The Luckiest Black Lab in the World
This is the first part of a remarkable rescue story told by
one of my customers with a heart of gold…
By Lisa Clark
Saint Patrick’s Day March 17, 2004. A day I had no way of recognizing at the time as the beginning of a three-month long quest to save a dog’s life. The day a colleague mentioned that a homeless female dog looking like a black lab was staying with her puppies in an abandoned house outside of Laurel, DE., in an area known as Columbia. My colleague told me about the dog because she knew that I wouldn’t be able to hear of a dog starving, left to fend for itself and protect her puppies, without wrapping my heart around the dog’s story and propelling myself to action.
Although I had no idea how to capture the dogs or if they would even
let me get close to them, I said I would try to rescue them on the
following Saturday, which was March 20, 2004. I called a Rescue in
Seaford, De for advice, having been given this name of the rescue from
a friend. The rescue had told me about the two weeks it had taken them
to rescue the seven puppies from a back road outside of Laurel, and
that they could never find the mother whenever they returned to the
area to look for her. At that time I didn’t realize then that the
rescue had rescued the puppies I had just learned about, and that they
had been trying to help the same mother dog.
On that Saturday I drove from my home in Oak Orchard, DE across the county to the Columbia area, but found no sign of puppies or mother dog. When I knocked on neighbors’ doors to ask about the animals, they told me that a rescuer had been around all week, and had retrieved the puppies but was unable to find the mother. These neighbors, who worried about the puppies, had been feeding them in the abandoned house, and though the mother would leave the house when they entered, she had never growled or made a threatening advance towards them. By now the puppies, frightened and mangy when they were being saved, had been treated by a local veterinarian hospital in Seaford, DE and were on their way to good health, socialization and hopefully adoption. Further inquiries provided the information that the mother had been living as an abandoned, homeless dog in this area on Mt. Herman Circle in Delmar, DE for over six years. She regularly turned over trash cans to scavenge the garbage in order to keep up her strength and protect her puppies. Having lost patience with her marauding, one of the neighbors was on the verge of putting poison in the trash cans. She may have also survived by eating dead chickens from nearby chicken farms- anything to stay alive. I never saw the dog, but the next day I drove back over to leave food for her by the edge of the woods....
On that Saturday I drove from my home in Oak Orchard, DE across the county to the Columbia area, but found no sign of puppies or mother dog. When I knocked on neighbors’ doors to ask about the animals, they told me that a rescuer had been around all week, and had retrieved the puppies but was unable to find the mother. These neighbors, who worried about the puppies, had been feeding them in the abandoned house, and though the mother would leave the house when they entered, she had never growled or made a threatening advance towards them. By now the puppies, frightened and mangy when they were being saved, had been treated by a local veterinarian hospital in Seaford, DE and were on their way to good health, socialization and hopefully adoption. Further inquiries provided the information that the mother had been living as an abandoned, homeless dog in this area on Mt. Herman Circle in Delmar, DE for over six years. She regularly turned over trash cans to scavenge the garbage in order to keep up her strength and protect her puppies. Having lost patience with her marauding, one of the neighbors was on the verge of putting poison in the trash cans. She may have also survived by eating dead chickens from nearby chicken farms- anything to stay alive. I never saw the dog, but the next day I drove back over to leave food for her by the edge of the woods....
Tags: black labrador dog, dog stories
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