The Last Dog Left In The Shelter Finally Smiles When He Goes Home

There is a very old saying that “patience is a virtue” and there is perhaps no creature on earth who can appreciate this sentiment better than a sweet shelter dog named Capone.

The Michigan based Staffordshire terrier-mixed rescue dog is 7-years-old now, and even though he has been patiently waiting for his forever family to come and find him at the Ionia County Animal Shelter, unfortunately, the time kept on ticking by. This, sadly, can pretty much be par for the course in shelter life, but at least the dogs aren’t there alone…usually.

As it turns out, Capone is also a repeat resident at the shelter. He had been surrendered to ICAS a couple of years ago in 2017 and it didn’t take long the first time for him to get adopted out…just not to his foreverfamily. The people that returned him did so because Capone had gotten into a small spat with a friend’s dog when they had them over for company.

After being surrendered to the shelter again, with no family to truly love him, Capone got very depressed and refused to eat any food.
“He lost quite a bit of weight as he just did not have the appetite he did in his home. It was very hard to get him to eat. We had to coax him daily with treats and assorted wet foods,” Quinn remembers the heartbroken dog.

Quinn is a seasoned rescuer and dog lover and knew exactly what was wrong with Capone and why he didn’t want to eat.

“He was heartbroken, and anyone who has felt true heartbreak understands how proper diet takes the back seat,” she defends the sweet shelter dog.

After suffering outright rejection for the second time in his life, Quinn believes that the awful experience really changed Capone and how he saw people, making him afraid to give his love and trust as freely as he did before.

“The Capone we met in 2017 and the Capone wet met in 2018 were two different dogs. After he was surrendered the second time, it seemed like he picked and chose his friends as if he truly felt betrayed. He became very attached to us shelter staff,” Quin said.

As a lot of dogs are, Capone is the type of dog who loves to follow his favorite people around, never wanting to leave their side.

“He is a ‘velcro dog,’ a dog who loves to be right next to you, always touching you,” Quinn adds.

With his past for forming bonds with humans only to later be abandoned by them, it’s perfectly understandable if Capone likes to keep particularly close contact with the humans he loves.

After his run-in with the anonymous dog visiting his former family, the shelter staff agreed that Capone should be adopted out to a family that didn’t have any other furbabies running around.

The restriction proved to be a huge setback in finding potential adopters for the sweet shelter dog, but they weren’t willing to give up on him just yet. They repeatedly posted pictures of the loving dog to their social media and made sure the entire community knew that Capone was totally ready to find his forever home.

Finally, in early January of this year, the loveable pittie found the forever family he had been waiting for this whole time.

Quinn was shocked and overjoyed that all of the staff’s outreach and Capone’s unending patience had finally paid off for the adorable dog, and when the family showed up to meet their new furbaby, the shelter’s director knew that this time the adoption would stick.

“They had fallen in love with his pictures and his story. [When] they came into our shelter later that day, they had already gone to the pet store and made him a custom name tag with his name and their information,” she excitedly recalls.

Even though Quinn knew that the couple would be perfect for Capone, she wasn’t so sure about how he would react to leaving the shelter workers he knew and loved to be with yet another set of strangers claiming to love him. Quinn was nervous that this time, it would be the dog who rejected the adopters, but as it turns out, there was never any need for her to worry at all.

“My staff and myself crossing our fingers that Capone would like them. As I walked into the lobby with Capone, he stopped and looked at Jon and Ashlee for a while. They both knelt down and Capone ran right into their arms. It was truly a tearjerker,” she joyfully remembers the family’s first meeting.

The only dog left at the shelter for so long, who had been adopted only to later be rejected twice in his life, would never be alone in the world again. He had found his humans after all.

While it was hard for the shelter employees to see him go, they were deeply touched at getting to be a part of such a wonderful outcome for the sweet dog they had come to know and love.

After his new family got Capone settled into his new house they took a picture of him as he curled up in his new bed and the look on his face is worth more than a thousand words.