For a lot of reasons, we had yet to foster a dog. Both of us weren't on the same page about the whole "second dog" idea and our busy schedules got in the way of seriously talking about the idea and making any sort of plans. That is, until this past Sunday...
We were out and about running errands. As we walked up to the car, we saw a small dog run by. It was funny because not only were we in a very industrial area where one wouldn't necessarily see a dog running by, but this dog turned his head and looked at us as he trotted past us. It was very funny and cute, but you probably had to be there to get it. We called him over, but he kept on going and went around the corner of a nearby building. We shrugged and got into our car. As I was starting the car, I looked out of the window and there was the dog, standing at our car. So we got out of the car to say hello to this little guy. We immediately noticed that he wasn't in good shape. He was loaded with ticks and way too thin. But he was very cute and wagged his tail and let us inspect him. We decided we needed to take him with us. He wasn't wearing a collar and looked too sick to be someones recently lost pet. He let us pick him up and put him in the back of our wagon.
He rode very nicely in our car for the short trip home. He seemed happy, despite the many, many ticks on him. We didn't want him to interact with Millie at this point, since we didn't know his deal. We put him out back and immediately focused on giving him a flea and tick bath. He wasn't very eager for a bath, but let us do what we needed to do. He was a good little bather and let us pick at his ticks and prod him as we cleaned him up. This happened two more times as the night progressed. We don't know how many ticks we found, but we guess easily in the hundreds. There were everywhere. We gave him a heart worm pill and some dinner and he passed out cold for the night.
On Monday I worked from home. My goal was to find out what we needed to do with the dog, whom Steven had started calling "Duke". I assumed that I would be able to bring him to the vet and have him checked out after I reported him missing to the local shelters. I also posted an ad for him on Craig's List, since a lot of dog owners post lost and found dogs on there. I spoke with our vet's office and told them what we had done so far. They suggested that we contact a place in Boca Raton that specializes in medical services for stray animals. We had no idea how much it was going to cost to have this little guy all fixed up with the puppy shots, spay, heart worm prevention, etc. We do all that for Millie, but we never calculated the cost to do all of that at once. It was a lot and it wasn't in our budget. So we decided to focus on getting all the ticks off of him and used a small dose of flea prevention medicine that we use on Millie, so at least he would be comfortable. When he first arrived, he was scratching and biting himself like crazy. That all stopped once we got rid of the fleas and ticks.
Duke slept pretty much the entire time for a day and a half. He would wake up if we came out back and play with us, but then he would go right back to sleep. He must have been exhausted from being on the streets, and was simply too tired to do anything else. We took him for walks (he walked great on a leash) and fed him and played with him, but we didn't let he and Millie meet. Millie could see him from inside the house, but we banned her from the backyard while Duke was back there. She is a healthy dog and we didn't want to risk her catching anything from him until we knew his health status.
While all of this was going on, we were trying to decide what to do with Duke. No one had called to claim him. One person whom I spoke with told me that she would be surprised if someone claimed him. She said there are so many stray dogs out there and people who can no longer afford their dogs oftentimes turn the dog loose. The problem with this is that then the dogs breed and more and more dogs are running around loose. A better alternative is for people who cannot afford to care for a pet to bring the animal to a local shelter. More on this later, but when the woman told me this, I was worried. At that point we weren't sure if we were going to keep Duke or not. We just wanted to get him off the streets and back to good health.
Next, part II of 'We call him Duke'...
0 comments:
Post a Comment