When I was 8, I got my dog Tanner. The first dog I’d ever had, Kali, died when I was 7. My parents had gotten her about 5 years before I was born. Then, almost two years before she died, we got another dog named Kaci. After Kali died, we lived with just Kaci for a while, but we could tell she was getting lonely. She had lived with another dog all her life, and she didn’t have anyone to run around with anymore. So we decided to do something about that.

We spent a lot of time that summer looking around the Des Moines area for a dog. We went to shelters everywhere, and looked at a bunch of dogs in pounds. One of the most memorable moments was at the Animal Rescue League. My family was there looking at a little schnauzer. It was less than a year old, and really cute. My parents didn’t want to buy it, but me and my sister did. Well, we did until it bit me in the sock and lost a tooth in my shoe. My sock was all bloody for the rest of the day, and the dog had to be taken away. After that incident, we decided to stop looking around for a while.

One day, in the middle of August, my dad was looking on Craigslist, and he saw that a dog was for sale about an hour and a half away. So, my dad, sister and I went out to a farm in the middle of nowhere. We hadn’t even told my mom before going! Once we got there, we weren’t so sure if we really wanted her. It was a complete dump. There were snakes everywhere, broken pieces of wood, little kids running around, a tiny house, and a cow. Tanner was there, sitting in the middle of the yard, avoiding kids with broken golf clubs trying to hit each other, sitting next to a giant black lab. Tanner’s a little white westie, so she didn’t really fit in with the scene. My dad looked at her, and she kept following us around while we talked to the owner. We started talking price, and we ended up getting her for about $200.

On the way home, we called my mom and told her what just happened. She wasn’t very happy, but she said as long as the dog didn’t have heartworms, we could keep her. The day after we got her, we took her to the vet to get her checked out. It took a long time, and we were really nervous. After almost an hour, The vet came out of the room. He said he had bad news, and I was really sad. Then we found out that Tanner had almost every disease or problem or infection except heartworms! My mom stayed true to her promise, and we got to keep her. After about a month of having her constantly on medicine and going to the vet, they said she was cured of everything she had. We still have to give her medicine to make sure her infections don’t come back, but she is better now.

Tanner loves the pond in our backyard. We have some goldfish in there, and they are all about the size of your hand. But that doesn’t stop Tanner, because all day, she stands at the edge of the pond, waiting for a fish to come close. If a fish is unlucky enough to swim by, she bites it straight out of the water and throws it on the ground. She doesn’t do anything with it, she just likes killing our fish. However, my dad doesn’t enjoy it when she does that. So now, we have a short fence around the pond. She can still see through and watch the fish (which she still loves doing) but now she can’t kill them, which makes my dad a lot happier.

Tanner is definitely spoiled more than our other dog, Kaci. If our family’s just sitting in the living room, Kaci has to make do with room on the floor. Tanner, however, has her spot reserved right on my dad’s stomach in his big recliner. I normally end up feeling bad for Kaci, and let her sit next to me on the couch, but then I have to push her back down because my face ends up getting soaked because she licks constantly.

Tanner is spoiled with her food too. Every night, when i go to get them food, I have to feed them separately. This is more of Kaci’s fault though. If we try to feed them together, Kaci ends up scarfing down her food, and then pushing Tanner out of the way and stealing hers. Then, Kaci proceeds to throw up in the backyard. Partly because she ate too much, and partly because she ate Tanner’s medicine.


Both of our dog’s love running around. The biggest problem is, if we let Kaci go off the leash, it will be three hours before she comes back. Tanner’s normally good about returning if we call her, but lately she’s been running too. It annoys me when they get loose, because I’m always the one that has to catch them. I never leave the backyard fence door open, or let them off of their leash, but sometimes my family forgets. Luckily, they think that it’s a game when they get loose, and they don’t try to run away that hard. However, they always make sure that they are just out of reach whenever I get close enough to catch them.

Where we live, we always have rabbits or birds flying around our house or sitting in our yard. Tanner is so used to living on a farm, that whenever she sees an animal, she always tries to chase it or bark at it to make it go away. Kaci just enjoys barking. This is always how I get woken up on the weekends. Either some rabbit came into our yard and is eating our grass, or a bird is out back eating from the bird feeder. I can’t yell at them to stop, because it just makes them bark louder. I end up having to close the blinds, which makes our house super dark. But even if I close the windows, they end up running around the house to try to find an open one, and then proceed to bark from there. My best solution so far has just been to go outside and try to scare whatever’s making them bark away.

At night, Tanner and Kaci sleep side by side in their kennels. If it was up to me, they would sleep in my room, but my mom doesn’t let them because they’ll end up going to the bathroom everywhere. So instead, we give them their treats (bacon bits. If they even hear the word “bacon”, they go sprinting to their cages to get some), and then go upstairs and go to sleep ourselves. Tanner gets the bigger cage, even though she’s like 4 pounds lighter than Kaci. Her cage isn’t just where she sleeps. Even when everybody’s home and we’re all awake, sometimes she just likes to sit in her cage and chew on her toys. And yes, she has plenty of toys. We stopped buying toys for them because whenever we did, Kaci would play with it for about a minute, then leave it alone. Tanner, however, would stare at it for a while, and if anyone tried to take it away from her, she would grab it by the mouth and sprint into her cage. She probably has 10 toys in there that no one can get out without getting their hand bitten off. She is extremely protective of her toys, especially her pet tiger.

We got her a little stuffed tiger a couple of years ago. She hasn’t let it out of her sight since. One day, she was sitting in the living room chewing on it, and I opened the door to let her outside. Well, she took it outside with her, but then went to look at the fish. She stared at them for a while, but I guess she forgot she had the toy in her mouth, and accidentally dropped it in the pond. She whined at the back door, and I let her in, thinking she was done. But then she kept running from the door to the pond, looking down in it, then back at me, then back down again. I walked over, and saw the little tiger sitting at the bottom. This was in February, and I knew the water would be freezing. However, I knew how much she liked her toy, and I braced myself and reached in and got it. My hand almost froze off, but I got it. Tanner took the toy in her mouth, oblivious to the cold, and ran back in.

I love Tanner. It always seems that whenever I’m having a bad day, or even when I’m not, Tanner will walk over to wherever I am and just lay next to me. If I’m laying down, she sits on my feet. If I’m watching TV, she curls up next to me. If I’m sleeping, she just sits at the foot of my bed, watching me. No matter what happens, I can’t be in a bad mood when she’s around me.