Bill Arnold's Daily Straydog Log
SATURDAY APRIL 24 2004
Erin reports ...
Rocky's back at Straydog in one of our hospital kennels
Rocky wouldn't eat when he got home late yesterday afternoon, but a few hours later he drank and drank and ate ten bites of cooked chicken from my hand.
Randy (our overnight man) and I took Rocky for a walk in the big play yard shortly after dark, and Rocky trotted around quite a bit. This is good! (Dr. Reeves said Rocky needed to exercise.) Rocky had a fairly good bowel movement in the park. Then he seemed to want to stay outside, lying down but with his head up, alert, watching the dogs in the kennels surrounding the park and enjoying the evening breezes. When we had to take Rocky back inside, Randy said he'd try to feed Rocky again later and walk him as often as necessary throughout the night.
Dr. Reeves had given Tina (who'd picked Rocky up and brought him home from Tyler) a lot of supplements and medicines for Old Rocky, and the doctor's instructions were that Rocky needs lots of nutrition, so we'll keep trying to feed him often.
Dr. Reeves has still not made a definitive diagnoses of Rocky's illness. It could be tick disease. It could be cancer. It could be something else.
Caregiver Michael almost runs over a mangy pup in the middle of the road
On his way to work yesterday Michael had to slam on his breaks to avoid hitting a little puppy who came from nowhere and suddenly darted into the road. Michael was in a remote rural area--no houses anywhere. Another dump. So Mike got out of his car and picked up the terrified little tyke (whom he's since named Scooby), put him in his car and brought the pup on to work at Straydog.
We don't encourage our employees to pick up strays. In fact Pat's "policy" always was that "if you rescue a dog, it's yours," but Michael's already got a house full of rescued dogs (some of which came from Straydog), and he had no choice but to rescue the pup.
People wonder how we can say we're too full to take their recently rescued stray when they call but then we make room for the rescues we (who work and/or live at Straydog) come across. What are we to do when a helpless stray crosses our path? We can't say, "We have to leave this one to be run over, starve to death or be eaten by a coyote so that when someone calls later on today with a rescue we'll have room for their rescue." We have to rescue first the ones we come across. (If we didn't, we wouldn't be worthy of our contributors' support.) Whenever others call with a rescue, we always take the dog if we have an opening. We have never said no to anyone if we've had an open spot in a kennel. This is why we've never been able to reduce our shelter population. And because we can't ignore the homeless strays we encounter, our shelter population remains the same or continues to grow depending on how successful we are with adoptions.
Scooby is a really cute pup, even with his bad case of mange, which has taken some of the fur from his face and caused a skin infection and swelling around his right eye. Scooby was dipped once at Dr. Morton's clinic and will be dipped every two weeks for a total of six treatments. He has a terrible case of worms too and was given a wormer.
We put Scooby in Thelma and Louise's temporary kennel and put Thelma and Louise back with Jasmine, their mom. This can't work for too long as Jasmine's kennel is very small and she's had enough of mothering these two ever-growing "black bear cubs"!
Jordan is scheduled to go to his forever home today
The family of five children and a father will be taking Jordan home with them this morning if all goes according to plan. If Baby Girl, Jordan's longtime kennel mate, is also adopted today, we will have a vacant kennel into which to move Jasmine and her big pups, Thelma and Louise.
A complete Adoption Day report will come in the Sunday Noon Posting.