The canine was now “too huge.” When the dog was turned over to a shelter in Georgia last year, his owner stated as much. The boxer dog, Mac, had been with his previous owner for nine years, but that chapter of his life was now over.
Mac was slightly overweight at the time, but not much. A board member with Out of the Box Boxer Rescue, Christina Wilson, however, has a suspicion that the owner was just unwilling to care for an elderly senior dog.
“You hear stories like this all the time,” Wilson told The Dodo. “A lot of people surrender senior dogs just because they don’t want to take care of them when they get older. It’s a sad situation, but it happens more often than people realize.”
Mac may have been “big” when he was surrendered, but he rapidly lost weight in the shelter, probably due to stress.
“The two or three weeks when he was there, he had lost about 20 pounds,” Wilson said. “A lot of dogs, especially seniors, don’t do well in shelters … it can be really noisy and stressful, so I think he just didn’t eat much while he was there.”
Wilson and her husband had just lost their own boxer, Levi, so when Wilson’s husband spotted Mac’s photo on the website for DeKalb County Animal Services, he was immediately drawn to him.
“Oh my god, he reminds me of Levi,’ he said. We must capture him,” Wilson said.
Wilson and her husband were optimistic about Mac’s future and chose to foster him until they could find him a permanent home. He revealed himself to be a loving dog that cherished nothing more than taking naps on the couch and becoming stroked.
Wilson also gets a kick out of Mac’s facial expressions — no matter what his mood is, he always looks grumpy. “He has the same expression all the time, whether he’s happy or overly excited or anything,” Wilson said. “He just has this mopey face, and it’s really cute.”
Wilson was still concerned about Mac’s weight, though. While he had a healthy appetite, he hadn’t yet gained back the weight that he’d lost in the shelter.
But after running blood tests, urine tests and getting Mac an ultrasound, he was given a clean bill of health.
But there was still an issue. Mac apparently didn’t get along with other dogs. Wilson took Mac to Virginia to meet a prospective adoptive, but despite the other dog being eager to meet Mac, the two dogs didn’t get along. Sadly, the adoption failed to materialize.
Even worse, Mac began to get along poorly with the Wilsons’ other two dogs.
“That’s when we realized, ‘OK, maybe he just needs to be the only dog. That’s the best thing for him,’” Wilson said.
They found Mac another foster home in Georgia with a man who had no other dogs — and Mac thrived there.
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