Emerald's sparkly new life

Today was a great day.

In September, I happened upon a 6-year-old Lab named Emerald on a shelter website. It said she had been there two months, which I thought must have been a typo. She was a beautiful black Lab, and she looked happy in her shelter picture, which is rare.

It turned out that Em was a cruelty case, having been kept in a crate as a breeder dog for virtually her entire life. When the authorities finally caught up with the owner, in July, she was pregnant again. She gave birth in the shelter and her puppies were adopted.

This shelter has the illogical and unkind policy of not adopting animals to rescue groups. The shelter people were rude and would barely talk to me. It pissed me off. What gave these public employees the right to ignore a citizen? Would county residents be in agreement with this effed-up policy? And who was thinking about the poor dog?

I sent a series of certified letters to those in authority in the county, aided by one of our volunteers who told me what statutes to cite and how to file Freedom of Information Act requests. They must have finally figured out that Lab Rescue wasn't going to let up, because on Nov. 16, I received a call from the shelter saying we could adopt Emerald. That same day, I was told the shelter had changed its policy and would now allow animals to be taken by rescue groups after 30 days in the adoption area. I'm guessing there had to be one or two animal lovers among the seven or eight county execs we bombarded with letters and e-mails.

But once the exhilaration of knowing we had prevailed had worn off, I began to worry. What if this dog's personality had been completely warped by a life of neglect, followed by her four months in the shelter? What if she was neurotic, unsocialized, fearful? I had had one of my volunteers take a look at her early on, but she wasn't able to interact with her. She just confirmed she was a purebred Lab.

But, amazingly, Em is the sweetest, most loving dog you could ever imagine. She's beautiful, with a gorgeous glossy black coat and kind eyes that look right at you. She comes up to you slowly, sits in front of you, and licks your face, then moves on to the next person. She loves other dogs, loves car rides, loves walks. Her only small issue is she howls when people leave. Not for hours, just when they first leave. But she's not destructive and she doesn't go nuts. She's just missing you. It's sweet and sad.

Anyway, this week we put her up on the website, and I sent a note out to all volunteers highlighting her story. I said I was looking for an active retired couple who could spend a lot of time with her. Yesterday, I got a call from a couple I thought would be perfect. They had just lost their dog, but they really loved Em's story and wanted to meet her. They are retired, love to travel, doted on their last dog (they sent me pictures of her) and were looking for an older dog to love.

Today I met this couple at the foster's house and I could tell they were taken with Em. She seemed to love them too. She looked a lot like the dog they had just lost. The husband thought they should take some time to think. The wife was crying when she left. I really wanted these people to adopt her. I had a great feeling about them. At around 2 p.m., I emailed them and said it was very nice meeting them, and that I thought they would be a great match with Em but of course it was totally up to them. About 15 minutes later they called and said they wanted to adopt her. The wife said she had cried because she didn't want to leave her.

This couple lives on the Florida coast in a home with a pool, spends summers in New Hampshire on a lake, and said they would never crate Em and that she could sleep wherever she wanted. They fed their last dog Innova food and have already asked when she is due for her next heartworm pill. Em will be free and loved for the rest of her life.

Like I said, a great day.

A surrendered Lab's fresh start

No one in rescue likes to see an owner surrender their Lab. It's hard not to be judgmental of those who give up their dogs for reasons other than death, illness, divorce or financial hardship when you're dealing with Labs who are about to be euthanized in shelters. But when people decide they want to give up their dogs, it's best to get them from them, before they end up with some Craigslist adopter or, worse, in a shelter.

Rescuing dogs is like being a reverse Robin Hood: You take dogs from the poor and give to the more well-off. "Poor" can mean finances, or it can mean people overwhelmed by life's circumstances. I've come to think it also means deficits in one's character and ability to empathize. "Well-off" doesn't have to be financial; it just means more capable of caring for and committing to a dog.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my owner surrender request for an 8-year-old chocolate Lab that his owners have had since puppyhood. Eight is a tough age to take a dog into rescue, and I told his owner that. hoping he would reconsider. Instead, he wrote back and elaborated on the reasons he wanted to give the dog up, namely that his flea medication "stopped working" and he was bringing ticks and fleas into the home, and that he was making a spot on the carpet and there was nowhere in the house he wanted to have a dog bed.

Our district is small, so I forwarded his information to all of our volunteers in rescue to see whether someone might foster him. I included details about the reasons for surrender. His story touched many. I immediately received an offer to foster him from one of our most dedicated volunteers, and people urged me to get him out of there asap.

In conversations with husband and wife before and during the surrender process, a story emerged. The husband got the dog as a puppy shortly after they were married. The wife never wanted the the dog, but the husband said he would be 100% responsible for care. However, the husband's job got too demanding, and they had two children, and now the husband was not home as much to care for the dog. Apparently they had fought about the dog for years, and the wife had finally won. At one point, the wife asked me, Would it be better to put him in the backyard for the rest of his life, or turn him in to rescue?

She also told me that one of the problems with the dog was that he tended to leave the front yard when they let him sit out there by himself, unsupervised, and run up to passersby, or visit neighbor's houses, or...whatever. Sometimes they would go after him, she said, sometimes not.

I drove to the home Thursday night. The neighborhood is gorgeous. The house looked like something out of HGTV, with wood plank floors, stainless steel appliances, designer lighting. And there was the dog. Eight years old or not, he was a wiggly, happy boy despite being 10 to 15 pounds overweight.

Only the husband was there. Sitting on the custom floors, I was struck by their dog's dirty, frayed collar and leash and his lackluster coat. The family fed their papered Lab inexpensive grocery store food. I asked for his vet records and received two stapled sheets from a recent visit, which I'm assuming happened because he needed to be boarded at the vet's over Thanksgiving and was required to be up-to-date on shots. The husband handed me his supply of heartworm and flea preventives, but not before noting how expensive they were.

He walked out to my car carrying his dog's food and bowls. I helped his dog into my car, and he went back into his house without saying goodbye.

I drove the dog directly to his new foster, and as we watched him wag his tail so hard that it nearly hit him in his face, we wondered how anyone could give up such a great dog, especially at this age.

Thankfully, this dog's former owners now can enjoy their lovely home without that pesky dog bothering them. At first, I thought the husband might have made the wrong decision about who to get rid of and who to keep. Now I think they deserve each other.

As for our newest rescue, we already have a ton of interest in him. He loves all the attention he's getting in his foster home. He will be better off living the rest of his life with people who appreciate him.

"Surrendering" a Lab

Last night, I received an application from a man who wished to "surrender" his 8-year-old Lab to our rescue. The dog has no behavior issues, according to the application. Reason for surrender: The man and his wife have two toddlers and lack "enough time to give (him) the attention or love that he deserves."

I have dealt with about eight owner surrenders so far in Florida. I would say six were from people just like this guy. He got the dog as a puppy, probably when his wife and him first got together, and for a while things were great. Then kids came along, and suddenly no one cares about the dog anymore.

I wrote back to this man and told me to send me pictures (I always need pictures to make sure the dog is as represented) and that I would see if anyone in rescue would be willing to take in his dog. But, I said, I had to be honest. Dogs his age were difficult to find fosters and homes for, because most people want young dogs. This dog would likely be in a foster home for months.

I said to him, I'm surprised that you'd want to give up what sounds like an amazing dog. Is there something you're not telling me? I told him many people feel overwhelmed when they have small children, and wasn't it possible that in a year or two, when the kids are a little older, you won't feel quite so overwhelmed?

If the dog could voice his opinion, I told him, he would say he would rather stay with the family he has been with all his life, even if it means a little less attention than before, even if he gets one walk a day instead of two.

I've decided that whether a person keeps his/her dog its whole life has nothing to do with the quality of the dog and everything to do with the quality of the person. A relationship with a dog, like a relationship with spouses or children or anyone else, is a commitment -- of time, money, effort. As with human relationships, there are times when things aren't going well, and times when more time, money and effort are needed. Commitment.

I hope this person will reconsider his decision.

Charlotte's long road

I tell everyone that I will never again get a dog from a breeder, now that I've seen the kind of dogs that come into rescue. My three personal dogs have all been from breeders, and the only difference I see between them and the dogs I foster is that the foster dogs are more loving, more appreciative, because they have glimpsed the dark side of life and don't want to go back.

My new foster Charlotte is a case in point. She is a beautiful, obviously purebred chocolate Lab, two or three years old, who was found as a stray in a rural area. Some purebreds are closer to the breed standard than others, and Charlotte is quite close. She's only 60 pounds, nicely proportioned, with a sweet, loving disposition. The kind of dog you might pay around $1,000 for from a breeder when she was eight weeks old and irresistibly adorable.

Yet, just a few years from her puppyhood, Charlotte turns up in rescue heartworm positive, loaded with fleas and ticks and hookworms, unspayed and probably pregnant. Her heartworm is pretty bad. Usually you don't see symptoms like a cough until heartworm is advanced, and Charlotte coughs when she is stressed. Today was her spay date, and the doctor was really worried about it, given her heartworm and her cough. He was afraid she might have respiratory problems during surgery. But we had to take the chance.

It is nearly impossible to find the heartworm drug she needs right now because of an extreme shortage, but I did find some nearby. She has an appointment for Nov. 26 to get injected with this drug. However, she can't be pregnant and undergo treatment, and she can't be a nursing mother and undergo treatment. The vet and I talked, and we decided the spay had to go on. Turns out she was around three weeks pregnant (the human equivalent of three months), so not very far along. She made it through surgery. But she has had a rough night. She was extremely nauseated and extremely thirsty, so she gulped a bunch of water, then violently heaved it all out, twice. The anesthesia makes some dogs sick to their stomachs and she had it bad.

She is sleeping now, so hopefully the worst is over.

I am determined to make this dog well and give her to a doting family that will spoil her for the rest of her life.

Marshall, Marshall, Marshall

A couple of months ago I received an application from a woman who wanted to surrender her Lab, Marshall. She said on her application that she rescued Marshall, a black Lab about 4 years old, from a high-kill shelter in North Carolina in December because "she couldn't stand to see another nice black dog put down."

When I met with her at her house, she struck me as a dog person with a good heart. She told me Marshall had been heartworm-positive and that she had had his heartworm treated. She told me that shotgun pellets in his left front shoulder were the cause of his limp, which she said did not hold him back. I took her to be a sincere person who genuinely cared about dogs. Marshall himself turned out to be a huge black Lab, nearly 100 pounds, with a gigantic head and a heart to match.

I took Marshall into rescue in late August and gave him to a first-time foster in Ocala, thinking he would be an easy dog for a newbee. The first thing we do with any new dog is take him to the vet. Marshall's former owner had given us his North Carolina shelter records, and he was up to date on vaccines and was already neutered. All he needed was his microchip and a fecal test, I told the vet. Heartworm test, he asked? Oh, right, I said, I'm sure he will be negative but we should do a test. Well, guess what. He was heartworm-positive.

A healthy percentage of the dogs we take into rescue here in Florida have heartworm, which is a nasty long, skinny worm that resides in a dog's heart and lungs. It is easily prevented with a relatively inexpensive monthly medication, but many dog owners do not bother to give it, the same way they don't spay or neuter or apply Frontline for fleas. Dogs that have heartworm that's left untreated slowly deteriorate. Their fur becomes dry and brittle, they become tired and winded with exercise, and they lose their zest for life. Imagine how it would feel to have live parasites crawling around in your heart and arteries.

Treatment for a dog with heartworm usually entails up to three injections with a drug called immiticide, which is an arsenic derivative -- in other words, a poison. The drug does a good job killing the worms; the worms are then absorbed by the dog's body over a period of weeks. During that time, it's critical to not get the dog's heart rate up, lest the worm debris migrate to the lungs and cause an embolism and sudden death. The injections are painful and the recovery is uncomfortable. Because most people do not want to adopt dogs with heartworm, our rescue pays for them to be treated with immiticide before they are adopted.

So Marshall would need heartworm treatment, which wouldn't ordinarily pose a huge problem, except that in early August, the only company that makes immiticide, Merial, announced that it was completely out of the drug and didn't know when it would have any more. This news changed everything for our rescue. We would have to take in fewer heartworm dogs, knowing that they would not be adopted for months, if ever. The heartworm dogs we already had, we would have to try to adopt out to folks willing to take a chance that someday the drug would come back.

Thankfully, a few weeks ago Merial began importing supply from Europe, so everyone is hopeful supplies will be plentiful again in the near future. But for now, availability is tight. I managed to secure one injection of immiticide for Marshall. The protocol we are using is daily doxycycline (an antibiotic that weakens the worms), monthly doses of Advantage Multi, a heartworm preventive that over time kills adult worms, and one injection of immiticide instead of the series of three recommended by the American Heartworm Society. Today was Marshall's day for his one injection.

So today I drove to Ocala while it was still dark to meet Marshall's foster in a McDonald's parking lot. I have three healthy dogs in my house, and when you meet a dog that isn't well, you can see it. Marshall just didn't have that sparkle that a healthy Lab has. He's still sweet and wags his tail, but it's just a little subdued. It made me more determined than ever to make him well. Here was another sweet dog who was dealt a bad hand.

Marshall was found to have an enlarged spleen during his initial intake vet visit. We paid for an ultrasound and there was no sign of a tumor. The heartworm vet said his tummy was tender, probably because of the enlarged spleen, which was probably enlarged because of the heartworm. A blood test showed his heartworm load to be moderate (versus light or heavy). Which led me to wonder: Did his owner get him treatment or didn't she? When I found out Marshall was heartworm positive and tried to call and ask her about it, she wouldn't answer the phone. I consider myself a decent judge of character and can hardly believe she was untruthful about treating him for heartworm. We have papers from the North Carolina shelter so that part is true. It could be the treatment was inadequate. Anyway, lesson learned. From now on, owner surrenders will have to take their dogs to the vet before I take them in, unless the owners are destitute. (Which they often claim to be. Then again, I would have taken Marshall in regardless.)

Poor Marshall didn't have a very pleasant time today, but the vet is hopeful that by January or February he'll be heartworm-free. I made an appointment today with a University of Florida orthopedic specialist to see if any more can be done for his bad shoulder. We will do everything we can to help him. I am already envisioning the healthy, happy boy he will soon be.

Buster-sitting

I first learned of Buster when Super-Volunteer Bob forwarded me his shelter pictures. He looked sad and lost and so obviously a beautiful chocolate Lab. Don't ask me how these gorgeous purebred dogs end up in shelters. Clearly someone went to the trouble of buying him from what would appear to be a pretty darned good breeder, then didn't microchip him, didn't neuter him. And he was such a total Velcro dog that I was sure he didn't run away. He was a stray, so it's almost certain someone dumped him.

Here are some of his shelter pics:

Buster is only about 2 years old and he's nearly 80 pounds but he is just a big baby of a dog. He just wants to eat, play and be loved, and there is not an ounce of meanness in him. A couple of days after I got him, we were walking him in our neighborhood and he saw a squirrel. He forgot himself for a moment and bolted after the squirrel so fast that his collar slipped over his head. So there I was, in the middle of a cul-de-sac with a collarless dog I'd just met who didn't know the name we'd given him (which at the time was Winston). He was taking off at full speed toward the squirrel. I yelled "WINSTON!" without the slightest hope that it would do any good. Winston/Buster immediately stopped in his tracks, turned around, ran back and sat down right in front of me. I put his collar back on, tightened it, and off we went.

A couple from Gainesville who were on their honeymoon in Hawaii who had been talking about adopting a Lab for more than a year saw him on our website and called me during their honeymoon to ask about him. A week later, they adopted him and renamed him Buster. He has blossomed into a blocky-headed athletic boy with perfect house manners. He has visited several times while his owners are out of town and he really livens up the place. Even Matix and Didi (aka Fuddy and Duddy) dig him.

Buster today:

Saying goodbye to Lily

Today brought a reminder that rescuing dogs is not always a happy experience. This morning I made the decision to euthanize a foster dog because she was suffering and was not going to get better. No one who rescues dogs wants that kind of outcome. We rescue dogs to save their lives, not end them. But part of rescue is making the difficult decision when it has to be made, and Lily was one of those decisions.

I had Lily, age roughly 7, for only three days, but she was in our rescue for nearly three months, having battled several other health issues, including kennel cough and a serious infection, in the interim. A volunteer from the Tampa area pulled her from a shelter where she had been left. She had a microchip, but when the shelter called the listed owner, she claimed she had given the dog away to someone. When pressed for details about the someone, she said she couldn't remember.

When the folks in Tampa got Lily, she had a distorted skull, or a "large, hard, bony protuberance," as I later read in her medical records. The first I heard about her was last week, when I was asked to keep her at my house for a couple of days while she underwent tests at the nearby University of Florida vet school. At that point all I had heard was that Lily had "a lump on her head." So I wasn't prepared for what I saw. Lily's head was grossly misshapen, as though her skull had been implanted with a rock the size of a potato. One side of her head was higher than the other, and the growth was so large that it had pulled her skin unnaturally tight, making her eyes wide and turned up at the corners, like a woman with a bad brow lift.

At my house, it was evident that Lily wasn't feeling well. She stared blankly and her eyes were lifeless. She shook her head, was wobbly on her feet, and seemed exhausted and defeated much of the time. I was looking forward to hearing what the doctor would say so we could make a decision right away. Our super-volunteer Bob came by to get her Monday morning, then called half an hour later to say he had gotten the appointment date wrong; it was next Monday. My heart sank because I didn't know whether she could -- or should -- stay alive until then.

The UF specialist had seen Lily's ultrasound and had made a preliminary diagnosis of multilobular osteochondrosarcoma, or MLO. It is a benign tumor that apparently has a pretty good cure rate if caught early enough. But Lily was not an early catch. This tumor was huge, and she was symptomatic. Surgery is the only option for these tumors, and I'm not a big believer in putting dogs through huge surgeries where the benefits are questionable. I discussed her situation with others in rescue, and we agreed. So in a way, the appointment snafu was a blessing in disguise. The plan had been to have her tumor biopsied, but why? No matter what we found, surgery was unlikely to be a good option for Lily.

So the goal became to try to keep Lily comfortable enough to make it to her appointment, just to hear what the specialist had to say. We tried to be encouraging with each wag of the tail, and she did eat and drink and pee and poop until the end. But she was existing, not living. On Monday night I came back from an errand and found her in a heap on the floor, not moving and unresponsive. I didn't know what was wrong but I rummaged around and found one Rimadyl, a pain medication, and gave it to her at around 9 p.m. She woke up the next morning almost bouncy, which confirmed that she had been in pain the night before.

I decided to get a supply of pain meds from the vet, hoping they would carry her through to the appointment. But subsequent Rimadyls did not have the same miraculous effect. She was just out of it.

On Tuesday night, my husband let her outside in the dark to go to the bathroom, and she didn't come back in right away as usual. He said she was just standing there in the dark. I went to look and that was exactly what she was doing. I had to call her several times before she came in. "This isn't good," he said, and at that point I decided to make an appointment with our Lab Rescue vet.

I decided to keep an open mind and listen to what our vet, Dr. Shores, had to say. I explained Lily's situation, ending by saying that I was asking myself whether it was in her best interest to keep her alive at this point. He was unequivocal: No. "If you had something like that in your head," he said, "how do you think you would feel?" That was all I needed to hear.

I stayed with her throughout, petting her and telling her how sorry I was. I thought of my two dogs, whom I've had since puppyhood, and how lucky they've been to have lives unscathed by disease and abandonment. Life is just unfair sometimes, to people and to animals. Lily was one of the unlucky ones. We take some comfort in knowing she was loved by her foster families during her final days. But this was not the outcome anyone wanted.

Rest in peace, sweet girl.