Pepper girl- The best mommy dog

Baby Pepper at a local pond we used to visit quite often. Yes I'm a baby too in this photo, only 18 years old.
Pepper doing what she did best, being a mommy dog.

Peppermint's Elegant Delight

March 11, 1996 to April 11, 2005

On March 11, 1996 the most amazing dog was born. She was a female black lab from a litter of 11. Her mom was black and her dad was chocolate. We went to look at her when she was 12 weeks old. It was only her and her 2 chocolate sisters left. Someone had recently tried to break into our apartment while I was home alone. I decided we needed a dog, even though we weren't supposed to have one where we lived. I wanted a rott, but my husband won he wanted a lab. The only dog that could stop an intruder with only it's tongue. Anyway we came home with this cute black furball and gave her the very original name of Pepper. Peppermint's Elegant Delight to be exact. We had no idea how to raise a puppy. I read every book I could get my hands on. At first we didn't have a crate, so we locked her in the bathroom at night. She promptly ate a hole in the drywall. I would go to work and come home to find my husband watching TV and urine spots all down the hallway. She was really good he would reply. Also I said no dogs on the couch well that lasted all of a day since my husband would lay with her on his chest. She's on me not the couch he would say. Well 2 months later we moved to a house with a fenced yard. She could now run and play outside without the fear the landlord might drive by. We took her to our first obedience class and learned sooooo much. She gave us our very first litter of puppies. We had read books, but had no clue about proper breeding practices. At least we were smart enough to OFA her hips, and lucky enough that her lines went back to the famous Bradking Beverly, one of the top producing lab girls of her time. The first litter the first pup was born before we realized she was in labor. We then called everyone we knew and they came over to watch. She was such a trooper. Now I wouldn't let anyone near one of my whelping females. I sure am glad she knew what to do cause we didn't have a clue. She went on to have 4 more litters for us. She only gave us black and chocolate pups, and one time she gave us 13 pups and raised every single one of them with no supplemental feedings. She taught us so much in her 9 years with us. She loved to retrieve, but would not swim. She would stand at the shore and steal the bumper from the other dogs and bring it to us like she had done all the work herself. She also loved to preform the speak command to the point of being very annoying with it. She died in 2005 from Mast Cell cancer. It was located on her vulva and they could not remove it without massive reconstructive surgery to her. We opted for chemo to reduce the size of the fast growing mass, but it made her so ill we decided to stop. The tumor wasn't shrinking anyway. We kept her as comfortable as possible but the cancer spread to her mammary tissue and she had a mass near her front leg. She was still happy but the original mass was so large and ulcerated and smelly that we were frightened it would become massively infected and necrotic and fly season was coming soon. So we opted to send her over the rainbow bridge. This was the hardest because she was our first dog and our first loss, and she was still licking us in the face in the vets office. She was a wonderful dog who taught us so much about dog ownership, breeding, and labradors as a whole. She would have been 13 today, she left us far too early.