Inaugural week went to the dogs

She was undemocratically dumped with her two near-adult puppies in a field bordering the Dunklin County Jail in Hayti, Mo. She had more character than the people who abandoned her and her brood. Kindhearted maintenance workers, with little extra income to spare, dug into their pockets to provide food, and the little family set up housekeeping in an outbuilding in the parking lot.

On Nov. 13 she delivered four more pups. Through the late fall and early winter, the pack endured. The sturdy traits of the two most discernable breeds in their gene pool, Labrador and Shar-Pei, aided their efforts. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, with one of the adult puppies already run over by a car and two of the new litter gone to good homes, my husband and I wandered into their lives. Not rescuing them was unthinkable.

And so we've spent Inaugural Week trying to place this gang of four. The two females are real dream girls, The mother's golden and caramel fur shows signs of stress, and the male has the lean look of a scrapper. But they're happy and, with some veterinary intervention, on their way to being healthy. I spent the morning of Inauguration Day on the phone calling shelters. Most were full, the result of foreclosures, a worsening economy and pet overpopulation. A no-kill shelter in St. Charles said the four could come there. Then one of my husband's colleagues said the mother and male could come live with him in rural Jackson.

LINDA TILSEN, Jackson