Dog Surrendered To Shelter As Family Were 'Having a Baby' Has Second Chance

A dog who was surrendered to the shelter for reasons entirely beyond her control has been given a second shot at happiness.

Shelly the dog will never know how close she came to being euthanized. Her owner, Lacey, initially agreed to foster her after being advised that Shelly "had to be out of the building that day."

"She would have been put down the next morning," she told Newsweek.

The ASPCA estimates around 3.1 million dogs enter shelters in the U.S. every year. Of that number, 390,000 end up being euthanized.

Shelly could so easily have been among them. Lacey doesn't know much about Shelly's life before the shelter. "She was turned in at the shelter by a family three weeks earlier because they were having a baby," Lacey said. "Apparently she was given to them by a family friend."

Shelly is a pit bull, which is something Lacey felt put her at an immediate disadvantage when it came to being adopted. "Unfortunately there are so many pit breeds in the shelter that are in perfectly healthy condition that get overlooked," she said.

As an enthusiastic volunteer at the shelter, Lacey therefore decided that ultimately she needed to be the one to step up for Shelly and give her some hope. "No one was coming to get her," she said. "We wanted to foster because I knew she could find a good home if she was just given more time."

Her hopes were proven correct, though not in the way she would have necessarily expected when she first signed up to foster. "We loved her so much, we ended up keeping her," Lacey admits. What makes that all the more remarkable was that she had only recently adopted another dog to join the rescue dog they already had.

"We had just adopted one new dog, so we initially thought getting two more on top of the one we had would be too much," she explained.

"But Shelly and our other new dog got along so well and felt so safe with each other. They were bonded almost instantly. It helped that they were both extremely well-behaved and both dog- and people-friendly. So I thought it was best to just keep them together."

It represents a remarkable turnaround for Shelly, who has wasted little time in getting settled in as part of the family. "She loves playing with her adopted brother and adores people," Lacey said. "She says hi to every single person we walk by. She was really scared of the car when we first got her, but now she loves a good car ride."

Lacey hopes Shelly's story serves as an example of the kinds of dog available at shelters who have "so much love to give."

"We should be committing to the animal that we adopt. Otherwise they come back to the shelter and are set up for failure or death," she said. "I also want people to get a different idea of how pit breeds actually are. The shelters are full of pit breeds because the media makes so many negative assumptions surrounding them. Most of them are the sweetest, most loyal dogs."

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