Brooke Morosca went to New Orleans in October 2024 for a stop on Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, travelling with friends and family and expecting to spend the weekend trading friendship bracelets. On the drive to the rental, she saw a yellow Labrador lying in the middle of the road and got out to check on her. The dog was filthy and covered in fleas. A very thin black dog came out of the bushes a moment later.
Both were friendly immediately, which Morosca found more alarming than reassuring given the condition they were in. She fed and watered them, and they followed her back to the Airbnb, where they slept on the porch for all four nights of the trip.
They were skittish — playful in bursts, then startling at nothing. The turn came on the porch partway through the stay, when the small black dog leaned his head into her hand while she was petting him, shut his eyes, and let his whole body go slack. Anyone who has worked with under-socialised dogs will recognise that moment as the meaningful one; it is the point at which an animal stops managing a situation and starts trusting it.
Morosca wanted to take him home but had no way to know whether he belonged to somebody. She asked locally and contacted the rental's host, and got nothing useful either way. On her last day she drove both dogs to Jefferson Protection and Animal Welfare Services, a Louisiana shelter, which is where the situation became complicated: the pair were involved in an ongoing neglect case and had to be placed on an intake hold until it resolved.
She flew home to Florida and called the shelter every day for a month. The black dog became available four months later. She drove twelve hours to collect him, and barely recognised him — he had put on thirty pounds under the shelter's care. She named him Rhysand, and he settled in fast, with a documented weakness for stuffed toys, soft blankets and the couch.
The yellow Labrador was a longer problem. She was heartworm positive and not yet adoptable, and Morosca has said she spent months feeling she had failed her. Five months after adopting Rhysand, on a hunch, she checked the shelter's website one night and found the yellow dog listed at the top of the available page. She drove back to Louisiana — but she also knew she did not have the capacity to keep a second dog permanently. A friend, Giulia Carlton, and her fiancé Harry adopted her instead, naming her Crumpet. They live fifteen minutes away, the two dogs have regular playdates, and Rhysand reportedly recognises the route to their apartment.
There is a coda. In February a stray cat started appearing on Rhysand's patio, and he became fixated on her in the specific, gentle way some dogs do — watching her through the glass, bringing toys to it, lying down on his side of the door while she lay on hers. Morosca eventually took the cat to a vet, got her treated, and moved her indoors. Her name is Feyre, and she and Rhysand became friends almost immediately.
The part of this worth extracting is the least romantic part: nine months of phone calls, two twelve-hour drives, and a shelter that held two dogs through a legal case rather than moving them along. Morosca's point about strays is that the animals in this story were not projects. They were three friendly animals in bad condition, and all three of them turned out to be exactly what they appeared to be on that porch.
