After 10 Years Without a Home, 2 Senior Dogs Found in Desert Finally Adopted

By Amanda Thomason August 3, 2018 at 11:36am

Shelter dogs often have difficult pasts. It’s impossible to know, as you pass cage after cage of sad puppy eyes and defeated body language, just what these animals have experienced.

There’s the list of usual suspects: abusive or negligent owners, changing family circumstances and just plain old wanderlust.

Some of the dogs do have actual behavioral issues that will take a steady hand and experience to iron out, but there are also those dogs who have just seen a lot of hardship and need time and affection to change their minds about humans.

Nellie and Mohave are in that last category. They have a very unusual story, one they have been quietly living out for nearly a decade.

When they were just puppies, the two wandered the Arizona desert together. Somehow, Mohave managed to break his leg, and it never healed properly.

Arizona is not a hospitable place to wander in. Rescuers don’t know how long the two were on their own, or what else happened to them, but by the time they were spotted, they were very wary of humans.

Eventually, humane traps were used to capture the two lab mixes, and they were taken to a rescue. That should have been the beginning of a new chapter, but they stayed in rescues and foster care, as reported by 12 News.

They even spent four years with the same foster parent, but at the end of those years, they were moved along. The odds were stacked against them.

Mohave’s leg was withered and mangled. He wasn’t in pain, and he used his leg to hobble along, so vets let it be.

But both dogs were timid. They were low-energy and didn’t get along well with high-strung pups. They only trusted each other, and no one wanted two middle-aged, fearful dogs.

They were captured in 2008. It wasn’t until this year that they finally found a permanent home.

In July, Second Home Pet Rescue began doing a lot of PR for this odd couple. They made a Facebook page just for them, pushing to get someone to take a shine to these twilight year pups.

“Mohave and Nellie, 9-year-old lab mixes love to explore outdoors and take naps,” they wrote on Facebook earlier this year. “They are extremely low-maintenance. These two are suckers for treats and pets. Please don’t let these two spend their 10th birthday at a boarding facility. Help us celebrate their 10th birthday in a HOME.”

Thankfully, a kind family has taken them in, and these two dogs will get to spend the rest of their days discovering what real love and a permanent home is like.

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