GRR Number: 21-065
Type of Surrender: Owner Surrender
Status: Available
Age: 9
Weight: 44
Personality: With some dogs, you might feel like you’ve invited a firecracker into your home! It’s Snap! Fizz! Pop! – indoors, outdoors, here, there and everywhere. But sweet Honey brings something else: a soft, warm, quiet glow that’s slowly growing brighter and stronger as time goes by. After a lifetime spent in the background, she’s learning day by day how nice it can be to make her way out to the front & show a little sparkle– and how happy her human friends are to see it!
Honey’s first few years are a question mark, but we do know that she moved in with her former owner at the age of 1 or 2; she was already a timid girl, and there is some suspicion that she had been treated harshly as a pup. For the next eight years, she lived out in the country, coming and going in & out of the house through a dog door, keeping company with the other household pups, but not getting much at all in the way of socialization, trips to new places, and so on. The whole lifestyle reinforced Honey’s tendency to keep her distance and hang back. When the owner moved to a nursing home, though, her life had to change—and in October 2021, the petite Lab/Golden mix arrived in GRR care.
You can imagine that Honey was pretty taken aback by the wide world and the new places and faces! She quickly staked out an observation post under the bed while deciding how best to dip her toes into this new existence. Over the next weeks and months, her foster mom celebrated each milestone: spending more time out from under the bed, sleeping on a dog bed, going to the vet in the car (still a bit scary), accepting the leash for walks into the backyard, rolling over for a tummy rub, eating her meals with her person by her side. This month, mom reported that “Honey hardly ever goes under the bed any more. For her, that's a big accomplishment!”
Ideal Home: Honey does just fine with other dogs, but as you might expect given her lifelong habit of yielding the spotlight, she tends to defer to them & hang back, so she might do best as an only dog in a quiet, loving, supportive household without a lot of commotion (but with a mom or dad home most of the time). We think she’ll really shine! GRR volunteer Gail, who has done respite care for Honey on several occasions, says: “She’s so tender and gentle, so curious and sweet. When she visited me, she began to come out into the hallway when I returned from the garage to welcome me home. She wagged her tail and yes, she just loves those belly rubs! You can tell she really, really wants to conquer her shyness, and I have a firm belief that she will do just that. She glides up behind you to check you out & give your hand a little lick; if you sit outside or in, just knitting or reading or relaxing, she’ll lie down beneath your chair and keep you company. So you see, she really, really does WANT to be close.”
The word everyone uses to describe Honey, over and over again, is “sweet” – and she so wants to share that sweetness with you. We’re so proud of how far she’s come. She’ll never be a bottle rocket, but a soft & steady sparkler – absolutely! If you think you’re a match for this loving, gentle little gal and are eager to help her continue on her journey, please read about our adoption process.
If you think you’re a match for this loving, gentle little gal and are eager to help her continue on her journey, please read about adoption process here: http://www.grr-tx.com/dogs/honey-2
