An evening at the pound

Two days ago I got a call from the county pound about a little Chihuahua mix that was deemed too shy for public adoption. I was given 24 hours to come get the dog; otherwise he would probably be euthanized. I had a cold this week, and felt like crap yesterday, and our usual small dog foster home had no more room, but I couldn't leave the little guy there. So I headed down to the pound at about 6:00.

When I walked into the animal intake area at the back of the building, a young couple was in the process of relinquishing their dog. He was a short-legged, prick-eared yellow dog with bright blue eyes; he greeted me with goofy puppy enthusiasm. The kennel tech doing the intake asked me, "Hey, can you take this dog?" The owners had told him the dog was tearing up their house; extreme behavior problems make a dog unadoptable, and if I couldn't take the dog into the rescue program on the spot, he would be euthanized. The young woman was in tears. I began to ask her questions about the dog:

How old is he?

8 months.

Why can't you keep him?

He has separation anxiety and tears up the house.

What exactly does he do when you leave?

He gets in the trash and chews on my shoes.

Does he scratch or chew at windows or doors?

No.

Then he doesn't have separation anxiety, he's just a puppy that's bored and lonely. Have you tried crating him when you leave?

Yes, but he cries and cries. And my husband doesn't want him.

Aha: the heart of the matter, and the bottom line. The husband hadn't said a word, and wouldn't meet my eyes.

I told the kennel tech, "We have nowhere to put this dog tonight. Please tell me you don't really euthanize puppies that chew shoes and get in the garbage." He told me to speak with the senior tech, so I went into the kennels and found him. When I explained to the senior tech this was a puppy chewing shoes whose owners are idiots, not an adult dog with separation anxiety, the senior tech agreed to put the dog up for adoption. It irritates the hell out of me to think that if I hadn't been there, the right questions would not have been asked, and that dog would have died for the simple crime of being an unsupervised puppy with irresponsible owners.

On to the kennels to meet the Chihuahua, and make sure he wasn't so fearful that he might become fear-aggressive. The kennels at the county pound are all indoors. A trench runs down the middle of each chain-link and concrete kennel; once a day, the feces, urine, vomit, and any spilled food are hosed into the trench. The smell is pervasive and foul. Some of the kennels are crawling with ticks. My Chihuahua was in a kennel with two large puppies; he was barely a third their size, and in their excitement to see me, they trampled him. The kennel had already been hosed down that night, but the puppies had since shit a couple of times; when I entered the kennel, I was accosted by two 35-lb. smelly puppies with wet, shitty paws. The Chihuahua huddled at the back of the kennel; I had to battle my way over to him. He cringed as I bent over him, but he didn't snap or snarl. I picked him up, and he snuggled against my chest. Oh yeah, he was definitely coming home with me.

All the way home, the smell from my clothes offended me; the damp puppies and the body of the Chihuahua left their stink on me. It's a mixture of mildew, festering socks, fermented shit and piss, filthy dog, and despair. Every foster dog that comes straight from the pound goes straight to the bathtub. My little guy was no exception, and he tolerated his scrub-down well. I carried him into the living room, wrapped in a towel, and held him in my lap until he quit shivering and was reasonably dry. Then I put him down and let him explore.

He's a chubby little guy with short legs, and I noticed that he was very cautious as he explored, crouching low and moving slowly, sniffing and pausing at every step. He sniffed my four cats indifferently, and moved on; the cats reciprocated in kind. That went well: time to introduce him to my three dogs. They had been waiting in their crates, not very patiently; D especially wanted to know if this new dog was fun to play with. The new dog wagged and sniffed politely, but when D progressed to play-bows, the Chihuahua didn't seem to notice, and waddled on, nose to the ground. Finally, when he bumped into the edge of a chair and startled, it clicked: I realized the little dog was blind. Today, when he missed the opening in the sliding glass door by a few inches and bonked head-first into the wall, his near blindness was confirmed. He can see bright light, like the flash on my camera, and he reacts to large movements close to his face, but that's about it.

He has the adorable habit of wrinkling his forehead, as though concentrating very hard, and cocking his head from side to side when you talk to him. He wants to be on my lap whenever possible; he fussed in the crate next to my bed last night, so I gave up and let him sleep in the bed with me. He promptly burrowed under the covers like a fat black mole, and slept at the foot of the bed.

He arrived at the pound with an old, frayed collar that held a rabies license 9 months expired, and a name tag that said "Jet" and had a phone number that is no longer in service. Someone loved him once; who knows how they became separated, whether by tragedy, accident, or the owner's choice. In any case, I felt he needed a new name for his new life, so I named him Pudge. He's asleep on my lap as type this.