iluvk9 wrote:15?? That alone is phenomenal!
Well, she's a rescue, so she's somewhere between 14.3 and 15. Our vet says she's seeing more and more pitties making it to 16, 17, even 18 years old.
Tiva has survived the following, so who know what else she can manage (most of this stuff was before I knew her!)
1. being abandoned in Times Square of New York, found covered with tar and lactating (but the puppies were gone), going up to every person she could find wagging her tail, even though it was covered with tar so hard to wag
2. rescued by a heroin addict (oops!): then she got moved to Madison WI (to be owned by the daughter of a friend of a friend, and that girl became addicted to heroin, which made Tiva's life hard)--she became a street-kid's dog
3. rescued from a burning apartment in Madison
4. fell down a waterfall: then my boyfriend (now husband) rescued her from her life with the street-kid, and soon after he got her, she decided to plunge down a big waterfall, just for fun
5. hit by a car: then some horrible person swerved intentionally to hit her, when she was on the farm property, but at the edge of the road (I wasn't around here yet--this was before the fences got put in when I moved here)
6. cancer: then, after years of relative boring old calmness on the farm, she got MCT and had to have her tail amputated
7. attacked by a young pit bull: Alas, last fall, our management of a two pittie household failed: a guest put a package of raw chicken on the ground right between Tiva and Vanya, our other pit bull. Vanya resource guarded it with a growl against Tiva, Tiva jumped Vanya (who outweighs her by 10 lbs and is 12 years younger), and in the few seconds before my husband pulled her off the young male, she ended up with a gash that needed stitching. (They're fine together now with close supervision, and separated whenever I'm not there, so my husband doesn't have to worry about keeping an eye on their body language).
But she's still chugging along, seemingly unaware that she's nearly deaf, toothless, and ancient: