MONDAY MARCH 12 2001 Mandy (the newly rescued stray) is becoming more trusting

The day after Mandy's rescue (and arrival at our Happy Home for Strays) I was sitting with her in her kennel talking with her and petting her as she sat by my side. She was beginning to look healthier already, and all of us have noticed that she is so much more trusting of us now.

Where did she come from? The fact that she just suddenly appeared on our hill made me think that the "owner" of the dog was someone in this area who knows about our shelter and dumped her here. The poor condition she was in let us know that she had not been well cared for. Maybe the owner wanted a better life for her, so he left her here hoping we could find her a good home? Or is she a long-time stray who just happened to find us?

We're all just happy that she is feeling better and looking better too.

TUESDAY MARCH 13 2001 Tommy is having a ball at his new home!

This morning there was another cute email message from Tommy Tootles (and his new mom and dad). We've heard often from Tommy since his adoption by this wonderful couple on February 26th, and Tommy loves his new home. We hear (via email) all about the fun new things he does, and the places he goes, and the kids that come to play with him, and the new friends he meets, and about the other two members of his new family--the cats, Misty and Iris. Tommy has become a much loved member of the family and sleeps in the room with his mom and dad, and has the very important job of guarding the cats at night too.

WEDNESDAY MARCH 14 2001 Mandy shows signs of wanting out of her kennel

When Mandy suddenly joined our Happy Home for Strays last Saturday (March 10th), we put her in the new kennel Randy had just finished constructing, which included a wooden shelter with a porch top for shade and a dog house within. The only thing left to do was to add more concrete blocks to the baseline of the fence. New Arrivals are often very frightened, and until they feel secure in their new environment here with us, we like to have the fence baseline completely lined with heavy concrete blocks, which deters them from trying to dig out.

Although Mandy seems content here now, I put in the order for more concrete blocks to be delivered as soon as possible. Hopefully they will be delivered today.

Mandy gets whisked to the vets to be boarded while we secure her kennel

It's a good thing the order is in for the concrete blocks, because this morning while Shannon and I were in Mandy's kennel treating the infection in both her ears with the prescription from our vet, we noticed deep paw scratches in the grass between several of the concrete blocks we already had lining the bottom of the fence. Oh, no! These are the beginning signs that she's trying to dig out.

We don't want to take chances with any new arrival who might try to get out of his or her kennel here, so as soon as we saw that Mandy had made this first slight attempt to dig out, we took her to our clinic to be boarded until the concrete blocks arrive. Once these blocks are in place, there will be no separations between any of the heavy blocks, which will give us two feet of concrete lining the entire inside of her fence.

Just as Shannon and I got Mandy in the car for the trip to the clinic, the big truck delivering 70 concrete blocks came chugging up our hill. Because it will take time to place all the blocks, Shannon drove off with Mandy to be boarded until we finish securing her kennel.

THURSDAY MARCH 15 2001 Another truckload of concrete blocks is delivered, and the fence is totally rewired at the baseline to make for triple security for Mandy

When a dog is determined to get out of his (or her) kennel, he (or she) will usually find a way to get out. Wanting to be sure we had done everything possible to totally secure her kennel, we added even more concrete blocks to her kennel fence baseline and Randy also "rewired" the entire baseline of her kennel fence to keep her from pulling up the fence bottom, even tho the fence had secure wiring on it already. After having done everything possible to secure the kennel, I went to bring Miss Mandy back "home" again.

FRIDAY MARCH 16 2001 "Mommy Dog" and new cutie, "Cookie," go to the clinic

New arrival, Cookie, the big Retriever/Poodle mix pup, and Mommy Dog, the mother of semi-feral young dogs, Bobby and Briar, both had minor health problems that needed to be checked by our vet, and their vet appointments were scheduled for early this morning. Luckily all turned out to be okay for both pooches.

Mommy Dog's itchy bottom problem is nothing serious and the doctor treated her for that at the clinic, and Cookie's loose stool problem is just a matter of getting her intestinal flora back in balance--not a difficult problem to correct either.

They are both okay, the doctor said after giving them a thorough checkup, and he sent home some medicine to help Cookie's slight intestinal upset. What a relief.

Final evening check and all is well

6:00 p.m. - It was getting quite chilly out this evening when I went outside to make my usual final check on all the dogs, and most all of them had already "turned in" for the evening, choosing to snuggle up in their hay-filled dog houses inside their wooden shelters. Then there are the usual fellas who always like to stay out till later, and they were sound asleep in their "scoopy holes" that they make to curl up in when they prefer to sleep outside. All was peaceful and quiet.

I walked around to Mandy's kennel, and she was sleeping so soundly in the grass beside her shelter doorway that she never heard me coming, and she did not wake as I walked near her kennel. Mandy has been constantly on my mind since she made that slight attempt to get out of her kennel just two days ago, and even tho we have secured the kennel thoroughly, she still worries us, so we keep a close watch on her to make sure she is not pulling at her fence.

Tonight she appears very content. Hopefully her "trying to get out" days are over.

SATURDAY MARCH 17 2001 - MANDY IS GONE!

5:30 a.m. - "Mandy is missing!" Randy gasped as I slid open the trailer door for him. Randy (our Kennel Manager) is the early morning feeder, and Mandy is the last dog that he feeds on his feeding rounds, and when he went into her kennel to give her her meal, she was not there! It was still so dark outside that Randy had no idea how she had gotten out--just that she was gone!

Randy grabbed our big spotlight and I took the flash light, and out we went to look for Mandy on our hill. No Mandy in sight.

Randy hurried down the hill on foot carrying the big spotlight to look for Mandy in the dark wooded area across the road next to Angry Neighbor's property.

Randy Almost gets arrested!

Because it was such a cold morning Randy was dressed in his usual cold-morning garb--his dark blue coverall work suit and his black knit ski mask, which covers all of his face except for his eyes.

As Randy was coming out of the woods carrying the spotlight to guide him thru the early morning darkness (after his unsuccessful search for Mandy), he was just about to cross the road, when a patrolling policeman spotted this "suspicious looking character" and pulled over to "question" Randy.

Randy said he told the officer that he really didn't have time to answer a bunch of questions because he had to hurry to continue searching for our lost dog. The nice policeman obviously believed Randy, because he offered to keep an eye out for Mandy too. Now we had the police helping us try to find our lost dog. Randy came back up our hill and took off in his car down our side road to look for Mandy there.

By 6:30 a.m. it was beginning to get light outside. Shannon had finished feeding her group of dogs, and she too set out in her car looking for Mandy. I took the dog van and went in the opposite direction.

By eight o'clock we had searched every main road and every side road in a 10-mile radius of our (Straydog Inc.) property over and over again, and we couldn't find Mandy anywhere. I called both of the Humane Society animal shelters in our area and left a description of Mandy, asking them to call us if they found her.

In the morning light Randy discovered the small section of Mandy's fence that she had pulled upward with her teeth in order to be able to push through the fence to get out of her kennel. How she was able to tear loose this part of the fence we will never know. The fence baseline had been secured to the bottom bar of the fence and Randy had gone over it again, putting heavy duty tie-wire every three inches along the entire baseline of the fence, securing it even more tightly. Yet Mandy had pulled with such force that she had popped the wires (wires strong enough to withhold 150 pounds of tugging) and she had pulled the fence loose.

The next mystery to solve was how Mandy had then managed to get out of our kennel grounds. We have chain link fencing blocking off every entry. There was no way for any person (or dog, we thought) to get in or out except by opening a gate. Randy searched the entire outside of the compound and finally discovered that after Mandy had gotten out of her kennel, she had dug beneath the wood fence to finally get loose.

We cancel Adoption Day in Dallas so that we can continue the search for Mandy

With so many of us out looking for Mandy we were terribly short handed here at the shelter, so there was no way we could make the trip to Dallas today. Mandy had to be found. We left two voice mail messages with Susan Devers, our volunteer who schedules the other doggie-sitter volunteers, telling her of our emergency situation here and that I hoped she could reach all of the volunteers to tell them we had to cancel Adoption Day.

Mandy is found, alive and well!

We continued the search for Mandy all morning. For over six hours three of us were out looking for Mandy while the other two cared for the dogs here. By 12:30 p.m. all of us were back at the shelter to begin the dogs' second feeding of the day. While I was hurriedly preparing the meals for the house dogs, so I could feed them and then begin the Mandy search again, I suddenly heard a lot of barking coming from the dogs at the east side of the kennels, which are closest to the side road. I grabbed the car keys and shouted to Gary, who was walking his last set of dogs back from the Big Play Yard, that I was going to check out what the dogs were barking at.

I drove down our side road about a half mile, but there was no animal in sight. When I turned around to drive back, I suddenly saw two dogs in the distance standing along the side of the road. One looked like Mandy! My first thought was that I could not be this "lucky" to find Mandy standing right in front of me.

The dogs stood there patiently as if waiting for me to come to them. I stopped the van just a few feet away and got out. It was Mandy along with one of the neighborhood "free-roam" dogs. Unbelievable! I called to Mandy, and she came running right to me. I scooped her up and put her in the van feeling such tremendous relief to have her safe again. The free-roaming neighborhood dog (whom I had seen many times before), went trotting on up the side road and turned into his driveway.

As I drove back up our hill, Randy, Gary, Shannon and Nita were all coming toward the van to see if I happened to have Mandy with me--this time. I gave them the thumbs up, and everyone let out a loud cheer!

Mandy goes to the vet--again-- for safe keeping while we plan what to do next!

This young lady is a "professional escape artist," and she certainly has jaws of steel. Knowing she had pulled up the baseline of the fence, even after Randy had secured it way beyond what we could have imagined needed to be done, we wanted to take no chance whatsoever of her getting out a second time. Something more needed to be done to make the kennel even more secure, and we needed time to figure out what we could do, so the best thing was to board her again at the clinic until we had this problem solved.

By 1:30 she was safe at our clinic. They are closed Saturday afternoons, but after my emergency call to them, the doctor met me at the clinic so I could put this kid in their care. I thought Mandy must have done major damage to her teeth after pulling up the fence, but the doctor checked them and they were just fine. She is not in heat, the doctor said, but they would manage to schedule her spay surgery for the beginning of this coming week instead of waiting till the 26th, which was her original appointment.

The end of a hectic day

Now it is 6:30 p.m. It has been a really hectic, stressful day, but it ended up a happy day. Mandy is safe again. I hated to miss out on another trip to Dallas for Adoption Day, but it is good that we stayed at home and searched for Mandy. Otherwise we may never have found her.

Shannon, one of our two newest employees, commented that she would have put fewer miles on her car if she had driven to Canada and back after all the driving she had done in her search for Mandy! We are all so glad Mandy is safe.

SUNDAY MARCH 18 2001 A note from Bill ...

We must make everyone aware that the only acceptable method of controlling the population of dogs and cats (so that we don't have to continue to euthanize thousands and thousands of healthy, young dogs and cats every month) is through making the public aware of the over-population problem and directing them immediately to spay/neuter programs in their area funded if necessary by us all. This problem has to be taken care of, has to be solved and has to be ended forever.

If some of our astronauts were stranded in space, we Americans collectively would spend untold millions of dollars to get those astronauts back safely, which is right and good.

So why can't we put our heads together and come up with a plan to end the killing of "surplus" dogs and cats and together as a nation implement a plan to solve the problem forever? ... We can if we will.

We want to thank all of you who have given (and continue to give) your support to our shelter. We will be forever grateful for your help.

More photoes taken this past week