Funny how life works. I had this blog entry ready to put up today - Freda gets adopted, Porsha and Minnow get ready to leave, we get a cat and an ancient, deaf dog that I was sure was going to bite it. It was on my hot list of things to do today as I had some down time in what’s been a crazy week. That happy blog will be up in the next few days.
What’s the famous quote about the best intentions of mice and men? Or how things in motion will remain in motion? Crazy keeps crazy going. It happens.
I am in my shower with my hand on the handle, literally about to turn on the water when the phone rings. I get out - you never know, with nutty weeks, what’s on the other end of it - and it’s Donna. She was at Thalia’s and met two volunteers from Las Cruces. Las Cruces is an incredibly poor barrio on the other side of Granada - almost outside of Granada. You go past the cemetery, down past where the paved road ends and keep going for what seems like miles of almost impassible, deeply rutted dirt roads. These women, a British and a Spanish woman, are living and volunteering down there with an NGO that builds houses and works with this forgotten little community.
The Spanish woman is a nurse, the British woman a social worker. In the course of working with the families, they encounter one family where everyone has scabies - scabies - sarcoptic mange - sarna. It’s actually not terribly easy to get sarna from animals unless you live with them, sleep with them, share a house with them. And their dogs were infested with sarna. They had one older puppy with it and a mother dog that had just given birth with it. Additionally, the mother dog had flea and tick issues.
The kids have sores from the scabies. The volunteers are going to treat the family and clean the house but they need help with the animals. Additionally they have some other animals in Las Cruces that need assistance but this is the pressing issue.
I take the five minute shower, put on jeans and shoes. As I walk to the front door the horn honks and there’s Donna and the women. We go to the clinic, pick up supplies. Slip leads. Ivermectin. Wormer. We don’t have enough flea and tick stuff and we’re low on ivermectin pills - what we use to treat dogs in the field, where we can’t really inject them. While I throw stuff in a bag Donna runs to the pulperia and gets bologna for the pills. I check the age requirements on the wormer, the ivermectin, for the older puppy.
We go to the vet pharmacy and pick up flea stuff, more ivermectin. I call Nick who tells me the ivermectin - which treats the sarna - is safe for the mother dog but she cannot have the flea medicine or antibiotics.
The Las Cruces volunteers are awesome - funny and smart and progressive. While we’re in the vet pharmacy they run into the regular pharmacy to buy a case of condoms for a sex ed/birth control class they’re giving to a women’s group they started.
We set out in the truck. I’d heard of Las Cruces - that it was incredibly poor, an off the map, forgotten place, but have never been there. You can hike to the Laguna through it on a path and I have some friends that have. But it’s actually bigger than I thought. We head down one road, cross onto another, bouncing and slamming through.
When we get to the house we see the older puppy immediately - he looks like a little Potato - bald and bloated with worms, scabby in places with a few stray hairs. The property looks like two small wooden buildings - home made - and what might be an outhouse. I don’t see any animals except chickens and some pigs. There’s a table type thing in front and I dump the bag of supplies on it while the volunteers talk with the woman.
We go into the house and the mother dog is on the ground with the puppies. She looks good, better than I expected, but I can’t see much because there’s no light. The babies are young enough that they don’t have their eyes open. I don’t know that they have electricity. They bring the mother dog out for me to look at. I see some ticks and slight hair loss but she’s not like the older puppy. We give her the sarna pill in meat. She eats it, runs back into her puppies.
Meanwhile the older, bald puppy has taken off down into the arroyo and is eating stuff down there. The two volunteers tried to collar him but he’s too nimble. We ask the kids to get him - he knows them, it’s easier for everyone. While one of the little boys goes after him we talk. The woman mentions there’s another dog in the house, they have a little black dog. We ask to see it. If the other dogs have sarna and the family has sarna, this one needs to be treated, too.
Donna goes in the house and throws down a little dog food. The black dog darts out, eats it, goes back under. A few minutes later one of the kids goes in and hauls it out from under the bed. It doesn’t have much hair loss but it has a ton of ticks, it’s gums are white. He puts it down. Before we can even touch it, the dog goes down on it’s side, convulses and goes still, eyes wide open. I touch it’s eyes. No response. It’s bladder and bowels release. I feel for a pulse and can’t find one. I try the eyes again.
It’s gone, Finn, Donna tells me. It’s dead. I try to find something glass to put in front of it’s mouth to see if there’s any breathing at all - it’s chest isn’t moving - but she’s right. The dog is gone.
I have seen probably literally thousands of animals die. Sad but true. I worked in shelters for years. I have euthanized a lot of animals. But I’m just totally shocked. The dog was fine a minute ago. Yes, it’s gums are bone white and there are enough ticks on it that it’s obviously anemic but I didn’t expect it to keel over and go down before we could even look at it. It wasn’t starving to death.
No matter how many things you have watched die, it’s not easy. Even humane euthanasia of animals in pain is not easy. Yes, you develop a black sense of humor and you learn how to deal with it but each death is a little tragedy. And here is one more.
No one picks up garbage down here - I don’t think there’s really any city services at all. They would just throw the body into the arroyo where other dogs and cats and pigs will wind up with the ticks and the scabies. Someone gets a bag and we put the body in the bag, put it in the back of Donna’s truck. I still have no idea what killed it so quickly - anemia? A sickness? - and it concerns me.
While we are dealing with this, they have caught the little puppy. We put it on the table. The woman tells me it’s six months old but it looks about eight weeks. It does have teeth, though, so I worm it, give it mange medicine. It will need to be treated for weeks and the volunteers agree to do it. With the kids, the scabies, and the mother dog the woman has too much on her plate.
So much on her plate, though, that she is willing to hand the puppy over to us. If I had known that I wouldn’t have medicated it here but still - she’s willing to let it go. We find a box in Donna’s car and put it in. It goes on the lap of Sam, one of the volunteers, on the front seat where it can get the air conditioning.
We go to another house, this one also with a nursing dog. These dogs are in much better shape - well fed, no real sign of sarna but some tick issues, the mother only has one puppy, the house is an actual house. One of the dogs has a wound and while I’m looking for the stuff to treat it a monsoon hits - the rain is a solid sheet. We have to get out before the dirt roads flood.
We leave promising to return. On the way back they’ve closed one of the dirt roads and we have to take another, less traversed one. The truck lurches so much my head hits the ceiling. Right as we get to the paved road the puppy decides the combination of medicine, box, dog food, whatever it ate in the arroyo and car ride is too much. With it’s head sticking out of the box it throws up all over Sam and the front seat of the car.
Sometimes there’s nothing left to do but laugh. Not because the other dog is dead, not because there’s so much that needs to be done - for that family, for that neighborhood, for this country, for everything - but because you are tired and drained and sad for the other dog and covered in dog barf and mud. And so we do. And we make dog barf jokes. And as we try to clean it up in the car we all wind up covered in it - the poor puppy. And we take the puppy back to the clinic - Donna has to run to another project - and we clean him up the best we can, get him some water and pedialyte, put him in a kennel with soft bedding.
When I return that night to do dinners he is sleeping peacefully. I put the other dogs in the clinic to let him out - I’m unsure of integrating him due to his size and how weak he is. At first he hesitates, hides in another kennel. I haul him out, put him in the yard. He wanders around for a bit looking scared. And then he picks up a branch and carries it around because he is, after all, just a puppy and like all puppies he wants to play or destroy. And as I do errands - cleaning out the kittens cage and feeding it, moving furniture on the patio for the dogs to have a dry place to sleep - I keep an eye on him. He uses the bathroom, checks out everything, his little bald tail starting to wag.
When I need to leave I put him back in his cage, release the other dogs. He doesn’t fuss or struggle. He has some water, digs into a bit of food.
Hang in little guy. Hang in.
***A quick side note - the mange puppy we brought back is, like Minnow, actually a female. But, like Minnow, I refer to all puppies as he. Shouldn’t make a huge difference, puppy is puppy. But worth noting that I always think of puppies as genderless and default to ‘he’. ***
****Another side note: linguistic one - sarna is not always mange. Here ‘sarna’ is used as the blanket term by Nicas whenever a dog has hair loss. Even if it’s a flea allergy or massive overinfestion or whatever - they call it sarna. And I have that habit, too. But I do believe the actual translation for it is mange but again, any skin problem becomes winds up getting called ‘sarna’. When I use it in the blog I usually do mean sarcoptic mange, which is incredibly common here. ****
2 comments:
I had that question too about sarna and mange.
Hi Finn,
Kristine and I actually hiked through that bario on the way to the Laguna. It was moving!
We missed you an Little Corn but it was a huge success. Minnow looked fabulous when she got off of the Panga. The clinic was a huge success (almost 100 cats and dogs treated) and $3200 donated to the school construction fund!
Scot and Kristine
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