Mister, a dog that good you don't eat all at once...
Another example of how wrong I can be.
A friend of mine came to visit one night and noticed that one of my dogs only had three legs (we had three maltese at the time). He also noticed that we babied this dog above and beyond what he'd ever seen a person do before. He asked about the dog and I told him that one night, there was a fire while we were sleeping and if it hadn't been for this dogs barking, we'd have slept through and never made it out. He then asked if that was how the dog lost her leg.
I answered, 'A dog that good you don't eat all at once.'
OK, that's not really how she lost the leg, but I do enjoy telling the story if someone asks. It helps to know that my wife is Korean, too (she's never eaten dog, and is just as disgusted by the idea as I am). The dog was actually born with only three legs. We let her brother and sister from the same litter go to new homes, but we knew from the day she was born that she would stay with us. She's actually a great dog. She has no clue that she's missing anything and gets around just as fast/well (faster/better sometimes) than her mother or father dogs. And as you'll see below, she loves to smile for the camera!
I really like adding images to this blog, so here's some pictures of our babies (we don't have children, yet, so this is as close as we have and they ARE our babies).
That's Umji. Her name means 'thumb' in Korean. As you can probably tell, she's missing the front right leg.
This is our little doggie family. Toby, the father is in the middle. Aji (a shortened form of the word kang-aji, which is Korean for puppy - we really couldn't come up with a better name for her when we brought her home), the mother is in a mumu that matches Umji's. Normally, I'm not a fan of dressing dogs (outside of maybe in cold weather), but we bought these Aloha style shirts/mumus and dressed them up for pictures.
We don't have the father anymore. We gave him back to his former family before we left Hawaii. He was a great dog, too, but it's kind of a blessing that we were able to find a place for him to stay other than with us. He developed a terrible habit of marking everything in the house. The dog had cantalope-sized, brass balls, because sometimes (more often than I can remember) he would wait until I looked at him to lift his leg and mark the coffee table not five minutes after I'd spanked him for marking somewhere else. In my mind, that took a lot of balls for a 10 pound dog to do. Lot's of people like to give me crap for not having a "man's" dog, but I tell that story to show that they aren't just little slippers with voices. Some might say he was stupid, but the dog was actually very smart. He was very well trained other than the marking thing and a complete joy to have. We really miss him sometimes.