My buddy, Jack

It's been a hard few days, which is why I haven't had a chance to post in a while.

This weekend we had to place our youngest dog, Jack, in a new home. It started about a week ago.

Jack is a cocker spaniel; a honeymoon baby that we purchased at the mall pet store after he was deeply discounted, apparently because no one would buy him. He was adorable, friendly, and was getting to an age where it would be pretty unlikely that he'd find a good home.

We took him in and fell in love with him right away. He got along great with our other two dogs and he brought a lot of life to the house. He was always a little off…acting a little bit like an abused dog (perhaps he was at some point). He would growl occasionally for no reason and would get fearful and submissive if he thought you were upset, such as if you caught him peeing in the house during potty training.

So he had his quirks, but he was a good dog and he was a lot of fun. Lately, he has been particularly energetic and difficult to deal with, and I was getting frustrated with him. After a long day of Jack getting in trouble, I tried to make amends right before bed. I got down on the floor with him, pet him for a while, and then leaned in to give him a kiss on the head.

Out of nowhere, he bit me. It was hard enough to break the skin on my arm and cause some pretty significant bruising. If I had been the baby, it could have broken a bone or left a scar – the thought of which made me physically ill.

He has always been great with the baby, and he was clearly her favorite dog, but we just couldn't take the chance of something happening down the road…maybe in a week, maybe five years from now. If it was just me, I would have kept him. The little guy weight 20 pounds and isn't exactly menacing. But with the baby in the house, we really didn't have any choice but to send him away.

Next came the task of finding a home for an apparently aggressive dog. Most shelters wouldn't even take him and I was getting to the point where I was afraid he would need to be euthanized.

Meanwhile, as the days passed, I was keeping Jack on a leash and at my side…which made things harder as he and I were joined at the hip while we were trying to sort this out. He was being a good dog for me and every night I spent with him completely broke my heart.

As always, I was spending about an hour a night with him outside, playing fetch and running around. He has completely boundless energy, which I think probably contributes to him getting a little stir crazy sometimes.

By an unbelievable stroke of good fortune, my mother-in-law managed to find someone at her job that was a perfect fit. He had grown kids and lived on a farm, complete with other dogs and assorted barnyard animals. Jack has never showed any aggression towards animals and his potential new family were familiar with dogs (not to mention farm animals) and could create a perfect environment to rehabilitate Jack – lots of land, activity, and attention, so he would be able to blow off steam outside and come in to a good home.

In my mind, even before we learned about this family, I believed that a farm was the very best place in the world for him. So my fingers were quite crosses as we worked towards getting him placed in his new home.

The new family talked it over and decided eagerly that they wanted him. We were thrilled – making the very best of a very crummy situation.

So I took Jack on one last trip to the vet to make sure he was healthy and had all of his shots. He could tell something was wrong and acted completely terrified at the vet. Once they took him to the back room, though, I was told he was happy and friendly. Clearly the vibes I was putting off in those final days weren't going unnoticed – in fact he had seemed downright annoyed by the tears in my eyes when we played our last game of fetch. To me it was goodbye, but to him, I was just being stupid.

After the vet, I met my father-in-law, who took Jack the rest of the way…which I will always appreciate to no end. I could barely hold it together in the gas station parking lot during the handoff, so I'm sure I would have been a wreck if I had to watch him go with his new family.

Later that night, I got an update. He was a little uneasy at first, but after some treats and some fetch, he jumped right into the car with his new family. I'm so happy for the little guy and hope his new home is more suited to his personality than his old suburban one.

So, to close, I figure I'll just share a few things I'll never forget about Jack:

He loved life. His tail was always wagging and he was always so excited about everything. We should all be more like that.

He was a fetch machine. Once I threw him a snowball into a very snowy backyard and went inside. That dog came to the door more than an hour later with the thing in his mouth. When we played with the other dogs I had to hold him back to let the others get the ball sometimes. He was a competitor. 

He loved the baby. Jack used to sit in my lap and let Babe-O tug on his big, floppy ears.   If she was too rough, he would bite his own ear and pull it out of her grasp.

He was my buddy. His name was Jack, but he knew when I said "Buddy," I meant him. He used to sleep in the crook of my arm at night, until we began the no-dogs-in-the-bed policy. Then he started sleeping on the floor right next to me. I was glad to learn that his new family plans to name him "Buddy."

The last few days were just awful – really, really hard and emotionally draining. I guess sometimes it's hard to be a dog person.