Meet:Wrigley

In this blog, I'm going to introduce you to the most important dog in my life.

Wrigley is a nine (almost ten) year old male maltipoo. His mom was an apricot toy poodle named Peaches, and his dad was a maltese named Frosty Bert Jensen. As precious as it sounds, the beginning of Wrigley's life was anything but happy.

Wrigley came from a puppy mill in Missouri. In case you've never heard of the term before, a puppy mill is defined as "an establishment that breeds puppies for sale, typically on an intensive basis and in conditions regarded as inhumane". Initially, we found Wrigley through an online website called Love Our Dogs. Ironically, the business did pretty much everything except for "love their dogs".

It wasn't until we had agreed to purchase Wrigley that my parents realized what was actually taking place behind the staged pictures of miniature dogs. By then, they couldn't change their minds, and I'm really glad that they didn't. Although it was a sketchy operation and a business that definitely shouldn't have been contributed to, my parents knew that my siblings and I would be crushed if we didn't get that adorable maltipoo that we'd been promised.

Before we got Wrigley, the breeder contacted us saying that we wouldn't get the dog directly through her. Instead, some man from Oswego would make the trip to Missouri, pick up our dog, and we would get it from him. That was for sure a major red flag.

On the day we went to get Wrigley, the shady guy from Oswego called my dad saying that we would have to meet him somewhere to get him. I'm not exactly sure who came up with the genius idea, but somehow it was decided upon that we would meet this man at a McDonald's in Bloomington.

When we arrived there, we came across an old, beat-up town car filled with dogs. And when I say filled I mean filled. There were literally piles of dogs laying on top of each other in car seats. You could sense the stench of puppies and hear whining before the doors even opened.

The guy got out of his car and grabbed two puppies from the passenger seat. He approached us with the dogs, and explained that he'd been delivering puppies to families all day. He said that the two puppies that he was holding were brothers, and that he wasn't sure which one it was that we wanted. He told us that one of them had a hernia, but other than that, they were in good health. Whichever puppy we didn't choose would go to a different family.

I chose the one that he claimed had the hernia, but I was outnumbered 2-1 by my brother and sister. We paid the guy for our dog, and then went on our way back home.

Wrigley weighed only two pounds, and was terrified. He cried and smelled bad the entire drive home, but I couldn't help but love him.

Wrigley ended up being extremely sick once we got him home. We took him to the vet, and discovered that he had multiple illnesses, along with a hernia. Not that it wasn't already obvious, but at that point we knew for sure that there was something wrong with Love Our Dogs.

Luckily, with a little care and love, we got Wrigley back to health. Now he's one of the most spoiled, happiest, loving, best dogs out there.