It can’t get any worse?
If you don’t recall the blog entry from Wednesday, March 12th, now might be a good time to go back and read it. Otherwise today’s entry might not make any sense.
Not that it will make any sense anyway.
Our trip last month to the far-away land where we attempted to evaluate dozens of dog which had been relinquished to the care of Animal Control had one bright spot: a middle-aged female that we called Sarah. She has been at Nelda’s for some time now and may have an adoptive home.
Sarah seemed to be coming out of her heat cycle when we saw her so it was decided to wait a couple weeks to spay her. Here is the result of the vet’s extensive examination done at the time of her surgery:
1.Bladder infection and Pyometrea – send home antibiotics
2. hips fine – chronic painful ACL tears in both knees… right one is worse.
3. heart-worm negative
4. ears fine
5. teeth chiping (lower incisors)
As she gets older she will probably have variable degrees of arthritis in her knees
Like for her to weigh 90 lbs
She was too groggy to come home, so she will spend the night there.
If she lays around lazy dog style, knees should be ok
There is some swelling, bone spur and mode degree of calcification.
Isn’t it wonderful how people care for their dogs?
That’s the good news from our trip.
Now for the part that will help you to understand why we chose to illustrate today’s blog with Munch’s painting “The Scream”.
The person highest on the bureaucratic food chain in the county that we traveled to -- the person who has authority over Animal Control, though not an A. C. officer -- has seen fit to disregard nearly every recommendation that we gave.
He’s delayed euthanizing many of the animals that we deemed unsafe and unadoptable. He’s put a couple of the younger ones into ‘foster care’ -- and they have been shuffled around several times because they couldn’t be handled by the inexperience folks who took them.
Then the litter of nine 5-week old pups (which were going to be evaluated for temperament at 7-8 weeks) started succumbing to Parvo. Our genius bureaucrat made the decision to try and save them with minimal care -- sub-cutaneous fluids. Obviously he is not a veterinarian, but he gets to make decisions anyway.
All nine suffered and died.
Then a couple of days ago we learned that one of the older females -- which we had deemed unsafe -- just whelped a litter of nine more pups.
And the bureaucrat wanted to know if anyone can foster and care for the parvo-exposed pups and their un-approachable mother.
Sure, buddy. We’re all lined up to help spread Parvo around SoCal and expose our own dogs. Most of us have plenty of scars from being bitten before, so what’s wrong with a few more? The pups will likely die, but we’ve got nothing but time and money and blood and tears.
I could just Scream.
Just when you think
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
