Picking Daisy

Daisy's mom got a new puppy and no longer wanted Daisy, so my friend adopted her about 4 days ago. The problem is that Daisy runs like the wind as soon as she spies an open door, and my friend lives on a busy street with an unfenced front yard. When he left the house, Daisy scooted out with him and took off running -- into the street.

Yesterday, when B came to change out two more light fixtures, he asked me if I was still looking for a playmate for Mia, something we had talked about often over the course of several months. I said yes, but not seriously and/or actively, and B said he had a dog, a 16-month-old Jack Russell terrier, that he took in and could not keep. Did Mia and I want to meet Daisy and become her adoptive family?

Daisy came over today to meet us, spent a full hour exploring every inch of the house and yards, figured out how to use the doggy run for potty purposes, and even met the chi-wah-wah next door who bellies under his wooden fence to talk to Mia. The pack of really big dogs behind us are not taking Daisy's presence too well, but they growl and bark at everything, scratching at their wooden fence and banging into it repeatedly. Daisy isn't very big, but she has a big dog mentality: she stood her ground inside "her" new fence and barked right back at the pack.

We're going to see how this goes, but I expect that by the weekend, Mia and Daisy will have figured out how to make this work. They have growled at each other, but also nuzzled, played, and shared Mia's best toy, Boy. Daisy knows the doggie door and we'll see how she does during the night.

The best part so far is that Daisy likes all the pieces of dog food Mia won't eat, which means maybe I won't have to sweep up the discarded food and replace it with Mia's preferred pieces. It gets expensive, buying bags of food so Mia can pick and choose the specific pieces she'll eat, while tossing the rest of it onto the kitchen floor. And ... Daisy already knows how to sit pretty before she gets a treat.

Yeah, this can work
.