Rescue a Dog

The project: Rescue a dog that was running loose in our neighborhood, keep it until owner discovers it in our yard overnight.

Time:
This is a really nice dog who ran right to us, so the capture took moments. Finding a rope took a few minutes. But one or another of us spent most of the afternoon socializing with him. Then there was the talk with one of our neighbors, a real dog rescue pro, and setting up the kennel she loaned us for the night, and socializing with him again at bedtime.

Why bother?
Save the dog from traffic. Help owner find dog.

Worth it?
I like to think we've potentially saved a dog's life when we catch one running loose.

We've often found wandering dogs. At one point, we were finding them so often during our stroller walks that I finally stashed a leash in the stroller just in case. Most of the time, owners have included their phone numbers on dog tags, so we simply ring them up, put the dog on a lead out front (in the shade with some water to drink) and the owners arrive shortly thereafter to retrieve their dog.

This is a particularly friendly dog, a Chesapeake Bay Retriever (Chessie). He's still quite young (nice clean little teeth) incredibly friendly and even good with the kids. (He was rather keen on the neighborhood cat, however, so I'm not sure there'll be much kitty love in his house.) Unfortunately, he's also not been neutered, so he is rather, er, driven when female dogs wander by. And most unfortunately, while he had a collar, it was marked in NO way - no tag, no name scrawled on the collar, no way to contact the owner.

I've phoned the local shelter so they can inform anyone looking for their lost dog as to his whereabouts. (No, the shelter folks didn't offer to pick him up, or ask us to bring him in. Just took down our info and said, "Let us know if you don't find the owner in the next 24 hours.")

No one showed by dark, but a neighbor who regularly takes in rescue dogs to prepare them for adoption loaned us a crate for the night, and donated some food and treats for him. If the owner doesn't show up by early tomorrow afternoon, we'll have to take him in to the shelter as we're headed out of town for the night tomorrow.

I understand some people don't like the noise of clinking, jingling dog tags, but a SIMPLE solution to providing pet identification while avoiding the tags is to use INDELIBLE marker to write the PHONE NUMBER directly ON the collar.

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