An Ugly Dog Problem, A Boarder Joins The Hoard and a Few Updates.

We have a black and tan dog problem. We now have five dogs at the clinic - Freda, Porsha, Ticky (who is now Ramon), the puppy, and now a tiny little timid thing named Tessa who is only boarding with us until she's fat enough to fly to the states.

Of the five of them Porsha, Freda and Tessa are all black and tan. It looks like a goddamn Guinness convention in the yard. Black and tans every which way. Despite being familiar with all of them I sometimes have to check for the presence of an eye or a set of larger ears before I start calling them by name.

Which brings me to a bigger problem: The Porsha Issue.
Tessa already has a home. Freda is unavailable for adoption until the puppy is old enough to be on it's own. But Porsha, sweet, happy, beloved Porsha, could go at any time. She's ready to leave. She's more than ready to leave - she needs to leave. While most clinic dogs get sick of clinic life, dislike the chaos of the kids at the school, balk at the confinement of the yard, Porsha loves clinic life. If we offered her a lease for her kennel there she would sign it. In a heartbeat.

Which leads us to Porsha's biggest problem: She is the best dog in the world. She loves other dogs. She loves kids. She's good with cats. She's so mellow that she's the only dog allowed in the clinic on spay/neuter days - she just sprawls out and keeps an eye on the recovering dogs. She breaks up fights between other clinic dogs. When the puppy chews on her ears she just wags her little half tail. When Quixote bit her so badly she needed antibiotics she refused to fight back. Of all the dogs, she has had the most surgeries and the most invasive surgeries: she was spayed, what was left of the eye was removed, her rear dewclaws were taken off. Later there was a problem with the eye removal and she had to have another surgery. She has taken all of these in amazingly good spirits. She wags her tail during injections. Her body also bears the greatest signs of abuse - a scar around her neck where a cord grew into her skin. A punctured eye. None of it has effected her goodwill, her good nature, her trust in the universe. She plays with the puppy while you trim her nails. She is the perfect goddamn dog.

So where is the problem exactly? The problem is that Porsha is ugly.


We think she's beautiful but to other people she is homely, unsightly. In the states a medium sized non-descript black and tan dog is a tough enough sell in a shelter. Add in the missing eye, the hairless ears (which might still grow hair, all is possible), the scar around her neck, the fact that her hair that did grow back in came in grey and it's impossible not to see her through the eyes of other people: she is an ugly dog.

And she is not in a shelter in the states, she's in a clinic in Nicaragua. To get her to a home in the States or Canada would cost hundreds of dollars. It's doable, it's been done before. It will be done again shortly with Tessa, our sad little boarder who was lucky enough to have a Canadian find her on the streets and fall in love with her.

To be perfectly honest, all of us want Porsha to go to a home in the States or Canada. We are all in love with this dog, her ridiculous grin, her unbelievable tolerance for anything, her absolute passion for food that has resulted in her not only being an ugly dog but also kind of a portly ugly dog.

Porsha needs a porch to lie out on, a sofa to crash on, some kids to play with, maybe another dog to chase her around sometimes, a few trips to the dog park. She deserves these things. Not that the other dogs don't but Porsha is, well, special. Different. She also needs someone who will understand that prior to coming to live at the clinic she inhabited another universe - a harder, crueler universe. It's highly likely that Porsha has never seen a sofa in her life or laid out on a porch. It's a certainty that she's never been to a dog park.

Cultural differences being what they are, trying to find the kind of home for her that we would like her to have is near impossible.

Toni and I were lamenting over her the other day. The dog that will be the hardest to adopt out is the one that we will be the pickiest about finding a home for. And it's all because of one simple problem: Porsha will always be wonderful but she will never be beautiful. At least not in any sort of Dog Fancy, Westminster sort of way.

The Boarder.


Look, it's another black and tan female dog! What are the chances? I'm not entirely sure where exactly Tessa came from or how she won the Nica Street Dog Lotto but she's only with us for a few weeks. Apparently a Canadian woman found her on the streets and fell for her. She's too underweight and sickly to get a health certificate now so she's staying with us until she's well enough to travel.

She seems like a lovely dog, if a little timid. Unfortunately, though, the clinic dogs all have pretty strong personalities so poor Tessa comes off about as interesting as a dishrag. I'm sure once I get to know her and she relaxes some she will become as endearing as the rest of the lot but thus far I can't think of much to say about her. She likes to lie around. I have her on the anti-Atkins diet - she gets kibble loaded with pasta to try to throw some weight on her but she's not a good eater. She trembles and throws herself onto her back when you scratch her behind the ears. She's astute enough to realize that Freda hates every other dog until she gets used to them and she stays out of her way. That said, yes. We have a boarder.

Apparently it's becoming known that we are a safe place for these dogs. Next week we'll have another one coming in. We don't really have the room but it's just another short termer, a dog from the Corn Islands named Minnow who needs to hang out and recover from some mange and other issues before moving on to a home they already have lined up. Do we have room? Not really. Resources? No, not terribly. It's very hand to mouth here. But we'll make it work. We always do.

Some Surgery Updates.

They did a bunch of clinics while I was out gallavanting around and slammed through a ton of animals - twenty three in one day. I think they did surgeries for three or four of the seven days that Dr. Tom was here. Crazy. What makes it even more amazing was that it was cancer week: a lot of the dogs that were coming in had tumors, a result of venereal diseases they pick up on the streets. So not only were they doing the spays and neuters and removing the tumours they were adminstering doses of chemo. The cancers won't kill the dogs now that they're removed. They could use more chemo but it's pricey, hard to adminster to dogs owned by people who can't afford a regular trip to the vet. The one dose they do get should keep them well enough. But Tom, Kit, Nick, Toni - all of them - are goddamn heroes, at the table for hours a day.

They also went and got Lolo, the dog with the broken jaw. It is still alive. Unfortunately, due to equipment limitations repairing the jaw was impossible but he was able to work with it a little, make it more comfortable, make eating a little easier. Lolo will never have a normal mouth but he will, and does, survive. And his family continues to care for him.

In between my trips I went in for a few hours one day, cleaned some instruments, did some shaving. But they worked twelve and fourteen hour days that week to make it happen.

Right after I did get back we had a different vet, Dr. Troy, for one day. I got back on a Thursday and was expecting a Saturday surgery clinic. In the absence of a vet we function primarily as a very small shelter and do some work with dogs on the streets themselves. But we were going to have a vet and thus the ability to do some surgeries. So the word was put out on the street: Bring animals on Saturday. We can operate.

Woopsy. Date confusion. We actually had Dr. Troy on Friday. Thus Friday morning finds us all set up for surgery with no surgeries to be done. Screw.

We paid the neighbors 100 cords - about $5 - to let us fix their dogs. It's a shame we did have to pay them but they keep cranking out puppies and well, particularly in the poorer communities it's hard to make inroads into the prevailing attitudes towards animals and sterilizing. Thus we bribe.d. Not as a habit, not as a matter of course, just this once. But we did.

That's two.

At eight AM I find myself driving around with Nick, Donna and Jeff the Farrier (more on him in later entries - what a cool guy) trolling for animals to fix. We drop Jeff off at the carriage owner's union and one of the drivers says he has a dog we can fix. After we set Jeff up we take the guy back down to his barrio to pick up the dog. While we're there his friends and neighbors come out with other animals for us - another puppy. A cat. We load the back of the truck. On the way back to the clinic we pick up a dog at the abandoned hospital. Apparently the dog has been living there for years and the police that guard the place take amazing care of it - she is fat and happy. But they can't control the fact that she cranks out a litter every year. They had actually approached Donna or Nick in the past about getting her fixed. We toss her in the back, too, and head back to the clinic with full crates and a cat in a pillowcase.

Another woman shows up with another cat. All in all we do eight or nine surgeries. Dr. Troy is awesome - careful, conscientious. Eight or nine is not a ton but it's something. And here anything is something fantastical.

***A future note - I am getting caught up on my blogging so I should be churning out for the next few days. And I know what the people want and so yes, puppy updates and pictures coming tomorrow as well as the Progress of the Potato and a note on Jeff, who actually just might be the most popular farrier in the world right now. Or at least the Americas.***