THE
STORY OF TWO DOGS!
Written
by
Marilyn
Mills
We
were sitting down to a much needed cup of tea during our lunch break at
the Veterinary Surgery when the receptionist came into the office with a very
worried look on her face.
‘The police are on the phone and they
insist on talking to you ‘she told my husband who is the vet ‘ it is most
urgent.’ she explained.
I could see my husband’s face. He was perplexed. Working with the police was always heart
breaking as the police dogs were first in the firing line and by the time they
were brought to the vet the injuries they had endured were usually very
extensive and traumatic.
He
picked up the receiver reluctantly.
‘Hello Sergeant, how can I help you?’ he
asked.
He nodded and agreed as he listened to the
policeman talk. He shook his head
silently and then said
‘Bring them in right away and let me see
what I can do.’
I looked at my husband and saw that he was
distraught.
‘What is it? Has another police dog been shot or stabbed
or even poisoned?’
‘No’ he answered. ‘I have never had to deal with this
situation before in my entire professional career. It seems that a toddler has drowned in a
swimming pool in the suburbs and when they pulled her out she was missing a
hand.’
I was shocked. ‘Missing a hand? How terrible!’
‘Yes, the child’s Gogo was hanging up the
washing and the child was happily playing in the garden with the two large dogs
who reside there. The Gogo said after a
while she heard the dogs barking frantically and when she went to look for the
child she saw the dogs at the side of the pool looking into the water.
The policeman says when she eventually
managed to pull the child out of the water.
She noticed that the child’s nappy had been removed and the hand was
missing.’
‘The police want me to operate on the dogs
to check the contents of their stomachs to rule out the fact that one of them
may have bitten the child otherwise they may have to treat this case as a Muti
Murder!’
Both of us were horrified at the thought.
Ever the more practical one, my husband
asked me to go and buy some re-sealable plastic bags from the local shop. He explained that it would not be necessary
to operate on the dogs but that he would induce vomiting and collect the
contents.
Not
being the most hardened vet’s wife, I battled to keep the contents of my
stomach down as I raced off to buy the necessary articles.
What a tragedy was unfolding.
Moving along the aisles in the supermarket
everything felt surreal. All the people
going about their business as usual whilst elsewhere a Gogo was mourning her
grandchild, a mother mourning her child and homeowners distraught at the
tragedy of what had happened at their home.
I marvelled at the complexity of life.
When I got back to the veterinary hospital
I saw that the police had arrived. Squad
cars were parked all over the car park.
Inside the waiting room with several policemen was a very distraught
woman holding onto two of the most magnificent chocolate brown Labradors I have
ever seen. One was very definitely the male as his head was twice the size of
the other one. The dogs were both
agitated and strained at their leads as they struggled to understand what was
happening. They sensed something was
very wrong.
After I had given the plastic bags to my
husband, who was in the process of getting the theatre ready, I went to sit
with the owner in the reception room.
The police were bustling about.
Cell phones were ringing. Voices
were raised! In general the quiet
waiting room had turned into a disaster zone.
Taking the distraught woman’s hand I guided
her into the sanctuary of the office to try and get her details in a quiet and
dignified way.
Slowly the story unfolded.
The owner of the house where the toddler
had drowned had been happy for her domestic worker, who had worked with her for many years, to bring
her grandchild to work as she felt it was safer than leaving the little girl at
home in the township. It had been a
regular occurrence and the dogs happily played with the little girl while she
tottered around following her Gogo while she did her work.
Nobody knew what had actually
happened. The Gogo wasn’t even aware
that the child had wandered off until the dogs had started barking. Now the police were blaming her dogs and
talking about putting them down. Yet
there was a lot of confusion. Maybe it
was a Muti Murder!
They had found the baby’s nappy lying at
the side of the pool.
A post mortem had to be done.
The dogs were each put into a newspaper
lined kennel. My husband explained to
the two sergeants what he was going to do and that they were to wait for his
diagnosis.
The team began the procedure. They took the male Labrador first. He was
the bigger of the two and the definite leader of the pack. Out of the two of them he would have been the
most likely to have done the deed.
The medication was given and the dog put
back into his kennel. Then they waited.
Luckily the medication worked quite quickly
and before long he had emptied the contents of his stomach onto the
newspaper. The assistant then moved him
to another kennel and my husband was able to bag the contents into the plastic
re-sealable bag.
He could not believe his eyes. There before him, mixed with the normal
things you would expect to find in the stomach of a large dog were tiny little
fingers. His heart sank.
He looked at the dogs. There was no aggression in either of
them. They both looked back at him with
eager eyes as if to say – ‘ You will have to talk for us. You will have to tell
the story’.
My husband went back to the police and the
owner in the waiting room and invited them into the office.
He showed them the contents of the pack.
The police started shouting that they would
have to put the dog down. The owner
cried out in disbelief!
He calmed them all down and explained what
he thought had happened.
‘The hand was definitely ingested by the
large male Labrador’ he said, ‘but I do not think the dog bit the child
intentionally. My theory is that the
child fell into the pool and the dog tried to get it out. First it tried to hold onto the nappy and
that came off in his mouth. Then he
tried to grab the flailing arm to try and pull the child out and the hand came
away from the body. At no time, in my
opinion, did the dog take an aggressive stand. I have worked with these dogs all my life
and I have owned six of them myself over the years and never would one of them
deliberately cause such an injury to a child.’
The police stared at the vet wide eyed.
The owner cried softly.
‘Do you not think it is necessary to put the
dog down’ asked the one policeman.
‘No definitely not’ said my husband. ‘He was trying to save the little girl. Of that I am sure.’
The policemen were not really
convinced. They asked if the evidence
could be kept in the freezer until they had spoken to their superiors. They had decisions to make.
The policemen asked him to write out a full
statement as soon as possible and they would collect it together with the
evidence in due course.
The owner left with her two precious
dogs. Tears of gratitude were pouring
down her face.
The following morning early my husband let
himself out of the front door quietly to collect the morning newspaper. We had not slept very well and thought
constantly on the fate of the poor male Labrador. The story had made the front pages of The
Witness.
The headlines read ‘Labradors hailed as
heroes!’ They were the toast of the
town as they had tried to save a baby from drowning in a local swimming
pool. Photos of the two dogs took
centre stage on the front page.
He hurried in to show me the
headlines. We both breathed a sigh of
relief.
We were so glad that yet another tragedy
had been averted.
The statement and the contents of the bag
were duly collected a couple of weeks later and to date we have heard nothing
more.
All in a day’s work at a local veterinary
practice!
