Bill Arnold's Daily Straydog Log

TUESDAY JUNE 15 2004

NOON UPDATE

Email message concerning Whiskers and Rocky

Subject: Whiskers and Rocky
Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2004 20:22:34 EDT
From: Pat Wright
To: straydog@straydog.org

I am so sad, so sorry. Little Whiskers and Rocky had been through so much, you all tried so hard.

Words fail me.

God Bless them and you all who loved and truly cared for them.

Pat Wright

Erin reports on a phone conversation with Angie about Whiskers

     I talked with Angie last night. She told me she had talked with the surgeon about Whiskers' hernia and asked if the doctor hadn't noticed anything. The doctor said that he hadn't even known that Whiskers had been hit by a car. He had been referred to do the operation by another vet who had initially seen Whiskers, and the first vet had mentioned only the leg. This other vet clinic tries to save Angie money, and so perhaps they had not done x-rays. He will check and see if x-rays were done. Angie trusts this vet, and is saddened by the oversight and just said that "We all dropped the ball."

     Whiskers will be cremated too, and we'll have another pretty little box on our shelf until we get the time to create a pretty garden out here at Straydog.

     Goodbye, sweet little Whiskers.

Whoever "dropped the ball" is not important now

     What is important is that we all work hard not to "drop the ball" again. Pat Arnold followed a procedure (which we did not follow in Whiskers' case) that would have caught Whiskers' problem. No matter what other vets might already have done with (or for or to) a dog that eventually came to Straydog, Pat would take the dog to our vet and start from scratch. In Whiskers' case our vet would have immediately called the other vet(s) involved for a complete history of the dog's medical problems, and if x-rays had not been taken, our vet would have taken them, and Whiskers' diaphragmatic hernia would have been discovered.

     Whenever the health and welfare of Pat's dogs was the issue, money was never a concern to Pat, and that's one of the main reasons it's so expensive to sustain our operation at Pat Arnold's Straydog, our Happy Home for Strays. (I hope Pat's not too angry with us for losing Whiskers.)

Neighbor's dog hit and killed in the road in front of our shelter

     Early yesterday morning as she was arriving at Straydog, Tina discovered a small dog lying dead in the middle of the road in front of our shelter. Jason, our overnight man, went down to the road and buried the poor dog, and we continued our work of the day.

     Then last evening between 6:30 and 7:00, our neighbor from across the road called to report that her little dog had dug out of its pen sometime during the day while she was at work, and she was very worried and was wondering if we had seen the dog. I said no but that we had found a dog who'd been killed by an automobile lying in the middle of the road. Our neighbor immediately burst into tears, sure that it must have been her dog. I told her I hadn't seen the dog, so I couldn't be sure it was hers but that I would have Jason call her with a description of the dog he'd buried as soon as he arrived at 7:30.

     When Jason arrived, he confirmed that it was the same dog our neighbor had described. Jason went down to the road, dug up the dog and took the body over to our neighbor. The only thing Jason said when he came back was that it was a very sad occasion.

Why we have coverage at Straydog 24/7/365

     The main reason we have coverage here at Straydog 24/7/365 is that we know that at any given moment any of our resident dogs could dig out. The most secure, most failsafe kennel will not keep dogs from escaping 100% of the time. Someone has to be here to keep checking on the dogs or dogs have to be kept inside. And if your only option is to keep the dog(s) inside for long periods of time during your absence, you have to accept living in a house in which the carpet will always smell like dogs. Before we founded Straydog, Pat had had all the carpet taken out of our former house and tile put down on the floors, and from that point on the house never again smelled like dogs.