Meet Bella

follow the pups on Instagram! @b.b.gsd

You know how sometimes life throws things your way and you pause and look back and know that you couldn’t have planned that any better if you tried? That’s what happened when we came home with Bella, Bear’s new little sister and the second GSD in our pack.

We’ve had Bear almost two years now, which is hard to believe! Looking back on pictures from when we adopted him, the contrast between his puppy self and his adult-ness now is kind of astonishing. I started to get puppy fever again! We started looking for a second dog to run our crazy big yard with Bear.

The first place we looked was back with the rescue where we found him. We even met another puppy (8mo male). Sadly, Bear wasn’t really having any of it. The other puppy was fine, but Bear kept snapping and growling. Doesn’t exactly bode well for the car ride home, let alone a permanent addition. We spoke with the rescue people, and they thought it might’ve been that they had similar temperaments and would fight for dominance. Personally, I don’t think Bear was sold on the whole sibling thing in the first place.

Unfortunately, not long after that, the rescue had to cease operations. The woman running it got sick, so we get it. Sadly, that didn’t leave us many options for finding another GSD. We stopped looking.

Out of the blue, our trainer texted us. He remembered from previous conversations that we wanted a second GSD, and he happened to know of one. It was a 2 year old female that he had trained several months ago, but her first family couldn’t take care of her (medical issues strike again). They gave her to our trainer to foster, and he reached out to us.

We board Bear with his trainer whenever we leave town for vacation, and he happened to be fostering Bella that weekend also. They had approximately 2 days together of pure play and bonding, under our trainer’s watchful eye. When we picked up Bear, we picked up Bella too <3

She’s smaller than Bear (~60lbs to his ~80lbs), and much less charge-headlong-into-the-fray than he is. That’s not to say she’s timid! We’ve had her almost a week, and she’s certainly figured out how to tell Bear to back off! She loves fetch, so I’m hoping she’ll teach her brother how that works. She also loves running – she’ll get Bear to chase her, which he LOVES – but she doesn’t have quite the endurance he does. Yet. We’re trying to teach her not to jump on the bed at 5am, so that’s a work in progress! Since she’s already been trained, we’ve been walking them together in the mornings. They do well heeling separately (1 dog per parent) or heeling stacked to one person. Overall, Bella has started adjusting quite nicely, and we’re glad to have her home!

Alright, enough chatter. I’ll include more pictures now 🙂 Meanwhile, excuse me while I clean my house. My two sheps are apparently water dogs, so they LOVE all this rain we’ve gotten lately. Which means mud!

Forever cleaning dog hair, but loving the two monsters from which it came,
Aiden

Oh! And if you followed Bear on Insta, we changed the handle to include Bella too 🙂 See above!