When my phone rang, I
was up in the mountains near Kingman, Arizona at the memorial service for my
mother. It was snowing, seven inches on the ground and the air clotted with fat
snowflakes.
I peered at the screen,
not recognizing the number. “Hello,” I said.
“Do y’all have a dog
named Shadow?” the voice asked.
“Yes.” My heart started
to pound.
The lady was calling
from Virginia. Shadow, my very independent labradoodle, had followed the
woman’s daughters to her home, about a mile and a half from where we lived.
Fortunately, the story
had a happy ending, mostly because Shadow had an ID tag. The very kind lady
offered to return Shadow, and my adult son, who’d been (ostensibly) watching
him, promised to keep better tabs on him. And we learned our lesson: always
kennel Shadow when we travel.
Another happy ending
story: a friend recently posted on Facebook the escapades of two dogs, hers and
her neighbor’s, who broke out of their yards in pursuit of some deer and
vanished. Neither dog was wearing any ID tags or had a microchip, something
both owners have since remedied. She and her neighbor finally found the escape
artists a few days later at the local animal shelter.
Most stories about dogs
landing in shelters don’t have these kinds of endings.
Just within this last
year, three friends in our small rural area have lost dogs. None of the dogs
was wearing an ID tag or had a microchip. Only one of the three was recovered.
In Dog-Nabbed, the third book in the Doodlebugged mystery series,
Doodle, the trouble-prone labradoodle narrator, ends up in several different
shelters. As part of my research, I visited our local animal shelter and
interviewed the animal control officer, a compassionate woman with a difficult
job. The visit to the place was sobering enough. Long rows of sad and desperate
canine faces peered out at me from behind their cages. And during the
interview, I learned some alarming statistics. A dog who ends up in a shelter
with no ID has half of the allotted time in a shelter as one with
identification. That time frame can be very short, sometimes only a few days if
the dog is deemed unadoptable and the shelter is crowded.
An ID tag with a phone number costs about $7 at our local PetSense. It’s
inexpensive enough that I buy several to put on spare collars, so that if
Shadow’s collar gets wet or, say, skunked, (it can happen!) he’s always has ID.
But here’s the thing about microchips and ID tags: the contact information
needs to be current. If your microchip registration lists an address you moved
away from three years ago, or the number on an ID tag has since been
disconnected, it won’t help your pet at all.
“Often we scan the microchip, but the address has changed and we have no
way of contacting the owner,” said the control officer.
As soon as I finished my interview, I rushed home to double-check that
all the information listed on my dog’s license and microchip were up to date.
They were, but I decided it was worth my peace of mind to schedule a call to
Avid every year and make sure. Because I don’t want Shadow to have the
experiences Doodle has in Dog-Nabbed.
Or worse.
In the excerpt below, Doodle has been taken from one shelter only to land
in another.
So, all in all, this new shelter is a much better place. Still, when I
burrow down into the sweet-smelling wood shavings at the end of the day, my
nose filled with the scents of new people, new dogs, new surroundings, I wish I
were back with Molly and the boss.
Suddenly that longing for Molly, for the boss, for home, cannot be contained. I sit up and let out a long, mournful
howl. Which might have been a mistake because some of the other dogs respond
with howls of their own. And of course I have to answer them. And they have to
answer back. Pretty soon we’re howling up a storm, almost sounding like a pack
of coyotes, except instead of howling at the moon on a frosty night, free to
roam at will, we’re stuck in our cages.
The side door opens and yellow light floods the barn. “Hey guys, take it
easy,” Henry grumbles. “It’ll get better for y’all. I promise. Go to sleep.”
And then it’s dark again, and we all curl down into our bedding for the
night.
Doodle, of course, has the author on his side, and I don’t think it’s too
much a spoiler to say things work out for him in the end.
But a dog without ID? That story
rarely has a happy ending.
~~~
Susan J. Kroupa is a dog lover currently
owned by a 70 pound labradoodle whose superpower is bringing home dead possums
and raccoons and who happens to be the inspiration for her Doodlebugged books.
She’s also an award-winning author whose fiction has appeared in Realms of Fantasy, and in a variety of
professional anthologies, including Bruce
Coville's Shapeshifters. Her non-fiction publications include features
about environmental issues and Hopi Indian culture for The Arizona Republic, High
Country News, and American Forests.
