The Story of Bingo

"You do it without knowing how any of it will turn out, or how much it will cost you, or if the story will be happy or tragic in the end."


-from The Dogs Who Found Me, by Ken Foster, on rescuing dogs


The Story of Bingo

Bingo was our first rescue dog, and he sold us on rescue right away. We wondered how anyone could let such a sweet dog go. We soon found out a possible reason: he was an escape artist.

Bingo once ran when I opened the front door, taking Jack with him on a joyride through the neighborhood, causing me to abandon all dignity to get them to chase me back to the house. He once put the window down and jumped out of a slow moving pickup truck (if you ever ride in my backseat, don't be shy; remind me to turn off the child lock). A worker left our gate open once, resulting in a 30 minute frantic search that involved lots of trespassing (there are now padlocks on our gates so that only those passing my responsibility and IQ screening can open/close the gates). There was also the first day at doggie day care, when Bingo broke free on the way in to run toward our house, which, as the crow flies, was less than a mile away. And while Jack was known to the day care staff as “Spiderman” for scaling partitions to get into different play groups, Bingo scaled them every day to run back into his kennel and curl up in a ball all by himself.

Bingo was a companion to Jack and helped to lessen Jack's separation anxiety a great deal. But something was always different about Bingo. He never played fetch and wasn't interested in balls or any inedible toy. He seemed to find enjoyment in sleeping, eating, and sleeping some more. Oh, he could get going at the dog park, running a few laps even faster than Jack, and playing rough with Jack like brothers do, scaring the other pet parents with his "dragon" sounds. But Bingo’s laziness was the yin to Jack’s JRT yang, and we didn’t mind one of our dogs acting less like the Tasmanian Devil.

There was evidence that Bingo had been in shelters at least twice, and behavior that suggested he had lived a rough life before he came into our lives.  There is so much we don't know about what all he had been through. He probably spent the last few months in pain before we knew that he was ill. Now that he has crossed the “Rainbow Bridge,” all I can do is hope that he found happiness and felt loved for the time that he was with us, and honor his memory by doing everything I can to better the lives of dogs needing rescue. There is always a degree of uncertainty to adopting or owning any pet, but if we don’t risk our hearts being broken, we will never know true love.

I won’t ever forget you, Bingo.