American Pit Bull mix named Jill finds forever home after 10 years at an animal shelter

An adorable and full-of-smiles American Pit Bull mix named Jill has finally found her forever home after 10 long years in a Texas animal shelter.

Beautiful little Jill was found as a stray in a rural area and brought in to be cared for when she was just a year old. She was treated for heartworms and that’s when she found herself spending the next decade waiting to be adopted.

Clay County Animal Shelter Adoption Manager Bonnie Stone told Texoma’s Homepage, a local news website, “We’ve had several applications be put in on Jill before but because she is [a] pit, a lot of landlords wouldn’t allow them to have her.”

Workers at the no-kill shelter in Henrietta, Texas, where Jill spent all those years said even though they had trouble finding her a forever home, the shelter became her home during those years and the workers became her family.

Stone said of the dogs in her shelter, “Even when we just get them in, we grow with them and they’re family members now.”

Finally, a woman named Keelie Blassingame, who began searching for an older dog to adopt, found Jill and said she fell in love. Blassingame said she wants to show people that adopting senior dogs is very rewarding.

Blassingame told Texoma’s Homepage, “All the other dogs were very sweet. I just feel like she kind of naturally gravitated towards me. I just knew that a lot of times senior dogs don’t get adopted very often, so that was one of the main reasons I wanted to adopt an older dog.”

Adopting an animal from a shelter helps organizations give homes to those pets in the most need. The Animal Humane Society’s 2021 report said the average length of stay for animals in a shelter was 10 days. Of those animals taken in by Animal Humane Society-monitored shelters, 51% were owner surrenders and 21.4% were strays.

By Douglas Jones, Scripps National.