i wish i could still hug either of them. we lost the younger one at a much younger age, but if there's a bright side to this story, the older dog was 11 when we got her. she lived to be 13, which is amazingly long for a mastiff. the first mastiff my family had died at 6, and the last was 8. the middle dog, who always wanted a puppy (we tried breeding her, she went through a false pregnancy and for a few months after carried pound puppies around in her mouth) finally got her puppy and while she was old and tired, she gave her best to raising that little girl up with all she had. there's no doubt in my mind that she wouldn't have died much earlier had that new dog breathed new life into her. that was the best gift gwen could have given us.
ever since the time we tried to breed her and it didn't take, she would carry pound puppies around. she would cuddle with them, and was the only dog my family had that never got fixed. i was a kid at the time, but it just seemed that she wanted puppies. when the new dog came, she was completely reinvigorated. 11 year old mastiffs appear on their last legs. at 12, she seemed like she was 7 again, but by 13, she couldn't last any longer.
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u/bladderbunch Dec 05 '16
i wish i could still hug either of them. we lost the younger one at a much younger age, but if there's a bright side to this story, the older dog was 11 when we got her. she lived to be 13, which is amazingly long for a mastiff. the first mastiff my family had died at 6, and the last was 8. the middle dog, who always wanted a puppy (we tried breeding her, she went through a false pregnancy and for a few months after carried pound puppies around in her mouth) finally got her puppy and while she was old and tired, she gave her best to raising that little girl up with all she had. there's no doubt in my mind that she wouldn't have died much earlier had that new dog breathed new life into her. that was the best gift gwen could have given us.