I’m writing all this because Cookie had a fall down a flight of stairs a couple of weeks ago and, much to my surprise, she broke a leg. We couldn’t figure it. It was onlya tumble but Sausage has had falls from higher heights (like the time she decided to jump out of J’s arms and timed it all wrong) and not injured herself. What went wrong with Cookie?
We rushed her to a vet who specialises in treating such injuries. “This injury is very rare,” he said. I wondered why that was because there seemed to be a huge body of papers and information on tibia fractures in dogs. (Of course I did an internet search the minute I heard the diagnosis.) The vet didn’t say much during the initial consultation, but he opened up during the second visit (the actual surgery) when we told him we’d only had Cookie two days before the injury had occurred.
We mused out loud that we thought Cookie’s muscle condition was poor for a bull terrier of five months of age. (It wasn’t for nothing that J referred to her as his “cow on chopsticks” when he first set eyes on her.) The vet agreed with our remarks and further suggested that she had not been fed very well.
“Having a bully with this kind of injury is highly unusual,” he said, “because, of all the breeds, bull terriers are the most muscular. If you and a bull terrier collide, you’ll feel it, not him! And usually, there’s enough muscle mass to cushion the dog against fractures like this. But not in this case.” He frowned down at a Cookie just coming out of anaesthetic.
“How old is she again?” he asked.
“Five months.”
“Ah. It would have been very difficult for her.”
I didn’t follow him. “Difficult?”
I couldn’t understand this. We had pedigree papers for her. She had champions in her bloodline. What could possibly be difficult?
“Well, for a start, she has white socks. Do you know what white means to a Chinese? Mourning. Chinese don’t like buying dogs with white socks.” (Fyi, the vet was Chinese.)
“They’ll have problems buying any bull terrier in that case,” J remarked dryly, “as all bullies have white socks.”
“And she’s old.”
“She’s five months old,” I repeated.
“And getting to the end of being a saleable puppy,” he added. “Do you know what breeders do with the puppies they can’t sell? They stop feeding them.”
“They starve them to death?!”
The doctor nodded. “This dog was very lucky to find an owner so late in life.”
“They just starve the puppy?” I repeated. My mind just didn’t want to take in that picture.
He nodded. “Of course.” He shrugged. “That’s what they do.”
That reminds me of Hieronymous, a beautifully natured Birman kitten that I was thinking of buying last year. (You could tell I wanted to buy him because I’d already named him in the pet shop!) Hieronymous was also getting a bit long in the tooth, and a polydactyl at that. I think that’s why nobody bought him. His extra toes. The things people are superstitious about here will astound you. The problem was that I wanted a discount on him because he was not up to date with his vaccinations, not microchipped and also not desexed. The deal fell through because the owner refused to drop the price. Absolutely refused … except by $10. By this time, it became a matter of principle. A $10 discount???? I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or be insulted. So I walked away.
I always wondered what happened to Hieronymous after that failed transaction. Unfortunately now I think I know. As J says, the breeders/owners here are so greedy that they’d rather kill the animals in a terrible fashion rather than discount the price or even give away the pet once they become “unsaleable”. There’s also no sense of responsibility. If the breeders incorporated desexing as a condition of sale, it would stop a lot of the stray problems that plague this country. But that, of course, costs money and spending money, it appears, is not the responsibility of such breeders. They only seem to like receiving it.
So, even though we paid money for Cookie, J and I realised that what we had on our hands was a badly-fed, almost completely caged “rescue”. A puppy that had never had an opportunity to roam, that was resigned to being crated twenty-three hours a day, and was terribly under-socialised. She didn’t even know how to chew when we first got her. It still makes me angry thinking about it.
Stay tuned on Monday for conclusions.
