Photos of My Dog Wally, A Foster with Dwarfism
I’ve always wanted a dog, so recently I decided to take one for a test drive and ended up fostering for Grateful Dog Rescue here in San Francisco. Since I live in an apartment I was looking for a smaller dog, and lo and behold one day this little guy was found homeless and brought into the Peninsula Humane Society. He was supposedly very sweet, and liked cats, but had a few problems with his eyes, so I agreed to give him a foster home until he could get everything fixed up. Once the vets had examined him they determined he was a mixed breed with dwarfism, which was evident by his curved front legs. I had never seen a dwarf puppy before!
The first thing we did was determine what was going on with his eyes, and it turned out he had glaucoma on his right-eye, and cataracts on his left-eye. We decided to go ahead with surgery on both eyes, removing the non-sighted right-eye in lieu of a lifetime of eyedrops to reduce the pain the swollen eyeball was causing, and the doctors removed the cataracts from his left eye.
Wally ended up wearing a cone for quite awhile as his stitches needed to just dissolve into his eye socket, and for awhile he was wearing an inner tube device that made it more comfortable for him too. He slept with it on and went everywhere with it, so when I finally took it off he shook himself off for days.
He ended up going to a loving home in Petaluma with an amazing young couple who just loved him at first sight. When they came to meet him he immediately came over to him and it seemed like the feeling was mutual.
During my four months with him I took a LOT of photos, and was lucky enough to give him a full-blown studio photo shoot too thanks to my talented friend Alexandria Huff.
Fostering a dog was pretty awesome, and I still miss little Wally, or Pancake as my girlfriend called him due to how he would just lay flat on the ground at times. Take care Wally – I still think about you, and a smile comes to my face every time I think about your sleeping soundly with your new parents who love you to pieces.
Wally’s loving family