I took it down after five weeks. I don't think she could have come from a GOOD place... assuming she also wasn't intentionally abandoned. Even though she was immediately friendly with me, my parents, my friends when they visited, and my sister when she came and brought her own dog over Christmas, she showed some signs of having been around people a dog shouldn't trust. She used to be extremely skittish the moment you picked up a spatula or flyswatter. She was also wary of fast or sudden movements, especially involving cupboard doors opening. It took a LOT of coaxing to get her to come into the house at all, as if she were trained with negative reinforcement to never do it. Signs point to somebody being rough with her, at best, and downright abusive at worst. She's gotten over all those things and feels right at home, now.
I can't even imagine who would hurt a dog like this. I don't mean "a dog like this" as in "it would be okay to hurt a different kind of dog or one with worse behavior", I mean that I wonder what the context even was. What reason there could have been. The things that make her such a good dog are parts of her personality. Sure, conditioning can affect personality, but a dog doesn't become affectionate and mellow out of cruel training. She would have to have been that way already--somebody saw fit to hurt this completely sweet dog. The worst thing she's done while here is shown little regard for the difference between the floor and the kitchen table... but I wonder if she'd ever even seen a kitchen table before, with how new and scary the concept of going inside a house was to her. Besides that, she probably wouldn't do it if she'd been physically punished for it, in specific. She's responsive enough to simply being told "no."
It has crossed my mind and made me feel a little dirty for how I handled the initiative to find her "real" home. Maybe five weeks wasn't long enough. Maybe there is, somehow, someone who doesn't know what Craigslist is, and also doesn't have a single friend or family member who does. Maybe no one looking for her has driven past the house and seen her in her favored spot, right in front of the front door. But the world isn't as black and white as Lily's face. There are little grayish speckles like on the side of her body, too. She's happy, I'm happy, we've gotten really attached, her puppies are safe and healthy and have a place to grow up until they're ready to be given to new homes and, with luck, be happy and make other people happy too. I feel good enough about it.
