When college gets ruff, pet a dog

Most weekdays, Ñato can be found doing “socials” at the bookstore on the Brownsville campus and leaving smiles wherever he goes. He is a Shih tzu who was adopted by Blanca Garcia and Ervin Vilchis.

Garcia is the administrative assistant at the Center of Gravitational Wave Astronomy and Vilchis is the department’s special events and community outreach coordinator. 

Ñato was adopted from a family living in San Juan. When adopted, he was 11 months old.

“He is from San Juan,” Garcia said. “His family, they were going to move up north. So, they were not going to take him and they were looking for a house for him and we adopted him.”

Coincidently, Ñato was the same breed of dog as Chata, another Shih tzu who lived with Garcia’s family for almost 11 years.

“[Chata] became part of our family when she was 1 month old,” she said. “Unfortunately, she passed away in our house in Mexico where she was visiting my grandmother for a few weeks.”

Without any prior knowledge of what breed Ñato would be, Garcia was excited when she first saw him.

“[Vilchis] called me on the phone and told me, ‘There was this person … that wants to let him go. The family is not going to take him up north, so they’re looking for a house.’ And I was like, ‘Take him, take him and we can adopt him,’ and he said, ‘No, but I don’t think so. It’s going to be a lot of work’ and I was like, ‘Just take him.’

“I had a feeling about the dog. I hadn’t even seen it, but I asked him for a picture of it and he sent it to me and two years before I knew about this dog, I had a Shih tzu who passed away and it was the same breed. … When he came with the dog, he reminded me of my previous dog.”      

Garcia formed a connection with Ñato immediately.

“I couldn’t say goodbye to [Chata] and that broke my heart into pieces,” she said. “So, when Ñato came, I had an instant connection with him. It was like seeing Chata again.”

Ñato accompanies Garcia and Vilchis to work so he wouldn’t be home by himself.

“He’ll just cry all day, but you know how dogs cry for a bit and after that, they calm down,” Vilchis said. “But the reason is that they don’t like to be alone. Even if they are left in a [different room] for two minutes, they just start crying and all this stuff, so we tell them, ‘Hey, if you want to come, you need to respect people’ because I know some people don’t like dogs.”

Ñato comes to school four out of five days of the week and visits the campus bookstore in the morning.

“When we are at home, he gets very excited ’cause he wants to come early and as soon as we go out, he goes inside the car because he wants to have his little social,” Garcia said. “Well, he’s here, he goes to the seminars and he goes to other classes where we have physics classes.”

Ñato also makes friends from different departments every day.

“People from the art department, health department [and] from Cortez, they come and say hi to him,” Garcia said. “Like, ‘Oh, is your dog here?’ and sometimes when he doesn’t come, I’m like, ‘I’m sorry, he isn’t in today’ and they come on the next day.”

They take their dogs everywhere they go, including shopping. For Christmas, they took them to meet Santa Claus.

“We took [him and our other dogs] to Bass Pro [Shop in Harlingen] to take a picture [with Santa Claus],” Vilchis said. “They were really excited because they had [an area] that was especially for pets and they went to go take pictures and they were really happy that day. They met other dogs and made friends [with them] and they received gifts from Santa.”     

Garcia wants the campus community to value and spend time with their loved ones, including their pets.

“I would like to encourage people to treat them, not just as your pet, but as a family member,” she said. “Just to give them love and respect as a family member, as someone you love, because they don’t know if you had a hard time during the day, they just give you joy.

“They just give you hugs and cuddles. It’s the purest love, that I can say, from a dog because they don’t expect anything as an exchange,” Garcia said. “They just give love no matter what.”