We Have a Big Dog – Part Three of Three

Continued from earlier today.

To see more of my photos on Flickr, click on the title.

This is Brute, our Staffy Terrier

Another Dog with Heart

A week or so after Ike's demise, I got a telephone call. It was a relative who wanted to tell me that a lady had a big, friendly dog that she needed to find a home for because she could no longer keep it. Her ex-boyfriend had acquired the dog behind her back and left it there, even though he already had some health problems. She already had other dogs she has taken good care of, and didn't want them to suffer because of this one that she hadn't asked for. I said that I wasn't interested in another dog, but she persuaded me to at least have a look. You can guess what happened next—on this particular Friday eve we were now owned by a very good-natured American Staffordshire terrier. The problem was, this very lively boy who his previous owner called Bruno was twenty pounds underweight, and had what we (along with the previous owner) thought was a nasty-looking barbed wire injury on the top of his wrinkly snout. We found out that he had an obsessive fondness for Coca-Cola on the way home in the Jeep, because he drank his fill out of my wife Andrea's McDonald's cup before we could get it away from him. I also decided to shorten his name to Brute at the time. For some reason, I don't like the name Bruno, and Brute seemed more than fitting for this big, happy, muscular fellow.

He devoured the top-quality dog food we provided, and seemed to gain quite a bit of weight over the weekend--but the open wound on his snout was not healing, despite a good cleaning and very liberal applications of Neosporin. When Monday rolled around, we got him to the vet sometime late in the afternoon. We took him to Dr. Morris Homan in Moorefield, who is the best all-around veterinarian that I know of. Dr. Homan also takes care of the animals on most of the farms here in Hardy County.

The news was not good. Dr. Homan said that Brute was a "great dog, with a really good personality," but added that the open wound on his snout was caused by dermadectic mange, which is fatal and incurable in most cases. This was not the more common sarcoptic mange, which is contagious and curable. He gave me the option of euthanizing Brute, because he said that even though he may be able to cure this condition, it would be very expensive to do so.

There is no way I can kill a dog if there is a chance that it can be cured, just no way. So, I agreed to the treatments. The treatments consisted of a very powerful bovine antiparasitic (Like I said, Dr. Homan has had a lot of experience with farm animals) that is intended to be injected into cows. You see, dermadectic mange is caused by a very hardy parasite that is transferred from the pup's mother at his birth. The parasites will only cause a problem if the dog has experience extreme stress, such as the profound malnutrition that Brute had suffered. The catch was, if it didn't help Brute, the medicine would kill him. On the other hand, Brute's chance to live was zero percent without the treatment.

Being a dog, and not a cow, we had to give the nasty-smelling mess to Brute orally. Apparently, it tasted as bad as it smelled, because we found it nearly impossible to give to the poor guy, and when we finally got it down his throat, his eyes would water and strings of drool would reach the floor. Then, I came up with what I thought was a very clever idea—inject the medicine into hard boiled eggs, then feed the eggs to Brute. And this actually worked, because the dog really liked eggs. But there were consequences. Think "silent but deadly." Very deadly. Even though it was early winter in the Appalachians, we regularly opened our windows to evacuate the sickening air. This also created one very memorable sixty mile car-ride episode, which still gets regular mention by our kids.

Brute is a very healthy dog today, thanks to Dr. Homan and his radical ideas for treatment. He is very much an "inside" dog, for two reasons: he has allergies to insects which has cause severe folliculitis (another near-death experience for him; thanks again for saving his life, Dr. Homan), and he has negligible pigment in his skin below his sparse coat, so he can sunburn quickly and dramatically in a short period of time. He is actually my wife's "bed-buddy," and regularly tries to push me out of the bed. He is quite a sizeable bed mate at eighty-seven pounds. But he is a member of the family, a big, clumsy, always-happy bundle of joy, and that's what it's all about, isn't it?