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R.I.P. State Fair Tippy
This is the part of keeping dogs I’ll never get used to.
It was 2006, and my quest for tenure at Indiana University had rounded the far turn and was heading into the home stretch. The semester had just cranked up and I was trolling for evaluators to come to my classes and keeping the pedal to the metal on research and writing.
In that panic, I had abandoned my sweet wife Tracy even more than usual. She was already neck deep in dog rescue. For years, she had been reporting to the Bloomington Animal Shelter, where she would inventory the dogs up for adoption and do her creative best to smoke out the blood of some pure breed. Then she would contact the rescue group for that breed and try to get them to take the dog that was plainly an “almost.”
Bloomington was a kill shelter, so we were always fostering as a bridge to save doggie lives. I’ll never forget how we got the dog that was just a mass of black mats. I was thinking this pooch was kind of ugly and I asked Tracy how long we would have this one?
“Forever. Her time was up.”
She had terribly crooked teeth and her shelter name was “Spook.” Tracy said she was kept in the back and there was little effort to find her a home before her date with the needle. She was not considered adoptable.
