Senior Rescue Dog Who 'Lived Outside For 15 years' Making Up For Lost Time
A rescue dog who has spent almost all of her life living outdoors is finally getting to experience some much-deserved home comforts.
Veronica Pflueger, a development director at Hope Animal Rescue, a non-profit in North Carolina, shared footage to her Instagram, @wethreepitties, showing the moment she found 17-year-old rescue dog Sheba enjoying a nap on her bed.
It's well-earned to say the least. "Sheba was surrendered to a local county animal in May of 2023 after her previous owner unfortunately lost his housing and couldn't take her with him," Pflueger told Newsweek.
"She was 15 at the time and had spent her entire life living outside prior to being surrendered. The first half of her life was spent on a chain. Then another local non-profit provided and built a metal run and enclosure for her outside so she would at least be unchained."
Sheba has fully converted to becoming an inside dog who loves nothing more than napping.
Sheba has fully converted to becoming an inside dog who loves nothing more than napping.
wetheepitties/instagram
Pflueger first met Sheba after the local shelter reached out to Hope Animal Rescue for help. "Given Sheba's age at the time she was surrendered and the condition she was in—she had skin issues, oral issues, and was heartworm positive—she was an urgent placement need for the shelter so they reached out to see if we had a foster home available," she said.
Pflueger has been fostering dogs for a decade but had never taken on a senior dog before. She found herself drawn to helping Sheba though.
"For whatever reason I couldn't get her out of my head and no one else or any other rescues were willing to take her so we said yes," Pflueger said. Having initially agreed to foster Sheba, within months Pflueger had decided to adopt. They recently celebrated two happy years together with Sheba, now 17, transformed from a struggling senior shelter dog to an "indoor couch queen that enjoys the finer things in life."
Those finer things include frequent naps, regular snuggles with one of Pflueger's other dogs and being petted by her husband. "I think she might be in love with him," Pflueger said. Sheba also helps look after any of the new fosters that arrive in the house.
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"Sheba is in retirement," Pflueger said. "She had never had a comfy dog bed before, let alone a couch or human bed to sleep on. Once we introduced her to these comfy spots, she decided that's where she was always meant to be and we'd often find her jumping up on the couch or choosing to wander down to our bedroom for an afternoon nap in our bed."
Pflueger shared heartwarming footage to her @wethreepitties Instagram showing Sheba making up for lost time with a nap on his mom's bed. On the clip, which has been viewed 2 million times since being shared in February, Pflueger can be seen going over to pet her pooch companion and, for a brief moment, it looks as if Sheba is smiling.
"There is honestly nothing better than seeing a dog who lived outside for 15 years sleep peacefully on a comfy, cozy bed," she said. "It may seem like an insignificant thing for lots of other dogs, but for her those moments are everything because she quite literally never had that before."
Sheba might have lived much of her life as an "outdoor dog" but most experts agree there is no such thing. As Rob Halpin from Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals explained to The Dodo: "Keeping pet dogs outside consigns them to a life of loneliness and frustration.
"Dogs are highly social animals whose ancestors and cousins—the wolves—live in packs. Wolves hunt together, sleep together and play together," he said. "Dogs don't have packs. They only have us. Depriving dogs of human companionship by forcing them to live outside blunts their natural desires and is its own form of animal cruelty."
The thought of Sheba spending all that time outside is difficult for Pflueger to contemplate. "It honestly breaks my heart to think that she spent 15 whole years sleeping on the ground or in a plastic igloo... especially given how much she LOVES all of the comfiest spots in our home," she said.
Thankfully, that's all in the past now. "When we took her in, we vowed to make sure she was comfy and cozy and in a peaceful and warm environment for the rest of her life," she said.
It's a promise Pflueger has certainly delivered on.
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