Can I ask a favor? All you humans that are out there thinking about bringing a dog into your life, or the ones who already have, I'd just like for you to stop and think for a minute. Because dogs (especially boxers!) are wonderful. Dogs are amazing. Dogs will give you our whole heart. We'll be the wagging tail that greets you when you come home every day, we'll be the warm body to snuggle up to when you're feeling rotten, we'll be the silly antics that make you smile no matter how bad your day has been. No matter what you do, no matter what you look like, no matter how the rest of the world treats you, we'll be there for you.

Do you want to know my favor? The one thing that we ask in return for all that love? When it's our time, when we're old and hurting... please stay with us. We love you. We gave you our whole life and heart and soul. When it's time for us to go on, please don't say "it's too hard" or you "just can't stand it." Don't make the last person we see be the vet. Worse, don't make us wait scared and alone at the shelter, not knowing what we did wrong or why our family abandoned us just when we needed you the most.

This is Painter. He loyally loved his family like a good dog should. And when he was hurt, his family didn't give any of that loyalty back to him. We think he had a stroke, or maybe some kind of brain tumor. He couldn't move his left side at all and his right side only a little. Instead of staying with him and holding him, his family left him at a shelter to make the poor shelter workers do what they couldn't.

Painter did find a family before it was too late. Two LBR volunteers went to look at him in the shelter and knew they couldn't leave him there, barely able to move on the rainbow blanket the shelter workers gave him but still trying to do his boxer wiggle. They did what family should do. They took him to the vet, they found out that nothing else could be done to help him, and they held him while the vet helped him to the Rainbow Bridge. Painter was a member of the Legacy family before he died, so he didn't die alone.

That's all any of us ask from you humans out there. We love you, and we'll do anything for you. Please, please don't make us die alone.