Marili has been at the shelter for years. Years. And for some reason, no one has ever shown any interest in her. No one. Ever.
On one hand, we can’t understand why. On the other, after so many years of being overlooked, even we ended up thinking of her as just “the dog that lives in the shelter,” in that specific kennel. Maybe it’s partly our fault too—because for all these years, since she’s so steady in who she is and what she does, we’ve been presenting her exactly like that: a stable, unchanging shelter dog. And clearly, that’s not enough.
Her white eyebrows aren’t because she’s old. They turned white suddenly when she reached adulthood. She came to us very young and grew up with us. As the years go by, they keep getting whiter, and the other day when we took her out for a walk, it felt like we were seeing her for the first time. Our reaction was, “Wow… Marili is so striking!”
Marili, then, is a good dog—a very good dog. She’s social—especially for a dog who has lived in a shelter for so long, she’s incredibly social. She loves walks around the grounds, and once she starts discovering the outside world, she’ll love walks beyond the shelter too. She can be a bit stubborn on the leash—she has these brief moments of stubbornness that last only seconds—but with the right handling, she forgets about it and walks normally, as if nothing happened. She loves treats, focuses, sits, and then gets back up again.
If you spend time with her, you realize how many things she has missed out on—things she truly loves. There’s this urgency in her, like she wants to experience everything all at once during a single walk, as if she’s running out of time. That can make her seem difficult at times, but she’s not really difficult—she’s just been deprived of so many of the things that make dogs happy.
We are certain that when the day comes that someone sees in Marili the dog of their dreams, and welcomes her into their home and their heart, she will give back her love and devotion to the fullest.
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