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December 2002

He came to Gold Ribbon as a stray. His rescue name was Chewy after the Star Wars character Chewbacca. The good Samaritan who rescued him called him that because because of the deep, guttural noises that he made, and still sometimes makes.

We had recently lost our 13 year old female, and we decided to foster Chewy with an option to adopt. He moved in with us on December 23rd. We decided to adopt him on Christmas Eve, and we named him Marley after the Charles Dickens character Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol. I frequently have to explain to people that he is a Dickinsian Marley, not a Rastafarian Marley.

The vet and experts at Gold Ribbon estimated Marley to be about 18 months old. We have since decided that he must have been less than a year, but he was a very well behaved puppy. He was house broken, and he had clearly been deprived of human contact. The first thing that GRR did for us was arrange to have his lower right K9 tooth removed. To this day, he is very phobic of kennels...probably because he was left in one for too long too many times. We speculated that he had broken his tooth chewing his way out.

Last month, we celebrated our third Christmas with Marley. I can't imagine what life was like before him. He lives to retrieve tennis balls and please his people. Today, he is an athletic 4 year old. His build is slight at 65 pounds, and he is all muscle. He frequently gets the opportunity to do wind sprints chasing balls at a fence enclosed park near our home. His most serious transgressions in three years have had to do with the fact that he thinks every tennis ball in the world belongs to him, and thinking that Christmas cookies are dog treats.

Marley is our fourth rescue Golden, and will certainly not be our last.