My family was one of those families that always had at least one pet in the home during the entire time that I was growing up. We mostly got our pets when they wandered into the yard as strays and then stuck around because we fed them. As a result, we had a mixture of mutts.

We did have one dog that we actually went out of our way to get, though. We hadn’t had a pet in a little while and us kids kept begging Mom and Dad to get us a new dog. We scanned the newspaper one day looking for free dogs and decided on an Australian Shepherd that was advertised.

She was a middle-aged dog and my parents thought that would be best for us at the time. Little did they know that she would rapidly become the neighborhood favorite for all of the male dogs in the area. Every morning we’d go outside to find a new dog in her doghouse with her - a Bernese Mountain Dog one day, a Boston Terrier the next … My parents weren’t responsible about spaying her so we had puppies around all of the time for the next few years. Us kids thought it was great but as an adult I think my parents must have been crazy!

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