After a long process and weighing many options, we decided to take our dog back and let him go to a new home.

And it sucks. So bad.

We love him, plain and simple. He is sweet, funny, loyal. He is the best snuggler and proved to me that yes, dogs really can give hugs.

But he’s got some bad habits we just couldn’t change, no matter what we tried. You know how dogs refuse to relieve themselves whereever they lay down and sleep? Apparently ours never got that memo. That’s precisely what he would do. We could take him out twelve times a day and the moment we were in the other room, he would find a way to pee on the back of a chair, somewhere on thee floor, and a few times, on our bed. Not cool. We would take him out for a walk before putting him in his crate, and within ten minutes, he would pee in there, too.

As you can imagine, it caused a lot of stress and lord, have I gone through the cleaning products.

He also seemed to hate it when I cleaned the carpets. When I did, within a few hours he peed on it. It’s like the smell was comforting to him.

We ruled out any physical issues with him; this is a behavior issue. And it’s beyond us.

We’re heartbroken. We constantly go back and forth over whether we did the right thing. We explained the situation to the people we took him back to and told them he’s a great dog, but needs a home where he has constant access to the outdoors. I’m positive that would be a better situation for him and would go a long way toward working through his issues.

It hurts. It hurts to think of him sad and scared. Crying and whimpering and missing his family.

It hurts to think of him with a heavy heart, too.