The Original Marley

If there’s one thing that can be said about the Tuchschmidt family, it’s that they love animals. Cats and dogs coexist, chaotically at times, with the family. Marley, an 11-year-old black lab mix (wearing the yellow bandana in the photograph above), is one of several adopted animals in their clan.

Marley wasn’t a planned adoption. “My dad was actually out of town, and I convinced my mom to go to the Humane Society,” Katie Tuchschmidt says. But when they saw him, Katie and her mom, Laura, were attracted to his sweet, shy personality.

“He was one of two left in his litter, and since we already had a female dog, we knew we wanted a male dog,” Laura says. That day, they took him home, and according to Katie, he proceeded to poop in her bed. They had been fooled by his sweet demeanor.

The shy puppy they thought they adopted turned out to be quite a rascal and developed a personality similar to the one of the yellow lab in the 2008 film Marley and Me. “He almost chewed off our deck of our house,” Laura says. “He was Marley before that movie even came out.” Katie describes Marley as a jumper and a runner with a particular interest in stealing the other animals’ toys and claiming them as his own.

Luckily, Marley’s hyper personality blended with the rest of the family and animals. Laura says she doesn’t have a home big enough for all the animals she wishes they could adopt and that their house will always be full of pets.

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