Two years with our sweet Cassie

Cassie's first day at home, Aug. 29, 2006.

Two years ago, on August 29, 2006, we adopted Cassie from the Burlington Pet Adoption Center, where we also adopted Greta, in Burlington, NC. She was only 6 months old.

We had decided that Greta needed a friend, a companion, a brother or sister. We put a lot of thought into it. But we didn't really know what breed of dog we wanted. (Yes, all you dog trainers out there can get on my case now). I think we knew we didn't want a dog that was as big as Greta. A medium-sized dog would be good. We just knew we needed to rescue another dog.

So we headed to the shelter to see who was waiting for us. We also are drawn to nonbarkers at the shelters. I immediately saw this little border collie looking kinda pitiful in her cage. So I wanted to check her out. Then my husband wanted to check out this other male dog. I don't even know what breed he was. So we were able to take both of them out to the play area. The border collie just wanted to play. She was all over the place, bounding here and there. She wouldn't come to us (a sign of things to come I suppose) and was just excited to be free. The male dog was very sweet and cuddly. He immediately won me over. But my husband wasn't sure. He kind of liked the energy of the border collie.

We decided that really, this was Greta's decision. So I stayed with the two pups, while my husband went home to get Greta. About 10 minutes later, he arrived with Greta to let her check out these two options for a new brother or a new sister. There was lots of sniffing, some peeing, some circling. And then a fight broke out between the two potential candidates. The male was on top of the female. And Greta got in the middle of it to protect the female border collie from the male attacker.

So we knew Greta had made her decision on which dog to protect, so based on that we had made our decision on which dog to bring home: our sweet border collie, Cassie.