Also on Friday I was involved in the rescue of 2 dogs found wandering in my neighborhood. I was walking Suzie and Gracie just after 9 a.m. when I saw these 2 dogs walking towards us, and a guy walking a bit behind them. I assumed they were with him, but he asked me if I knew whose dogs they were. He'd first seen them at 8 a.m. in his street, and he'd been tracking them ever since. He'd called the Humane Society and they said they would send someone. In the meantime I kept an eye on the dogs and he went knocking on doors to see if anyone knew the dogs. We thought they'd maybe escaped from someone's yard or something. The guy brought some dog food and water out for the dogs, but they wouldn't go near either of them. Basically they were really skittish and you couldn't get close to them. Neither dog was wearing a collar. They were 2 shelties, they looked pretty well cared for and I don't think they'd been loose for very long. I borrowed the guy's cell phone to call my hubby, and he came to get our dogs to take them home. He also googled a bunch of different shelters and rescue organizations and started calling around, with no luck. At 10.15 a.m. I called the Humane Society again, and asked when someone might get to the dogs. The guy I spoke to was pretty rude and informed me that they would "try to be there by 3 p.m." - I told him we were trying to keep the dogs away from the 2 very busy main roads, and the dogs likely wouldn't still be there by 3 p.m. and he said, "What do you want me to do about it?" - I said that we didn't want the dogs to get hit by a car and he asked if they'd been hit yet so when I said "No, not yet" he also responded with "What do you want me to do about it?" - well wouldn't it be better to rescue the dogs before they got hit?! What the hell?!
The guy who'd found the dogs originally had to leave to go to work, so I stayed to keep watch over the dogs.
Hubby got in touch with a different organization at 11 a.m. who said it would be 6 to 8 hours before they could come. Brilliant - it'd be getting dark by that point! He also called AZ Sheltie Rescue, and left a message.
A lady rode by on her bicycle and I stopped her and asked if she recognized the dogs - she didn't, but she stayed with me to help. She called her sister and she came along too. We were trying to keep the dogs in a safe section, away from the roads. One of the women called the cops to see if they would send anyone, I ended up speaking to them over the phone and they told me someone would be dispatched very soon, as in it would be the next call to be dispatched. They took my (hubby's) cell phone number (I had his cell by that point) and they called me right back to say they wouldn't be able to send anyone after all because the dogs weren't attacking anyone. I was gutted.
One of the women who just moved in to a house opposite where all this was going on brought me a bottle of water out, because I'd been there for ages! Hubby brought me a sandwich, some chips, a Pepsi and a bottle of water too. I hadn't eaten breakfast because I'd been planning to have it after our walk, which would've been around 9.30! I was pretty hungry by that point.
Around 1 p.m. the dogs started trying to make a run for it, we tried to stop them but they got away. They were so scared, it was awful. I wished they would just realize we were trying to help, but obviously they didn't know us and had no reason to trust us. They ended up running right across one of the main roads, and almost got hit by traffic. The ladies on the bicycles followed them but I was on foot and didn't know what to do. I ended up walking around the neighborhood once more, not expecting to see the dogs again but hoping they might return to the area. I spotted one of the ladies on her bicycle and one of the dogs was there too - yay! I kept an eye on the dog, watching him go up and down the green belt. I tried throwing him pieces of my sandwich, thinking he might be hungry, but he ignored them. I walked all the way down towards where the dog was, under a bridge that goes under the road. I saw another neighbor and talked to her for a bit, we watched the dog from a distance. I got a voicemail from AZ Sheltie Rescue, saying they'd send someone local out to our location. Hubby called them again to tell them our current location.
The dog then moved back the other way, to where the 2 dogs had been originally. I'd left the rest of my sandwich by a tree when I'd started following the dog, and he stopped by the tree for a while so I figured he was eating my sandwich - he ate the whole thing, which was good, at least he wouldn't be hungry. Then he ran off again. At that point I couldn't really do anything so I reluctantly went home, defeated. I was really worried about the dogs, they were now separated and probably panicking like crazy. When I got home I realized I had pretty terrible sunburn - my face, apart from where my sunglasses were, was really really red, my arms were too and so were the backs of my legs. When I'd left the house the UV index was low, and only planning to be out for 30-40 minutes I didn't put any sunscreen on. Damn! I was pretty upset about the dogs, I really thought they'd get hit by a car or something, and the fact they were no longer together really upset me too. When I got home hubby called AZ Sheltie Rescue again to let them know the dogs had bolted and we didn't know where they were now, and he called the Humane Society and Animal Control to tell them the same. No point having them spend time coming out when the dogs were no longer there...
All day Saturday I kept wondering about the dogs, hoping they'd be rescued by someone else. I didn't see any posters in our area, I half expected to see a "missing dogs" poster but didn't. If I had, I'd have rung them and told them what had happened, and that a lot of people had tried really hard to help but to no avail.
Then on Sunday we took the girls to the dog park and lo and behold, there were 2 posters saying "Found - 2 sheltie dogs" !!! Yay! I took the details (Craigslist listing and email address) and checked it out when I got home - and it was those 2 dogs, and they were both together and safe. Thank God! I emailed the woman and it was one of the ladies who'd been helping me out, the ones with the bicycles (sisters). She told me that they'd got one of the dogs cornered in one of their neighbors' yards, so trapped it in there, then a few hours later around 6.30 p.m. they'd found the other one too and taken it back to the same place to reunite the dogs. I was so happy to hear that! The lady whose yard the dogs were in kept the dogs overnight and in the morning Animal Control came to collect them. The women who eventually managed to catch the dogs got in touch with AZ Sheltie Rescue and they've agreed to take both dogs once they've been evaluated at the shelter (standard procedure). That evaluation takes about 3 days. Neither dog had a microchip and as they had no collars there's no way to identify them. Poor things. I suspect they'd been abandoned, nobody so far has come looking for them and it's been 4 days now so you'd think if they have an owner they'd be frantically searching for them.
Anyway, it's good to know the story of these dogs will have a happy ending - someone will love them again, hopefully they'll get re-homed together and have a lovely new family. It's nice to know my 5 hour effort wasn't in vain, too! :-)
On Sunday we took the girls to an APARN fundraiser, PugStock 2011! The theme of the event was, of course, hippie! We went to a farmers market on Saturday and a lady there sells loads of tie-dye stuff, she didn't have anything for dogs but she had lots of baby T-shirts. We asked if we could try one on our dog and she was happy for us to do so - we ended up with 2 shirts for the girls, both 18 month size! They fit great. Only $10 each, too - much cheaper than "proper" doggy clothes!
We had a great day at PugStock, and I think APARN will have made quite a bit of money. They adopted out 7 pugs that I'm aware of, hopefully more adoptions will follow soon. The lady who'd been fostering Gracie before we took her was really happy to see Gracie again. She said they had another 6 pugs being surrendered that day, it's so so sad. They can't adopt them out quick enough - it seems as though for every pug they adopt out, they get another 3 or more! I wish we could take another, but we can't. We're having trouble with Suzie at the moment anyway, she's getting quite aggressive with Gracie at times and we've had to break them up a lot lately because Suzie's trying to fight Gracie. It's horrible, but we're hoping it's a phase that will pass. We took Suzie to her agility class last night and she started acting up there too, with the trainer's dog! How embarrassing... The class finished at 7 p.m. but Wendi, the trainer, stayed behind with us for 45 minutes helping us with Suzie. She showed us a few techniques which really seem to work well, we've been using them since we got home last night. We're going to sign Suzie up for an obedience class too, we'll sort out the details next Monday when we go back for the agility filming session. It's embarrassing because Suzie is so cute but she can be really nasty at the moment, and it's really not cool. She's never shown any aggression towards other dogs, or people, and for it to start now is just horrible. Wendi was saying that she's at that age where things like this do start to happen - she's 19 months. We need to nip it in the bud ASAP, which we're trying to do. The obedience class should help too, we'll learn a lot. The situation with Suzie and Gracie is escalating, it's making Gracie reluctant to eat again and she was doing so well - last week I noticed a big improvement in her general attitude, she seemed to be settling in well and she seemed happier generally. Wendi agreed with me that this could be part of the reason for Suzie's aggression - before last week, Gracie was depressed and very submissive, so Suzie probably didn't feel at all threatened by her, but now Gracie's coming out of her shell so to speak, she does perceive her to be more of a threat. This morning when I gave them their breakfast, Gracie took a while to start eating (long enough for Suzie to finish eating before Gracie had really started) and then Suzie went for Gracie so we had to remove Suzie from the situation. Gracie was really worked up by it, though, understandably. I couldn't get her to eat after that, I tried for 25 minutes and she wouldn't eat. Poor Gracie. It's so frustrating! We just need to persevere with Suzie, making sure she knows we're the boss and not her, and we just need to be consistent. She's turning into a monster!
No comments:
Post a Comment