My wife and I have been married for 32 years. In that time our pets, more commonly known to us as dogs, have taken a large part of that shared life together. It is no secret that these sometimes small friends are able to take the sting out of loneliness, the hurt out of bad relationships, or in our case, add happiness to an already happy time.

The first dog we had was a mix of german shepherd and black lab. The dog was a female, with mostly black, and some brown. We called her