Sophia's story

Three years ago I took home a seven-pound, ball of fur and energy.

It was two days before I started by first job, which meant I had fulfilled my parents' requirements for me to get a dog: That I get a job that wouldn't require me to live at home.

My father, who had never owned a boy dog and thought they'd mark everything in the room, talked me out of adopting a 70-pound plott hound named Max that I walked every week at the Quad-City Animal Welfare Center. Max was later adopted, and with all the tiny places I've lived since graduating from college, it really is a good thing I didn't get such a large dog.

So I bought Sophia from a responsible breeder. She was the last one left from her litter and they called her Stormy, because to call her a handful was an understatement.


The first night I had her, I put her in a newborn baby sweater when we went outside to go to the bathroom because I didn't have a dog coat yet. I had to roll the sleeves up because they were too long.

The first time I left her alone for an hour, I came home to find her sitting in her crate covered in poop. When I showered to get ready for work the next day, I got out 15 minutes later to find the same scene. She was so used to being around other dogs and people all the time that whenever she was left alone she'd freak out, poop and throw herself around the crate until she exhausted herself.


So after reading several articles online and a making frantic call to my mother, I started vigorously playing with her before I had to leave until she fell asleep. Then I carefully placed her in her crate so I wouldn't wake her and put a Kong filled with peanut butter to distract her when she woke up and I was gone. It worked.


Sophia demanded to be the center of attention. When my husband and I started dating a few months after I got her, she jumped in between us during our first kiss. She peed on the bed multiple times to show she was ticked that she had to share. But she loves Adam and it was when I said just that when Sophia happily greeted him after he had gotten back from a trip that he told me he loved me for the first time.

Now that we've adopted Einstein and Lady, both older than her, there is no question that she is the alpha dog in the house. Whenever we pet another dog, Sophia comes running, to make sure she doesn't miss out on the love. And whenever she gets to sleep in the bed, she always sleeps on top of me, as if to say, "She was mine first."

But I couldn't imagine not having the little terror that forced me to be a cleaner person, lest she eat the shoes I left on the floor, the dog that knows all her commands, but chooses not to listen to them when I want her to come in from outside, and who usually beats dogs three times her size in a foot race at the dog park.

And if it weren't for Sophia, I wouldn't have gotten Lady so Sophia could have a friend, which then led me to become passionate about rescue dogs, adopt Einstein and foster Smokey and Molly. So really, the seven-pound ball of fur and energy started it all.