BELLA BELLA

Our friends Jon and Beth lost their dog yesterday. Bella could have been the poster child for pit bill rescue. She had the face for it.

Bella came to her family through a rescue that pulled her from breeding squalor. No one will ever know how many litters of pit puppies Bella gave the dog fighting world. As Jon says, if we ever find the people who ran that ring, there will be human blood and jail time and no regrets.

Beth and Jon didn’t know Bella had cancer when they got her. She was cute and had a personality twice the size of the room and she picked them out of the lineup of adoptees at the event by licking Beth. A lot.

Multiple tumors showed up in her stomach not quite a year into her adoptive life; the vet said they were due to Bella being “force-bred,” repeatedly and often. Her body would not have been given time to rest between litters: wean, breed, birth, wean, repeat.

A surgery could take them out, but they would reappear. What did Jon and Beth want to do?

Realizing they couldn’t save her life, they set out to give her a life to savor. Bella had a full year of royal treatment: a soft bed in Beth’s office, two soft beds at home. Walks: lots and lots of walks. Bella never met a blade of grass she didn’t want to sniff, or a squirrel she didn’t want to chase.

There may have been cheese and other things dogs normally don’t get because of health concerns; since Bella spent a year stretching out the sympathy, she got a LOT of forbidden stuff. Did I mention Bella’s natural intelligence? Jon and Beth swear she could even work the TV remote.

She could also counter surf; Jon came home unexpectedly one day when Bella had been home alone, and she was up on the kitchen counter, exploring her options. Thinking fast, Bella barked, “Thank God you’re home! I found a spider!” She was a very clever dog.

And sweet, to everyone but other dogs. Well, and squirrels. Bella could not hold her licker around any human; you were getting a sponge bath.

While Jon and Beth would have liked to give Bella more than the glorious two years they had, Bella knew how good she had it. She knew her retirement would be golden and that should take it all for what it was worth because her early years had been wrong in every sense of the word. I suspect she even knew that her life was a testament to the power of dog rescue and the horrors of dog fighting. But most importantly, she knew Jon and Beth adored her, and she adored them right back.