In Loving Memory — Porcia

"Mama's Baby Girl"
August 3, 1992 – September 22, 2003

Porcia passed away in the late hours of September 22, 2003. She was eleven years old, and she had been ours for four and a half of those years. This house is named for her, and this website carried her name for years before it carried anybody else's.

Nebraska, and a Name That Was Never Hers

Porcia was born on August 3, 1992 in Nebraska, into the racing industry, and she raced until December 1995. Her racing name was Becbob Gladys — a name assembled out of kennel convention rather than affection, and one she was never once called under this roof. She was renamed shortly after her first adoption, and Porcia is the name she answered to for the rest of her life.

She finished racing at three. That is ordinary for the breed and it still strikes us as strange: a Greyhound's working life ends at an age when most dogs are only just done being idiots, leaving nine or ten years of retirement to fill. That arithmetic is the whole reason adoption groups exist, and it is the first thing we say on our Greyhound facts page.

Twice Returned

Porcia was rescued by a Greater Northwest Greyhound adoption group, and she was returned to them by her first two adoptive homes. We never learned the reasons, and we have never seen much point in guessing at them. What matters is the shape of it: by the time she came to us in May 1999 she was six and a half years old, she had lived in at least four places, and she had twice been handed back by people who had promised to keep her.

None of that was her fault. Retired racers are not blank slates; they arrive with a history they cannot explain to you, and the ones who have been returned tend to arrive expecting it to happen again. Anyone who has taken in a dog part-way through its life will recognize the first few weeks, which we wrote about on our foster dogs page.

May 1999, and a Terrier With No Sense of Proportion

It took Porcia several months to adjust to our home, and particularly to our Smooth Fox Terrier, who simply couldn't understand why Porcia didn't want to play 24 hours a day. Zoe weighed a fraction of what Porcia did and had approximately forty times the ambition. Porcia's position, reasonably enough, was that she had already done her running, thank you, and would prefer the sofa.

The negotiation went on for months. Then, sometime in that first winter, she decided to finally settle in, and that was that. Nobody won the argument; she simply stopped treating the house as somewhere she was passing through.

Pannus

Porcia was also one of the two dogs in this house diagnosed with Pannus, an autoimmune condition of the cornea that turns up disproportionately in Greyhounds. Ray, who came later, arrived with an active case in both eyes. Between the two of them they are the reason there is a page about Pannus on this website at all. It is controlled rather than cured, it needs medication for the rest of the dog's life, and it responds well when caught early; the Merck Veterinary Manual's summary of corneal disorders in dogs is a good place to understand what is actually happening in the eye.

Five Years

Porcia brought more joy than we could have imagined to our lives, and we hope her last five years with us were some of her best. What we remember is not any single event. It is the ordinary shape of those years — a large, quiet dog in the same spot every evening, the sound of her getting up, the fact that she was simply there. Most of the pictures on our photo album exist because somebody in this house kept thinking there would be time for more of them later.

She died in the late hours of September 22, 2003, aged eleven. Eleven is a respectable age for a large Greyhound and it was nowhere near enough. Two years later we lost Ray as well, and the house that had been full became briefly, unbearably empty.

Why the Site Stays Up

We continue to maintain this website in her memory, and in hopes that at least one person might be motivated by it to adopt a retired racing Greyhound. That was true when we wrote it in 2003 and it is still the only reason the Greyhound Retirement Home exists. She was returned twice and then she was home. Somewhere there is a dog in the same position right now.

We miss you Porshy! See you at the bridge.