Sometimes the most precious gift in the world is the simplest one. For Ezra, a stray dog who spent his life on the streets, that was somewhere soft and warm to sleep. And the smile on his face

when he received his very first bed said it all.When Ezra first arrived at Fairfield County Animal

Shelter in September, he wouldn’t look anyone in the eye. He lay in the back of his kennel,

shaking and staring at the wall. Shelter staff knew he’d need to overcome his fear to have a

chance at a better life, so they came up with a plan to win him over: hot dogs.

“The hot dogs were the key to his heart,” Samira Yaghi, rescue coordinator at the shelter,

told The Dodo. “We always had hot dogs when walking by Ezra’s kennel. What started with tossing

the hot dogs slowly became him taking them gently out of our hands.”As Ezra got more comfortable,

he began to press his body up against the volunteers, allowing them to pet him.Finally, five months

after he arrived, the nervous dog went outside for his very first walk. “It’s been uphill ever since,

” Yaghi said. “He is full of wiggles and bounce anytime he sees us approaching, eager to say ‘hello’ and eager to give us kisses.”It was after one of these walks that Ezra’s life changed forever.

“We had several dog beds donated and they were still sitting by the entryway,” Yaghi wrote on Facebook. “On his way out for a walk, he [lay] on the bed [and] had to be coaxed off. On

their way back in from the walk, he [lay] on the bed again.”Seeing how attached Ezra was to the bed, the shelter staff put it in his kennel. He immediately sat in the bed, smiling from ear to ear.
“Just look at how happy and proud he is to have that bed,” Yaghi wrote. “He sat nice and tall with a smile of gratitude on his face!”