11/04/2026
❤️
A lot of people who retire to Florida give up a dog to do it. Mostly they're scared of what happens to the dog if they go first.
So a woman named Joanie, who's 78 and used to run a school cafeteria in Ohio, made a deal with the county shelter last winter. The shelter would bring its oldest dogs to the clubhouse at seven in the morning. Anybody in the neighborhood with a golf cart could take one along on their morning ride and bring the dog back by lunch.
She put a notice on the board by the mailboxes. The first Tuesday, 11 carts showed up. By March, 52 people were signed up.
The dogs rode in the passenger seat with ears blowing back, past the pond and the palm trees and the pickleball courts, where people stopped playing to wave. A pit mix that had been at the shelter for two years, gray all through the face, rode with a retired dentist from Michigan. There was a basset hound that went out with a couple who'd lost their own basset the summer before. One old shepherd mix wouldn't get out of a man's cart at noon and lay down across the seat. The man drove back around the pond again.
Joanie took a shaggy little terrier mix named Scooter. On the first ride Scooter sat up straight on the seat and stuck that gray nose into the wind for 3 miles. The next morning Joanie stopped at the clubhouse and filled out the paperwork.
Most of the people in those carts had told their kids for years that they were too old to start over with a dog. After a few weeks of morning rides, a lot of them quit saying it.
By the end of the season, 44 of the old dogs had never gone back. The shelter still sends the van every Tuesday and Thursday, and the first carts pull in before the van does.
Joanie still drives the same loop every morning. Scooter still rides up front with that nose in the wind, and Joanie has given up trying to get the dog to look at the road.
