About Scout and Emily

Scout and Emily were best friends. Emily is a Route 66 author, photographer and activist and is Webmaster of several Web sites, including route66motels.com, Indie Tulsa, and Red Fork State of Mind.

Scout was a demolition expert, exterminator and home security specialist. She passed away in March 2009, just two months shy of her 11th birthday. For the last seven years of her life, she traveled Route 66 extensively with Emily. In recognition of her love for the road, Emily took her ashes down Route 66 and scattered them in some of her favorite spots.

Scout was a rat terrier. Wasn't she cute? Unfortunately, she was also very hard to get along with sometimes. When Emily adopted Scout, she didn't know anything about rat terriers. Scout had her paws full, trying to educate Emily about the proper care and feeding of terriers.

Emily lived in an apartment when she adopted Scout, and she thought Scout would make a good roommate because she was so little.

Wrong! Rat terriers are little, but they're very feisty, very smart, and very high-octane. They need a lot of exercise, and they can be stubborn, especially when they disagree with their owners about how they should behave. They're great pets if you have room for them to run and time to spend training them and giving them lots of exercise. If you don't have a lot of time to spend with your dog or a lot of room for him to play, you probably shouldn't get a rat terrier.

If you decide to adopt a puppy, you should read about a lot of different breeds and try to find one that matches your lifestyle. There are lots of good Web sites that can help you. Don't make the mistake of adopting a puppy without finding out whether it will be really happy living with you. Scout and Emily loved each other a lot, but it took them several years to learn to get along, because Emily didn't learn enough about rat terriers before she adopted Scout.

Scout and Emily lived with Emily's husband, Ron, and their sidekicks, Jason, a retired racing greyhound, and Songdog, a collie mix who wandered into the driveway and adopted Ron one afternoon. (Jason, who passed away in 2010, didn't like to ride in the car, and Song is too big and rambunctious to stay in motels, so the boys usually went to camp while Scout and Emily and Ron were on road trips. Jason and Songdog didn't mind, because the girls at camp loved them and always gave them lots of extra attention.)

Since Scout passed away, Emily and Ron have added three new members to their pack: Riggy, a black-and-tan rat terrier who doesn't really like road trips; Walter, a fluffy white cat with gray tabby spots; and Lillian, a.k.a. Lil Miss, a Chihuahua-Italian greyhound mix who complains a lot if she thinks she isn't being cuddled enough. Emily rescued Walter from a tree in June 2009, when he was about five weeks old -- the same age Scout was when Emily adopted her. Walter acts more like a dog than a cat. In fact, he acts a lot like Scout. Sometimes Emily forgets and calls him Scout. He always comes running.