for her share of attention. She loves to sleep on the bed, but due to the alpha issue with Sheba, we make her sleep on the floor. It is a bit of a struggle. I’ll get on the floor and coax her off the bed. As soon as I get off the floor she’ll use that time to jump right into the bed. It usually takes about three tries before I can hop into bed without her jumping in first.

Sophie has definitely given us a couple of humorous stories. One time she was crawling under our bed to probably get a dog toy and got stuck halfway! Mike had to lift up the bed while I pulled her out. She was just fine, but it was a bit ridiculous. Then a couple weeks late, we woke up in the middle of the night to Sophie whining and moaning. I wasn’t sure what the problem was, so I got off the bed to see what happened. Apparently during the night, she had wiggled around the blankets and wedged herself half under the bed again (back end this time)! So I pulled her out gently and she went right back to sleep…silly thing. She also seems to have no problems with water. I was in the hottub on the far side and Sophie came up to the tub. She saw me and jumped right into the water! I grabbed her and lifted her out of the tub, but she didn’t seem to mind her dunking at all. Actually, when I moved back to the other side, she looked like she was getting ready to jump back in again!

When Sophie came to us, she was a bit timid and so I think she attached herself to me pretty quickly. I love giving tons of attention to our dogs, so she probably loved all the petting and kissing she got. But it got to the point where if she couldn’t find me in the house she would become frantic. She wouldn’t leave my side even if someone was pulling pretty firmly on her leash or collar. Since she got so attached, we thought it was a good idea to move her to a new foster home. So we moved her on Sunday and got our next foster dog.

Looks like Sophie is going to get adopted this week by an elderly couple. They came to visit her at our house and really liked her size and personality. They seem like really nice people and I’m sure Sophie will love the attention she’ll get as the only dog in their house.