Straydog UPDATE posted FRIDAY 12/20/02 at ~5:17 p.m. CT

Pat Arnold's Daily Dog Log

FRIDAY DECEMBER 20 2002

"Stray dog" belongs to neighbor up the road

     My shopping trip to town for dog supplies took much longer than I anticipated, and I was really in a hurry to get back to the shelter to the ton of work always waiting for me. As I approached our driveway, I saw the side of what appeared to be a white dog in the road several hundred feet ahead of me. Could it be the stray white dog one of our caregivers said she had noticed a few days ago on her way to work?

     Instead of pulling into our driveway, I continued to drive the van slowly up the road toward the dog, who was standing in the middle of the highway watching me come toward her. I honked the horn to try and make her move away from the road, which she did, but I couldn't pull over to the shoulder of the road beside the dog because the ground was still too wet from the recent rainy days we've had, and I knew I'd get the van stuck in the soft dirt, so I drove a bit further and pulled into our neighbor's driveway. The dog followed me, and this time I caught full view of her. She had white fur on one whole side of her body and black fur on her other side.

     I had seen this dog before as I was driving to our vet clinic several days ago. She had been lying in the yard of this very house, with her black and partially white side showing at that time, which is how I had just recognized her as probably belonging there.

Just to make sure I decided to stop and talk to neighbor

     I went up on the porch and knocked at their front door. An elderly woman answered, and I asked if the dog, now standing beside me on the porch, was her dog. "Oh, yes," was the reply. "Our grand kids love the dog." In one way I was relieved but then became really concerned when the woman went on to say that the dog likes to roam and often runs along the road, and "it's just so amazing that she hasn't been hit yet," she added nonchalantly.

     I asked if they kept the dog as a house pet, or did they ever keep her in an outside kennel to keep her off the road? "Oh, no, she wouldn't like to be penned up," was the response. Of course I asked if they were at all concerned that their dog could be hit by a car or truck, and the surprising answer was, "Well, I guess if she gets hit, she gets hit." You can imagine my thoughts when I heard this!

     The fact that there is another neighbor close by who Shoots To Kill stray dogs, did not even faze this couple. (The husband had by now also come to the door.) They just didn't care. Throughout our short conversation I realized that these neighbors thought no more of their dog than they would a pair of old shoes!

     I could have invited the couple to our shelter to show them Frosty so they could see first hand the horrible damage a bullet can do to a dog's leg (in addition to possibly killing the dog), but they wouldn't have come, and I didn't even bother to tell them about Frosty because it was obvious they would not have cared anything about how dogs suffer from such horrendous acts of violence.

     This is the type of mentality many people have toward their pets, and it makes us sick.