Jananas

We took Lila in to the vet’s last night. We wanted to get her checked out and make sure that at a minimum she’ll be dewormed if needed and given flea medication. She’s 1-2 years old based on how clean her teeth are.

Lila weighs 52 pounds, which is half of what she should weigh. This is after she’s already had 3 days of lots of food, so she initially weighed even less.

The absolutely terrible news is that she has a microchip. The vet called the owner, although the microchip is still registered to the breeder.

Tell me, who buys a purebred Canadian Kennel Club registered dog and then starves it? Who spends the money on a purebred dog and then doesn’t bother to housebreak it?

Because the call has already been placed we run the risk that the owners might ask for her back. What a nerve racking way to spend a week – waiting for someone to call and worrying that they’ll ask for her back.

Instead I’m going to call her local Humane Society & Animal Control services and ask them to open a cruelty investigation. The scary thought is that there could be more animals.

What’s really stressful for us is that if it comes down to a he said-she said conversation, we have no proof of ongoing abuse. We have a severely malnourished dog who was found wandering, but we can’t prove that she didn’t just escape and get away. We can’t prove that this was done either through neglect or on purpose.

What we do know is that she has had multiple times where she could have escaped from us and she didn’t. She was off leash and running through the woods at the cottage and she came back. She got out of her collar when we were walking her at a gas station and she went right back to the car. My gut reaction is that she’s not running away from us, people who picked her up at the side of the road, so why would she be running away from her original home?

We have options and there is no way that we can let her go back to her situation (we’ve already made that commitment to ourselves). [Edit - when this was written, we felt like we had options. Sadly it turns out that because she is microchipped and the owners reported her missing that we legally have to give her back.] We’re tired and not really sleeping (a dog who isn’t housebroken and who is eating lots of food needs to go out every few hours). We’re scared and on edge and waiting.

Despite all of that, we wouldn’t do it differently if we had a second chance. Sometimes these things are more important than your own tiny set of personal circumstances.

More from jananas

• Introducing Lila, the dog we found at the side of the road
• The Hybrid Generation
• Bright Yarn on a Gray Day