Yesterday I learned that one of my photos of George garnered an Honorable Mention in the Puppy Love 2012 exhibit. There are lots of terrific photos in the show, looking at and celebrating moments in the human-canine experience. You can see them here. A portion of the proceeds from the show, which runs during the month of February at A Novel Experience in Zebulon, GA, goes towards animal rescue and assistance dogs for returning combat veterans.
Do I Smell Cookies?
George is charismatic, with personality to spare, which is conveyed in everything he is and does, but especially his eyes. He looks directly at you. He has expectations. Likes and dislikes. He can be very stubborn. I guess I’d say he has a strong sense of self. He is intensely bonded to my husband.
George wasn’t always George. Once he had no name and no future. Before that, I am sure he had a name and someone who cared about him. He may have been simply lost, with a worried owner who did not know where to find him.
This is something familiar to anyone who has ever rescued an animal out of a squalid high-kill ‘shelter’ or any other really bad situation. If a picture is worth 1000 words, then this is a really long post.
I wasn’t planning on rescuing one dog, much less two, but the skinny little tan dog somehow got into my peripheral vision, and from there he got his hooks in me. Those eyes. That face. He had a pal–a beautiful but frightened rat terrier. Couldn’t leave her behind. I was only able to photograph the two. There were many more. I wish I could have sprung them all…
Bella today.
I took the before pictures you see in the slide show below and left them on my hard drive and didn’t look at them for a year and a half, until I was writing “No quarter for cats“. George and Bella had long since become our dogs, each exuberantly themselves, and both of them favorite photographic subjects. To see the looks on their faces in these old photos was quite a shock. These were the same dogs, but not the same dogs. Their eyes, the ‘windows to the soul’–they looked like they were collapsing inward, like they knew and expected death was near, like they had almost no hope left. Rescuers who ‘pull’ dogs from places like Floyd County, GA will tell you how the dogs are often so frightened that they army-crawl to the rescuer’s car.
There are very few bad dogs, but a great many unlucky ones.
George and Bella came so close to sharing their fate.
Every day, I am grateful that they are alive, and think of how close they came.
Every day our lives are diminished by the tragic state of our ‘sheltering’ system.
Every day brings another chance to put it right.
The closing reception for the Puppy Love 2012 exhibit will be February 25th at 6 pm at A Novel Experience in Zebulon, GA.
