Sadly, it sounds like this dog, in a lot of ways, has a better life than many other pit bulls (and other breeds) around the country… even those with homes. I think it’s incredible that this dog was so well taken care of by someone who had so little when there are thousands upon thousands of dogs around this country severely neglected and abused by families with homes who didn’t quite realize that the little puppy in the pet store would turn into an adult dog with a lot of needs. There are even more of these poor pets roaming the streets of our cities and waiting out their last days in shelters, alone. What a beautiful story of the love of an animal owner, even at expense to himself.
My little boy, Bodie, was a stray whom I found tied with a rope to a lamp post in the cold pouring down rain last fall. He was covered in fleas and his little Chihuahua body was all skin and bones and when I picked him up for the first time he screamed so loudly from fear that I thought he must have broken bones.
My road to rehabilitate this dog has been long and is on-going (he’s still shy around strangers and very protective of his food and incredibly attached to me) but what I am forever impressed with is his ability to forgive humans for the wrong they have done him and how much just a little bit of love transformed Bodie completely.
Thanks for posting this, Anthony.
10 months agoThis dog was a fixture in Hoboken, along with her owner Randy. I saw her picture when I went looking to adopt a cat just now and the story broke my heart all over again.
In the pecking order of man and beast, there was no lower rung than the one shared by Randy Vargas and Foxy on the streets of Hoboken.
He was 46 and homeless, regular work like that fondly remembered machine-shop job long in the past. She was a member of dogdom’s least-fashionable demographic, a 10-year-old brindled pit bull, compact as a pickup truck, ears askew, two-tone face, white neck, the rest an arbitrary mix of light and dark.
And yet in this city increasingly defined by creatures who drew the long straw — winners in real estate and on Wall Street, sleek goldens, pampered Yorkies, fashionable puggles and doodles — there was something transcendent in their bond.
Maybe in a world of opaque relationships, theirs was a lesson in clarity like a parable from the Bible. He had rescued her back when she was homeless and abused, a scared runty thing living with homeless men who had no use for her. She in turn gave him purpose and companionship and love.
Maybe it was how the relationship brought out the best in both. It brought him to life and into the world, as much a part of Hoboken street life as any young comer with his black Lab. And it made her a creature of eternal sweetness, unfailingly friendly to people and animals, tail wagging at the merest glance, a pit bull in name but not metaphor.
So if you spent any time in Hoboken the odds are pretty good you would have seen the two of them, sleeping in front of SS. Peter and Paul Parish Center, visiting the Hoboken Animal Hospital, walking down the street — the dog keeping perfect pace with him, dressed in winter in raffish layers of sweatshirts and T-shirts plucked from the St. Mary’s Hospital Thrift Store, she keeping perfect pace with him.
Cheryl Lamoreaux remembered seeing Mr. Vargas resting on a condo’s shaded concrete steps on a sweltering August weekend day, flat on his back with Foxy in the same position one step below. It was the perfect image of man and dog, she said, and added, “This really was a dog with a deep soul.”
Everyone who knew them said the same thing: Mr. Vargas cared for the dog better than for himself.
“If it was the dead of winter, the dog would get all the blankets, he’d get the sidewalk with nothing on it,” said Robin Murphy, a groomer at the Hoboken Animal Hospital. “If it was raining, he’d put the umbrella up for the dog before he’d put it up for himself.”
