When you hear about people adopting pets you start thinking about shelters and how much better the life of the animal will be now that it has a home, but most people don't actually think about adopting a pet. Most people think about going through breeders, which I am not putting down as it is another way of getting a beautiful animal in to your life but going through a breeder is so expensive! Yes, you get the breed you were looking for and there is the anticipation of choosing your animal and waiting until they are able to come home but there are many other animals that do not have a home and are being put down due to over crowding shelters.

The water lapped up underneath my chin and was beginning to cool off, giving me a chill. I reached up with my big toe and turned on the hot water, a tear rolling down my face when I thought about my puppy Holbrook. He was a rotty, but was also mixed with something else much bigger, making him a very formidable sight, but he was a lover. My chin began to quiver and I wanted to duck under the water until I quit blowing bubbles, anything to end the gripping pain I felt inside.

When our dog, Cole died in 2014, my husband and I were devastated. He was such a great dog. He was a black mutt, part border collie, part lab, maybe some chow chow or some cocker spaniel, who knows? My husband and his youngest daughter found him in a box of other puppies in a Safeway parking lot with a sign that said, “Free Puppies”.

In May, I started a new job at Pawsafe Animal Rescue as the kennel manager. Very quickly, it became a dream come true. I got to spend my days with puppies, and I got to help them find their forever home. It was such a fulfilling feeling, and it honestly helped shape my life and help narrow down the path I want to take for the rest of my life.

When Cpl. Matt Foster left Afghanistan after his tour of duty in 2013, he didn’t know whether he would ever see his K-9 partner again.

Grady was, when I first saw him, less than a year old. He was tall and slender, waving his half-length stump of a tail behind him, and he stared at me through the pane of glass that separated us, keeping me from laying my hands on his black-and-tan bespeckled coat and him from engorging his nose with the pungent scents I had no doubt tracked into the shelter. His concrete kennel was barren except for a tarnished blanket crumpled in the corner. It was the fifth blanket they’d tossed to him since he arrived less than a week prior. Had we not left with him — my mother and I — there would have been a sixth, and a seventh, and an eighth, until someone else snatched him up. But no one else was going to snatch him up. Despite his unremitting wag and his half-erect ears, Grady had an intensity to him that would have made White Fang think twice before squaring off. It was his eyes.

"What is your purpose?!"

Excuse me? What do you mean my cat got out?” The words I asked my step-dad as he gave me the weekly (or more or less daily) report on my cat.

I blink.

“I own a Pit Bull, It’s a lifestyle. I’m on a mission to fight bad reputations and stereotypes. I am an advocate. I stand up for their breed and it’s a priviedge”—Pittie Chick

The first time I heard my mom was finally going to agree to get a dog was from my sister over text eight months after I moved from Arizona to California for school and two weeks before I was supposed to come home for the summer. After confronting my mother about it, she sent me the sweetest picture. It’s of her holding the most adorable three week old Great Pyrenees puppy. That dog looked like it belonged with my mom. My two sisters and I all agreed that it would be a crime against the universe if she didn’t take her home. They belonged together.