It all started about five years ago when our lovely first dog named Cassie was diagnosed with cancer. She had developed tumors and needed expensive surgery to the tune of over a thousand dollars to take care of it. At the time she was already fourteen years old, quite elderly for a dog. The vet told us to take our time to think about whether we wanted to spend the money for the surgery or not. Of course we thought about it, but what else could we do? Cassie was our first baby. We got her from the Pet Adoption Center in Canoga Park when she was three months old, years before our son Eric was born. So we did the only thing we could do and went ahead with the surgery.
Cassie lived for three and half years after the surgery, to the ripe old age of seventeen. But the surgery and the fact that Cassie was fourteen and not getting any younger got us thinking that we should get another dog, a puppy, to lessen the sting of the inevitable day when Cassie would no longer be with us, especially for the kids. So we started thinking about what kind of dog we'd like to get. Around this time our family saw the movie "My Dog Skip" and my son Eric decided he'd like to have a Jack Russell Terrier. Moose did such a good job playing the perfect little boy's dog that we were convinced.
Of course now I know that he was only acting. Because the real Moose was rescued from being given to the pound by his owners because:
"He was extremely mischievous, always escaping, chewing up things and running off. When he killed a neighbor's cat and chased some horses, that was it."
That was the start of our Jack Russell Terrier explosion. We found Skip (guess who he was named after) and brought him home in 2002 when he was only six weeks old. They told us he was the calm one of the litter. We liked to joke about how if he was the "calm one" we'd hate to see the other puppies bouncing off the walls.
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