Opinion : Do Dogs go to Heaven?

Buddy where he THOUGHT he belonged, on a lap!

Warning: contains warm sappy thoughts about a dog...

Yesterday we put the website to a sort of test, asking for help in locating our dog. Thanks to everyone's help we were able to locate him within a couple hours of the e-mail being sent out! We had comments sent in with information about him and a detailed phone call, thanks to everyone who had spotted him and told us about it!

It's amazing how big a dog can look when he's trying to crawl up in your lap, or when he's putting his head on your lap for attention, or he's nudging your elbow while you are trying to type stories on your computer and how annoying he can be when he wants you to just touch him so he can sleep on the floor at your feet...and how small they look beside the road.

A few months ago, we had a plumber out to do some work, and this was the first time Buddy's territory had been challenged. He let the guy know right away that if he wanted to talk to us, he'd have to go through Buddy first. It's those moments, that you promise the dog a steak, and realize that if he needed to he'd probably die to save your life.

Buddy was that kind of dog. He looked like a full bred Chocolate Lab, he'd been trained, he was well behaved, house broken and the little guy took about 5 minutes to worm his way into our hearts.

He was wandering in the road near our house when he found us...he was hungry and lonely. Within an hour, he was in the house, and running from person to person, wagging his tail like crazy. We found out then that he still thought he was small enough to sit on your lap.

Thanks to the website, we were able to at know what happened to him and able to retrieve him for the last time.

That's the downside of pets.

I think back to memories of our city pets that seemed to always have a run in with an animal larger than they were, while ours were properly chained up, it seemed like we came home to injured dogs and even a cat.

I remember my dad saying, "They weren't made to be chained up, they can't get away when they need to", I think what he was really saying is that he felt bad that he wasn't there to save the animal from whatever just hurt it.

Every night since the end of August, when Buddy arrived at our door, we let him out at bedtime, to do the whole bedtime routine, then and he'd knock at the door as soon as he was ready to come back in. A couple nights ago, he didn't knock.and we thought that was odd, but the weather was nice, and he has crawled into the shed to tough it out before, so we didn't think a lot about it.

Then the sun rose and still no dog.

We used to shelter the kids when a pet had to be put down, or when probably an Eagle had carried them off, or something else caught them, with ideas that they found other people to love them.

Now that the kids are bigger, they quit believing in the Tooth Fairy, and Santa, and that their dog has found another home.

The girls had always wanted lots of pets, and as soon as we moved to the country, stray cats moved in, relatives called to bring out their dogs, strangers dropped off their dogs, so to some extent we've been running a rescue for pets on our farm...most of the time we keep them, sometimes we pass them on to the shelter.

As soon as we saw Buddy, we knew he'd be part of our family, now he will be one of the most missed pets we've had at our place in a while.

So long Buddy, tell the other pets "Hello!", and if you see another stray, as sweet as you were, show him where our house is, there's some girls here that need a furry hug.