He was chubby. His little puppy belly was distended, full of his morning mush. His eyes and nose were dark against a light coat. And he wanted to be ours.
We rescued him from a puppy mill. A family in the hills of southwest Wisconsin were allowing unlimited breeding. When my twin sons, both in ______________ grade, and I found the ad, we were ecstatic. Purebred Golden Retrievers, it said, half price. All ages, light blonde to red. I didn’t know I was walking into a Mill.
My five children were still mourning the loss of Glory, our deep russet colored golden who had recently passed away. None of us had been prepared for her loss coming hard on the heels of my divorce.
So I schlepped my way south for several hours to find a new companion. As I was still finding my feet after the divorce, my mother handed me a check for the pup.
The boys were receiving the puppy as a combined birthday present just two weeks before Christmas. So they traveled with me to find their new companion. We dropped off their older sister and two younger siblings at my mother’s house in Wisconsin Dells and then continued our journey to pick out their puppy.
We discussed what we were searching for as the car sped over the flat north eastern highways and began the slower crawl through the hills. This dog was to be everything Glory was not. Not female. Not russet or red. They wanted a light colored male. But it still had to be this breed that loved children and could play with them.
We found the farm outside of Richland Center, Wisconsin, after many wrong turns. Pulling into the gravel driveway, we saw eight adult Goldens tied to various dog houses. Their fur was patchy, and they stood in the terrible hunched posture of emaciated dogs. I could see the ribs on one russet colored dog. They began barking furiously, plumed tails wagging, paws reaching for us. A large woman in sweat pants and a holey T-shirt stepped onto the sagging porch of an unpainted wooden house. The windows were dirty, the shingles old. Alex leaped out of the car to stand beside me, his golden blonde hair almost white in the sunlight. He could barely contain his excitement. His identical twin, Aaron, moved more hesitantly, unsure of the setting. It looked like something out of Stephen King’s novel “Cujo.”
“I’m here about the puppy,” I said.
She nodded and gesture for us to step inside. I figured she wanted to finish the business end of things first before taking me out to one of the dilapidated sheds behind the house to pick out a puppy.
We were hit with a thick stench as we entered the house. Alex moved gamely, trying his best to be polite and brave. Aaron put a hand to his face and flicked his huge green eyes my way.
The house was one large open space. To my right, a living area held several torn and broken recliners. Each was filled with a slightly smaller version of the woman. Some looked over their shoulders at us before returning to the large television on the far end of the room. A torn curtain serve as a door through which I could see a filthy bathroom.
The other half of the room, to our left, was a kitchen that was separated from the living room by a play fence generally used for toddlers. Beyond the gate was the reason for the stench. Dozens of puppies rolled and wrestled across the kitchen floor. As the woman extolled the virtues of the litters present, I began to count. More than fifty puppies from new weanlings to yearlings were in the house. They were rolling in defecation and urine, slipping in it, sleeping in it. They discerned that there were strangers in the house and began yapping and clawing at the fence, trying to reach us. Dozens of tails wagged. Dozens of mouths yapped, calling to us, begging us to play.
Aaron gagged slightly and pulled his T-shirt over his nose. His eyes were filled with tears. I quickly told the woman we wanted a male, light colored puppy. She looked over the roiling sea of pups.
Before she could say anything, he found us. He fought his way through the pack and tried to climb to us. He was pushed back by more eager puppies, far larger than he was. Again he fought his way forward only to be dumped backwards. Righting himself, the little guy tried another tactic. He squiggled under the pack and shoved his little nose through the fencing. I glanced at my sons to see that they were both watching the little white puppy. He disappeared into the sea of bodies once more and then, suddenly, reappeared on top of the others. Like a crowd-surfing rock music fan, he made his way forward once more.
“That one.” It was Aaron, pointing, his eyes flashing. Alex grinned in agreement and nodded his head.
The woman grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, checked the puppy’s privates to ensure he was, indeed, male, and dropped him into Aaron’s arms. The puppy wiggle and wagged, washing Aaron’s chin with his little pink tongue. Alex leaned in, petting the puppy.
“Why don’t you take him outside while I pay?” I suggested, nearly overcome by this time by the terrible stench.
The woman quoted a price fifty dollars higher than the ad.
“But you said…”
She folded her large arms across her more than ample bosom. “Don’t you want him?”
“Yes, of course I do. But the price in the paper was…”
“That was the price for regular puppies. That one is really light. More in demand.”
I wrote her check, glancing over my shoulder at the waste-caked puppies who were still calling for attention. The woman began beating them back with a rolled newspaper. The puppies cowered and moved back from the fencing.
Outside, I took a deep breath of fresh air. The larger, chained dogs bellowed.
“You want his papers?” She had followed me outside, thrusting registration papers at me. “And this is the information on the chip.”
The puppy had a microchip inserted into his skin. This technology, once registered, could be used to locate the dog if he ever ran away or got stolen. I had no plans to register him as an American Kennel Club purebred. He was not for show and I had no plans to breed him. I wondered idly how she could be sure of his parentage in the sea of puppies cooped up in the house.
She turned and went back into the house. Aaron and Alex were petting the puppy on the grass. He was jumping at them, trying to lick their faces, his tail wagging so hard he kept losing his balance.
It was love at first sight.
Both boys climbed in the far back of the mini-van, letting the puppy sit between them on the bench seat. He didn’t really sit. He continued his game of alternating kisses to each of the boy’s faces.
“Buckle up.” I looked over my shoulder at them, at their identical beaming smiles, their identical flashing green eyes. I wish I could have frozen that moment, that instant of pure joy.
They didn’t even notice that the puppy was just as dirty as the others in the house. The stench of that room now filled the mini-van.
“Let’s get this little guy home and give him a bath. Then you can pick out a name for him.”
“Rico.” Alex grinned at me.
“What?”
“His name is Rico,” he said. Aaron nodded. The puppy made another lunge at Aaron’s chin.
“Okay. Rico it is.” I found out later that the name came from the psychotic penguin in the cartoon movie “Madagascar.” Of course, my silly Alex would choose a name from something that made him laugh.
We began the return trip to my mother’s house in Wisconsin Dells to show her the puppy and collect the other children. By the time we arrive, Rico had settled into a fluffy doughnut between the two boys. Each boy had a hand resting on Rico’s back.
Rico lifted his head as the mini-van pulled up at the curb outside my mother’s house. Children spilled from the door, racing to see the new pup. Not only my other three children, but most of their cousins were there to greet him.
Aaron carried him out of the mini-van, his arms gentle around the fluffy bundle.
“Put him down so he can go potty,” my mother advised.
Rico did his duty and then galloped from one child to the next, leaping, tripping and rolling over the grass, over their shoes, over himself.
“Pew, he stinks,” Kelsey called out. My youngest daughter never pulled any punches.
“Let’s give him a bath!” cried my nephew Jake who was only a year younger than Aaron and Alex.
Alex scooped Rico up and took him into the house.
“Wait for us,” I called after him. I lingered, watching the parade of children following the puppy. Rico was going to be adored and pampered.
“Mom, hang on,” I said.
She turned to me, her eyebrows raised in an unspoken question.
“That place. Where I got the puppy. It’s horrible. The dogs are mistreated. It’s just a puppy mill. There were more than fifty puppies in that kitchen. They are covered in feces.”
My sister, Bernadette, shook her head. As a second grade teacher, she is a lover of all small creatures. “You need to turn it in.”
So while my sister facilitated a wiggly, wet bath during which almost a dozen children got just as wet as the single blonde puppy, I called the county humane society and described what I had seen.
“We’ve had calls on them before, but every time we get out there, the puppies are gone an the place is locked up tight,” said a man with a warm, concerned voice.
“The puppies are in the house,” I told him.
“In the house? And you said there were about fifty of them?”
“Yes, and the dogs outside look thin. I didn’t see any water bowls out there either.”
“I think we need to do a surprise visit.”
He took down my contact information and promised he would follow up with me after visiting the house.
I breathed a sigh of relief knowing that the terrible conditions in which all those dogs lived would be improved. I hoped that each of the puppies there would be adopted out to good homes.
“Don’t let him get away,” I heard my niece Sarah cry.
Rico raced past me into my parent’s family room with a horde of children in pursuit.
“AAAHGH!” came a bellow from the room.
My father. I bit my lip and raced after the horde.
Rico had climbed up my father’s legs and was shaking vigorously on his lap, covering my father with water and suds.
“Eileen Ann, get this thing off me!” he cried. My mother obeyed him by lifting the dripping puppy into the air.
“Wuf.” It was Rico’s first word to us.
My father tried to keep a cranky look on his face, but Rico won him over. He cracked a smile.
“He sure is a cute little thing.”
My father’s black Labrador, Josie, sat at my mother’s feet, sniffing at the dangling puppy. My niece brought in a towel and wrapped Rico up like a little blue burrito. Josie followed, still sniffing, as we moved into the dining room.
After much fluffing and drying with the towel, Rico finally hit the floor. Josie, still curious, sniffed him.
“Wuf.”
Evidently Josie had thought the burrito pup was a toy because when Rico came to life at her feet, she was traumatized. She ran from the room with a skittering of claws on linoleum.
“AARGH,” we heard again.
The horde of children, joined now by the adults, and followed by Rico waddling behind, raced to the family room.
There was Josie, a full-sized Labrador Retriever, perched on my father in order to hide from the tiny fluff-ball.
Rico had definitely made a strong first impression.
We rescued him from a puppy mill. A family in the hills of southwest Wisconsin were allowing unlimited breeding. When my twin sons, both in ______________ grade, and I found the ad, we were ecstatic. Purebred Golden Retrievers, it said, half price. All ages, light blonde to red. I didn’t know I was walking into a Mill.
My five children were still mourning the loss of Glory, our deep russet colored golden who had recently passed away. None of us had been prepared for her loss coming hard on the heels of my divorce.
So I schlepped my way south for several hours to find a new companion. As I was still finding my feet after the divorce, my mother handed me a check for the pup.
The boys were receiving the puppy as a combined birthday present just two weeks before Christmas. So they traveled with me to find their new companion. We dropped off their older sister and two younger siblings at my mother’s house in Wisconsin Dells and then continued our journey to pick out their puppy.
We discussed what we were searching for as the car sped over the flat north eastern highways and began the slower crawl through the hills. This dog was to be everything Glory was not. Not female. Not russet or red. They wanted a light colored male. But it still had to be this breed that loved children and could play with them.
We found the farm outside of Richland Center, Wisconsin, after many wrong turns. Pulling into the gravel driveway, we saw eight adult Goldens tied to various dog houses. Their fur was patchy, and they stood in the terrible hunched posture of emaciated dogs. I could see the ribs on one russet colored dog. They began barking furiously, plumed tails wagging, paws reaching for us. A large woman in sweat pants and a holey T-shirt stepped onto the sagging porch of an unpainted wooden house. The windows were dirty, the shingles old. Alex leaped out of the car to stand beside me, his golden blonde hair almost white in the sunlight. He could barely contain his excitement. His identical twin, Aaron, moved more hesitantly, unsure of the setting. It looked like something out of Stephen King’s novel “Cujo.”
“I’m here about the puppy,” I said.
She nodded and gesture for us to step inside. I figured she wanted to finish the business end of things first before taking me out to one of the dilapidated sheds behind the house to pick out a puppy.
We were hit with a thick stench as we entered the house. Alex moved gamely, trying his best to be polite and brave. Aaron put a hand to his face and flicked his huge green eyes my way.
The house was one large open space. To my right, a living area held several torn and broken recliners. Each was filled with a slightly smaller version of the woman. Some looked over their shoulders at us before returning to the large television on the far end of the room. A torn curtain serve as a door through which I could see a filthy bathroom.
The other half of the room, to our left, was a kitchen that was separated from the living room by a play fence generally used for toddlers. Beyond the gate was the reason for the stench. Dozens of puppies rolled and wrestled across the kitchen floor. As the woman extolled the virtues of the litters present, I began to count. More than fifty puppies from new weanlings to yearlings were in the house. They were rolling in defecation and urine, slipping in it, sleeping in it. They discerned that there were strangers in the house and began yapping and clawing at the fence, trying to reach us. Dozens of tails wagged. Dozens of mouths yapped, calling to us, begging us to play.
Aaron gagged slightly and pulled his T-shirt over his nose. His eyes were filled with tears. I quickly told the woman we wanted a male, light colored puppy. She looked over the roiling sea of pups.
Before she could say anything, he found us. He fought his way through the pack and tried to climb to us. He was pushed back by more eager puppies, far larger than he was. Again he fought his way forward only to be dumped backwards. Righting himself, the little guy tried another tactic. He squiggled under the pack and shoved his little nose through the fencing. I glanced at my sons to see that they were both watching the little white puppy. He disappeared into the sea of bodies once more and then, suddenly, reappeared on top of the others. Like a crowd-surfing rock music fan, he made his way forward once more.
“That one.” It was Aaron, pointing, his eyes flashing. Alex grinned in agreement and nodded his head.
The woman grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, checked the puppy’s privates to ensure he was, indeed, male, and dropped him into Aaron’s arms. The puppy wiggle and wagged, washing Aaron’s chin with his little pink tongue. Alex leaned in, petting the puppy.
“Why don’t you take him outside while I pay?” I suggested, nearly overcome by this time by the terrible stench.
The woman quoted a price fifty dollars higher than the ad.
“But you said…”
She folded her large arms across her more than ample bosom. “Don’t you want him?”
“Yes, of course I do. But the price in the paper was…”
“That was the price for regular puppies. That one is really light. More in demand.”
I wrote her check, glancing over my shoulder at the waste-caked puppies who were still calling for attention. The woman began beating them back with a rolled newspaper. The puppies cowered and moved back from the fencing.
Outside, I took a deep breath of fresh air. The larger, chained dogs bellowed.
“You want his papers?” She had followed me outside, thrusting registration papers at me. “And this is the information on the chip.”
The puppy had a microchip inserted into his skin. This technology, once registered, could be used to locate the dog if he ever ran away or got stolen. I had no plans to register him as an American Kennel Club purebred. He was not for show and I had no plans to breed him. I wondered idly how she could be sure of his parentage in the sea of puppies cooped up in the house.
She turned and went back into the house. Aaron and Alex were petting the puppy on the grass. He was jumping at them, trying to lick their faces, his tail wagging so hard he kept losing his balance.
It was love at first sight.
Both boys climbed in the far back of the mini-van, letting the puppy sit between them on the bench seat. He didn’t really sit. He continued his game of alternating kisses to each of the boy’s faces.
“Buckle up.” I looked over my shoulder at them, at their identical beaming smiles, their identical flashing green eyes. I wish I could have frozen that moment, that instant of pure joy.
They didn’t even notice that the puppy was just as dirty as the others in the house. The stench of that room now filled the mini-van.
“Let’s get this little guy home and give him a bath. Then you can pick out a name for him.”
“Rico.” Alex grinned at me.
“What?”
“His name is Rico,” he said. Aaron nodded. The puppy made another lunge at Aaron’s chin.
“Okay. Rico it is.” I found out later that the name came from the psychotic penguin in the cartoon movie “Madagascar.” Of course, my silly Alex would choose a name from something that made him laugh.
We began the return trip to my mother’s house in Wisconsin Dells to show her the puppy and collect the other children. By the time we arrive, Rico had settled into a fluffy doughnut between the two boys. Each boy had a hand resting on Rico’s back.
Rico lifted his head as the mini-van pulled up at the curb outside my mother’s house. Children spilled from the door, racing to see the new pup. Not only my other three children, but most of their cousins were there to greet him.
Aaron carried him out of the mini-van, his arms gentle around the fluffy bundle.
“Put him down so he can go potty,” my mother advised.
Rico did his duty and then galloped from one child to the next, leaping, tripping and rolling over the grass, over their shoes, over himself.
“Pew, he stinks,” Kelsey called out. My youngest daughter never pulled any punches.
“Let’s give him a bath!” cried my nephew Jake who was only a year younger than Aaron and Alex.
Alex scooped Rico up and took him into the house.
“Wait for us,” I called after him. I lingered, watching the parade of children following the puppy. Rico was going to be adored and pampered.
“Mom, hang on,” I said.
She turned to me, her eyebrows raised in an unspoken question.
“That place. Where I got the puppy. It’s horrible. The dogs are mistreated. It’s just a puppy mill. There were more than fifty puppies in that kitchen. They are covered in feces.”
My sister, Bernadette, shook her head. As a second grade teacher, she is a lover of all small creatures. “You need to turn it in.”
So while my sister facilitated a wiggly, wet bath during which almost a dozen children got just as wet as the single blonde puppy, I called the county humane society and described what I had seen.
“We’ve had calls on them before, but every time we get out there, the puppies are gone an the place is locked up tight,” said a man with a warm, concerned voice.
“The puppies are in the house,” I told him.
“In the house? And you said there were about fifty of them?”
“Yes, and the dogs outside look thin. I didn’t see any water bowls out there either.”
“I think we need to do a surprise visit.”
He took down my contact information and promised he would follow up with me after visiting the house.
I breathed a sigh of relief knowing that the terrible conditions in which all those dogs lived would be improved. I hoped that each of the puppies there would be adopted out to good homes.
“Don’t let him get away,” I heard my niece Sarah cry.
Rico raced past me into my parent’s family room with a horde of children in pursuit.
“AAAHGH!” came a bellow from the room.
My father. I bit my lip and raced after the horde.
Rico had climbed up my father’s legs and was shaking vigorously on his lap, covering my father with water and suds.
“Eileen Ann, get this thing off me!” he cried. My mother obeyed him by lifting the dripping puppy into the air.
“Wuf.” It was Rico’s first word to us.
My father tried to keep a cranky look on his face, but Rico won him over. He cracked a smile.
“He sure is a cute little thing.”
My father’s black Labrador, Josie, sat at my mother’s feet, sniffing at the dangling puppy. My niece brought in a towel and wrapped Rico up like a little blue burrito. Josie followed, still sniffing, as we moved into the dining room.
After much fluffing and drying with the towel, Rico finally hit the floor. Josie, still curious, sniffed him.
“Wuf.”
Evidently Josie had thought the burrito pup was a toy because when Rico came to life at her feet, she was traumatized. She ran from the room with a skittering of claws on linoleum.
“AARGH,” we heard again.
The horde of children, joined now by the adults, and followed by Rico waddling behind, raced to the family room.
There was Josie, a full-sized Labrador Retriever, perched on my father in order to hide from the tiny fluff-ball.
Rico had definitely made a strong first impression.