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Spirit Animal words Dwain Hebda images courtesy Angela Meek
ANGELA MEEK WASN’T LOOKING FOR A DOG. Dogs she had, along with an assortment of other four-legged friends on the family spread in Shady Point, Oklahoma, reminiscent of her upbringing in Alma, Arkansas. But as had been the case her entire life, dogs have a way of finding her. “I think I was born into it,” she says over cat mews in the background and two hounds lolling nearby. “Our whole family is animal lovers. We all have cats and dogs and horses and cows and goats. I grew up on eighty acres and we had horses and cows, cats, dogs, chickens.” In 2012, Angela’s pack already included a handful of dogs, including the mother hen of the bunch, a blue-eyed Husky named Anna Bell. And it was Anna Bell who announced the approach of another candidate
for
the
collection,
a
scraggly-thin
Staffordshire Terrier. Again, Angela wasn’t looking for a dog and she sure wasn’t looking for a pit bull. “I never had a Staffordshire Terrier before. All I heard was pit bulls are the dogs that’ll kill you or kill your kids or do something bad,” she says. “And I’m like, I don’t need that up here with my cats and kids.” Nonetheless, Angela fed the black pup with the golden-oak eyes and immediately took to social media to try and find either its previous owner or a new one. “I was hoping nobody had dumped him. I hoped he just wandered up or jumped out of the back of a truck,” she says. “I posted pictures everywhere. At that time, I was leaving to go on a cruise with my family and I told my husband, ‘When I get back, that dog needs to find another home.’” When the family returned to the green grass of Oklahoma, Angela discovered the squatter had indeed found a home – hers. “He was the first one to greet me,” she says. “He Bart
just worked his way in.”
DOSOUTHMAGAZINE.COM
