When we arrived at the Pet Festival, we soon encountered someone we'd heard about but not met - a neighbour of one of Mum's aquarobics classmates. This woman, C, and her husband, N, started fostering greyhounds for GR with their whippet and cat earlier this year and when Mum's classmate told her about their first grey, we immediately looked her up - and when told about us, they tried to look up Miss Shadow but she never made it online.
So it was quite funny to meet her in person, with her gorgeous little whippet and latest foster (possible forever!) hound. Since we were looking for a cat-friendly hound, she was the perfect person to talk to about who was a possibility from GR. We encountered a couple of other greys and their people as well - greyhounds love other sighthounds. We headed over to the GR stall after awhile and C called her husband to tell him to head over with their temporary foster, a gentle light brindle boy who would be a possible match. We met up with the head of GR, Peter, the one I'd been emailing with (we'd met at a couple of trivia nights previously) and discussed meeting C and N at the overflow kennels the next day where there were several cat-friendlies and a couple more to be tested. There was one other at the stall, a huge black boy, Bob but he was probably 38-40kg and that was just a bit much as far as Mum was concerned. As much as I like big dogs, even I found him a bit big!
We also had cuddles with several other greys at the stall, including a blue brindle boy who had lost a large part of his tail to 'happy tail' - wagging his tail and smacking it against hard surfaces, causing bleeding that is very hard to stop!
They had a blue shell pool as well, so the dogs could stand in it and cool off and we managed to coax Miss Shadow to dip her feet in. We've since bought one ourselves and she's tried 'digging' in the water on a couple of hot days. It looks hilarious.
Eventually we moved on, since the festival was about to finish and we found the GAP stall - and Miss Shadow was
so happy to see L, the coordinator, bouncing up, putting her front paws on the counter, generally looking delighted. We were all quite surprised since she hadn't seen L since we took her to Winterfest back in ... June? GAP had a stall. And Miss Shadow hadn't been in their system very long either. But it was very sweet.
We talked to L about a new grey as well and she said they did have one male they thought would test cat-friendly - but he was mostly white and after years with dalmatians, we have decided against further white dog hair!
On our way out, we stopped at the
AWDRI stall (I check their FB regularly for cuteness) and thank goodness they didn't have any blue heelers there (tears!) but we did get to cuddle with Pudding, the red heeler puppy from HQ and a little chocolate kelpie puppy who'd had a terrible start in life but was obviously being very well cared for now.
And then we were heading out, with Miss Shadow trotting along happily, sniffing at everything and seeming just fine, with prospect of getting another dog suddenly just a day away ...