For those of you who have not been following along on Facebook and Twitter, where I tend to be most present online these days: we have a third dog living with us at the moment.

Inka, as we've been calling her, was found by my wife near the corner of Irving and California while she was out walking another dog in the area. She had escaped from wherever she'd been kept by chewing through the flimsy hardware-store rope that had been knotted once around her collar, and had been on the loose for at least one day before my wife caught up to her; cold, wet, miserable under a residential awning.

She's nine pounds, housebroken, has great teeth, a decent appetite, and no illnesses that we have found. She's extremely clever and relatively fearless, although her separation anxiety has reached a point that she has physically knocked down barriers to try and locate us when we leave. My best guess is that she's mostly rat terrier. She gets along with both of our dogs and enjoys curling up with us on the couch. She was not micro-chipped. The vet had concerns that she may have been abducted to be used as a bait dog, a prospect which infuriates me.

She may or may not have had her shots or hysterectomy; we have no real way of telling right now. And this is why we're not able to keep her--we could handle the day-to-day cost of keeping her, since she's low-maintenance, but we simply cannot afford the cost of even a PAWS clinic visit to get her vaccinated and fixed. (ETA: This post as initially written gets a little misleading here, for which I apologize. Our budget right now isn't ideal to keep her long-term. We could stretch our funds, but really shouldn't. I'm thankful to everybody who has so far responded offering to help pay for the vet bills so that we could keep her.) I could probably make a wry point about how the high cost of medical care in this country does not make exceptions for species, but that's not the point of this post.

The point is that she needs a new home, and she needs a new home soon, because she's bonding with us and our dogs and she's getting used to the environment, and the longer it takes the harder the re-adjustment will be. It's not fair to her to continue living with us, because we can't support her and the family we already have on the budget we're currently keeping.

We were originally planning, if we could not find somebody in our circle willing to take her on, to give her over to PAWS, but we discovered that, as a stray, PAWS cannot take her in directly, she would have to go to Animal Control first.

Longtime readers of this space may recall that I had cause to deal with Animal Control earlier this year and that the end result of those dealings left me with little to no confidence in this city's particular department. I absolutely refuse to hand over this near-perfect little creature to some sort of Dickensian nightmare in which I'd wager she stands just as much chance of being euthanized through clerical error as she does of making it to PAWS.

As such, I ask for your help. If you know somebody who has lost a dog like the above, please let me know. If you or somebody you know is interested in meeting this dog to adopt her, understanding that she will cost possibly $100-200 in initial vet costs, please let me know.

I don't pretend that I can predict the future, but I would find it unconscionable to believe that this dog doesn't end up living a long and contented life with people who love her. Prove me right.