Between the lengthy process of getting them much-needed, complicated, care for their teeth, followed by getting them spayed, Mither, the 9 ½ -year-old brood, and her 18-month-old daughter, Babycat, had been with us for three months by the time we made the final decision regarding their adoption.

To me, it was unthinkable either to split them up, or to adopt them as a pair elsewhere. They had settled in beautifully with our routine and seemed happy to be here.

Mither adapted to her change in circumstances rapidly, while Babycat took a little longer to let down her guard. Yet she was coming along, and it was inspiring to see her progress, practically on a daily basis.

So there came the moment of truth, the showdown, when I told Charles we had to decide. “Decide?,” he laughed. “Wasn’t it decided the moment you met them?” I had to admit that for me, it was; so we ‘officially’ adopted the pair. Mither and Babycat were ours.

They may have been unexpected, and certainly were unplanned, but they never were unwanted, not for a minute. One thing that kept nagging at me was the idea I’d been given that Babycat was incapable of learning how to walk on lead, and hence, unfit for racing.

I knew from experience that forcing a shy dog like Babycat to do something was exactly the wrong tack to take. Shy dogs need rewards and lavish praise for doing what you ask of them. They also need to be given tasks to accomplish staring with easy, and gradually increased to more complicated. Asking too much, too soon, is a bad idea as they tend to experience sensory overload and freeze.

With Babycat, just getting her leash attached to her collar was enough for starters. Later, we urged her along with the help of a piece of roast beef as a lure. By the end of a week or two, she was trotting along as if she’d been doing it all of her short life.

The next thing that I wondered about was that, since she was now walking along nicely on lead, how might she have done on the track? Not that I had any intentions along those lines. The dog was spayed, and was our pet.

But the way she tore around in our fenced half acre, the muscles she had developed, and the way she would jig and then jag with ease, certainly appeared to my untrained eye that she had all the necessary ingredients to be, if not a great racer, then at least a competent one.

The only way to know for sure was to try her out in an amateur setting. A friend of mine has a 330-yard oval track and agreed to allow me to bring her there for a test drive. He warned me that without any training and, she would probably not even come out of the starting box, much less be able to chase the lure.

But, he said, if I was willing to make the drive of several hours for what was almost certainly a waste of time, he was willing to humor me.

The first couple of tries were futile. She had no idea what was expected of her and seemed intimidated by the whole experience. The last thing I wanted was to have her revert.

But then I had the idea of first walking her around the track, and later, jogging with her. Having one of my friend’s young pups who, while still green, at least had some schooling under his belt, also helped. As I watched Babycat observe the other dog, I could almost see the gears turning in her head. Aha, she seemed to be saying to herself, so that’s how it’s done.

In the end, she never made it entirely around the track; but she did manage to bolt from the starting box unaided. And for the few brief moments when she surged ahead, she was a beautiful sight to behold. It confirmed my suspicions that she was never unable, simply misunderstood. To paraphrase Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront, she could have been a contender.

One would assume my story would end there, but it does not. A scant six weeks ago, Charles and I picked up a 13 ½ -year-old former brood. The old girl came straight off the farm where she was a much-loved fixture around the place. Yet finding homes for dogs that age is no easy trick, so I began to worry about her prospects.

Then when I met her, I saw she was quite nervous from her abrupt change in environment and needed to get her bearings before she could be presented for adoption. At this point in my narrative, I suppose it doesn’t come as a great surprise to learn that Charles and I provided the spot for her to get her bearings.

And I suppose you would also not be shocked to learn that, six weeks later, she is still here, that it seems like we’ve had her for her whole life, and that we have no intentions of ever giving her up. If none of that is surprising, then try this: Machushla, as we call the old deaf matriarch, is Babycat’s grandmother on her father’s side. Had there ever been any doubt about where Machushla was going, that bit of news sealed the deal.

Now the young girl can look to both her mother, and her grandmother, to get the idea of how things are done in the world. As they say on late-night TV infomercials, but wait, there’s more! There is one other twist to this story.

My adoption group has been faced with half a dozen ‘bounces’ in the last couple of weeks. Bounces are dogs who are returned to us when their owners either cannot keep them any more, or choose not to. Ordinarily, one bounce a month is a lot, but half a dozen in two weeks is almost more than we can cope with. Yet our door is always open, so they were streaming through at an alarming rate.

One call we had involved not one, but two returns simultaneously. The woman told us that when she originally adopted first one male Greyhound, and then a second, she lived with her somewhat elderly father. But then she married, moved out, and her adult brother moved in with their father. The dogs stayed where they had been comfortable and with a fenced yard, and the woman continued to visit them daily.

Things were going along well enough until the father started showing signs of dementia and, at times, would point to the dogs as if he’d never before seen them and ask where they came from. Both the woman and her brother knew the situation wasn’t going to get any better, so they decided the dogs needed to be re-homed.

I knew these dogs only by their pet names and hadn’t yet looked up their racing names. We arranged to take them in on a Sunday. On Friday, we had a call that one of the dogs, Max, had been found running down the street. One of our volunteers picked him up unharmed and also the other one, Eric, who was still in the house. In answer to the question posed in the song, “Who Let The Dogs Out?” it seems it was the elderly man. He had opened the front door, and Max made a run for it.

Meanwhile, when the home health care aide arrived, she found the confused man trying to get out of his own bedroom window. Yes, I know it doesn’t make sense. That’s why they call it dementia. At this point, having so many other bounces, we were really pressed for where everyone would go. Believe me when I say that if it hadn’t been an emergency I would never have raised my hand. But it was, and I did.

And so Charles and I offered to foster Max while Eric went to another foster home. My reasoning for choosing Max was that at five years of age, he would probably find a home sooner than seven-year-old Eric and we’d have him for a shorter amount of time. So here’s the punchline: Max, who we have re-named Francis X, turned out to be Mither’s son and, of course, Babycat’s half brother. What were the chances that we’d keep her daughter, but let her son go? Zero.

I am purposely putting the following in writing: so I can be held accountable if ever I waiver: This is it. No more dogs. Our door is slammed shut, and bolted.

But as much as we may have what most people would consider too many dogs, as much as they are expensive to maintain properly, and as much as they require an amount of energy that seemed more abundant only a decade ago, I have to say that not since that awful time when we lost eight dogs in ten months, has our pack felt complete.

These Greyhounds really get under your skin, don’t they?

Cynthia Branigan is the author of the best-selling book “Adopting the Racing Greyhound” and the award-winning book “The Reign of the Greyhound." She is the founder and president of Make Peace With Animals, an all-volunteer adoption group that has placed over 5,000 Greyhounds since 1988. Comments on this column are welcome and may be sent to Cynthia at FromTheHomeFront@Verizon.net.