It was December of 2018 and the dog that would change our lives was there on Facebook.\u00a0 Hungry, sad, and neglected.\u00a0 Pam\u2019s high school classmate Beth had posted it.\u00a0 She had been watching her neighbors\u2019 dog deteriorate in their backyard. Since Ciara, the dog, had escaped from their yard a few times and chased the mail carrier and UPS driver, she spent most of her time on a chain.\u00a0 The only exception seemed to be when it was extremely cold outside.\u00a0 On those days, she was moved to a pen in the garage.\u00a0 After months of Beth\u2019s persuasion, the family had agreed to give her up and Beth was looking for someone to take her.\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure how long after the post first appeared, but one afternoon Pam finally told me about it. \u201cI know how much you like German Shepherds,\u201d she said, \u201cand having three dogs isn\u2019t much harder than having two.\u201d\u00a0 She was right, we\u2019d had three dogs before, and although getting a second dog is more work than having just one, adding a third isn\u2019t that hard.\u00a0 I had grown up with small dogs but have always had a soft spot for large ones.\u00a0 I had loved German Shepherds since childhood and Ciara, as the dog Beth had posted about was called at the time, was a German Shepherd mix.\u00a0 She had the color and markings of a German Shepherd, but was smaller and boxier in stature, with a solid white paw.\u00a0 In the photo on Facebook, she was so thin that you could see her ribs. Her eyes stared past the camera, empty, without hope.\u00a0 So, it took no time at all for me to say \u201cyes.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nTwo weeks later, on a cold Saturday morning in December, we made the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Wichita to Kansas City.\u00a0 We had a kennel in the back of my Dodge Durango and a leash.\u00a0 And no idea what to expect.\u00a0 Beth had told us the family with Ciara spoke Spanish and not much English.\u00a0 Would they understand what was going on?\u00a0 Would we drive all the way up there for them to tell us no?\u00a0 Fortunately, Pam had a couple of friends that spoke Spanish, so we had them on standby to translate if needed.\u00a0 We also took some cash in case there was a misunderstanding about \u201cfree.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 We stopped for shopping and lunch in Kansas City, giving ourselves one last chance to back out. We didn’t. So, we headed to Beth’s neighbor’s house to meet Ciara.\u00a0 It turned out there was less of a communication barrier than we expected; the family\u2019s oldest son was home, he spoke English, and the turnover went smoother than expected.\u00a0 The house was surrounded by a three-foot chain-link fence, and at the end of a metal chain, lying in a \u201cbed\u201d of dirt, was the dog from the Facebook post.\u00a0 But she was even sadder in person, thinner, lonelier.\u00a0 The look in her eyes was one of defeat, that this was going to be the best life she would know.\u00a0 Because she had a stocky neck, the two-inch collar she wore was buckled tight and had worn off some of her fur.\u00a0 When I reached for her to pick her up, she growled, that low, warning growl that says, \u201cdon\u2019t do that.\u201d\u00a0 I froze and realized it wasn\u2019t going to be the way we got her in the truck.\u00a0 Luckily, Pam was able to put the leash on her and lead her toward the truck.\u00a0 I managed to sneak up behind Ciara, pick her up, and get her into the kennel before she realized what was going on.\u00a0 A few hugs and some tears of joy from Beth. Then we pulled away from the curb with a traumatized dog in the back and no idea what came next.\u00a0 Was there a happy dog still in her?\u00a0 Would she get along with our other two dogs, Abbey and Grace?\u00a0 Had we made a mistake?\u00a0 Ciara wasn\u2019t a name we liked, in fact we didn\u2019t even know it was her name until we looked at the paperwork from her previous veterinarian.\u00a0 We had already decided to name her Scout.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was December of 2018 and the dog that would change our lives was there on Facebook.\u00a0 Hungry, sad, and neglected.\u00a0 Pam\u2019s high school classmate Beth had posted it.\u00a0 She had been watching her neighbors\u2019 dog deteriorate in their backyard. Since Ciara, the dog, had escaped from their yard a few times and chased the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-18","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thescoutstory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/18","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thescoutstory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thescoutstory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thescoutstory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thescoutstory.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thescoutstory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/18\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thescoutstory.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}