Happy Tails
A Ray of Sunshine for Shadow
Shadow— an apt name for a dog who was kept locked in a bedroom nearly 24/7, suffering for who knows how long from a painfully infected eye (that eventually required surgery to remove). When she came into the Pet Haven system, this 65-pound, one-eyed, aggressively barky black Lab fairly quickly blew 
through several foster homes. Her final foster mom, Laura, described her as “out of control, wild, barky…She couldn’t be contained.”
The adoptive families weren’t exactly taking numbers to take on this challenge.
Then in June, after four months with no takers, “Donna M. fell from the sky,” Laura said. Reading Donna’s email of interest in adopting Shadow, Laura cried. She called the Wisconsin artist, who lives three hours away from the Twin Cities (normally enough to disqualify an applicant, but these were dire circumstances) to prepare Donna “by saying almost nothing good about [Shadow].”
Feeling “cocky” after having had three troubled rescue dogs before, Donna figured she had it in her to work through any problem and drove down to meet this special-needs dog.
They met at Downtown Dogs in Minneapolis and walked around the block. The whole while, Donna said, Shadow had “a barking tantrum,” somewhat akin to an over-stimulated autistic child in a meltdown.
“There was almost a rhythm to it. She just didn’t know how not to bark. I felt so bad for her, but I still felt it was something she could unlearn.” Shadow just “had a lot to say because she’d never been listened to before,” Donna said. She packed up her new family member and drove back to Wisconsin.
The next morning, though, Donna’s harried voice over the phone to Laura indicated she may have felt she’d made a BIG mistake!
“She was driving us crazy,” Donna said.
Laura gave Donna every opportunity to bring back Shadow, but “I was secretly hoping she wouldn’t take me up on it.” And she didn’t.
Now, thanks to Donna’s patience and consistency—as well as their four-mile-a-day walks on her 45 acres of land, the Great Lake in which the year-and-a-half-old Shadow swims like an Olympian and the afternoons spent sunbathing with her new dad, Matt—positive changes are happening, and Donna celebrates each small victory. “Shadow is a handful,” she admits, but there are ever more moments when her taut body language relaxes and she’s “like a normal dog.”
And Shadow is teaching Donna some important life lessons, too. “I have to use my steely look,” she said, to gain dominant status in her new pack, shared by 10-year-old collie mix Minky. Now, thanks to Shadow’s lessons, she can look other people in the eye and say, in essence, “Don’t you bark at me!”
“It’s all a blessing,” she said. “I know someday I’ll look back and say [of adopting Shadow], this is one of the best things I’ve ever done.”
“All our dogs should be so lucky,” said Laura of the wonderful change of circumstances in Shadow’s life, from a locked bedroom prison to her very own Shangri-la. “This is a major victory for Pet Haven.”
And also for one special dog named Shadow who is finally having her day.
© 2008 Sid Korpi