Jojo, a 3-year-old speckled pointer mix, has been adopted by Felicia Harrington in December 2017. But three months after Harrington brought her home, she received noise complaints from her neighbours and even got a letter from the management of her apartment compound.
“They said, ‘If you don’t get rid of her, then we’re going to have to evict you,’” Harrington said. “‘And we’re going to do that within 24 hours.’” At the time, she was in line to get approval for a house, but wouldn’t be able to move in until the beginning of the month.
Fearing she would lose either her dog or her home, she started calling her friends but nobody could take JoJo in. So she turned to SPCA of Texas for help. “I called them and said, ‘I don’t know what you can do, but I don’t want to give her back or surrender her. I just need help and don’t know what else I can do.’”
“They said, ‘Are you sure you’re going to come back?’ And I was like, ‘100 percent, I promise you the second I get this approval, I will move into the house with nothing just to have her.’ And that’s exactly what we did,” Harrington shared.
JoJo stayed in foster care for two weeks, living with two other dogs. Her foster family gave her a nickname, “Wiggly Butt” because of her unceasingly happy wag.
As soon as Harrington and her family had moved into their new house, they returned to SPCA of Texas to pick up the adorable dog.
“Definitely a lot of tears were shed,” Madeline Yeaman, communication specialist for the SPCA of Texas. “She was a happy dog and liked all people, but there was a difference in the way she reacted to seeing her family to any other person. For everyone here it was a good feeling to keep a family together.”
“I am so grateful for everything the [SPCA of Texas] has done making sure [JoJo] could come home because surrendering her was probably the most painful thing I’ve done in a very long time,” Harrington said. “The possibility of her not getting to meet my daughter — that was even more crushing for me — and I don’t know many people who want their dog to meet their newborn baby. But she’s my mama dog, and she’s the only one who understands me.”
