Doggy Tale

Last Monday afternoon when I took Ginger for a walk, a dog I'd never seen before came out of somebody's yard and started following us. It followed us all the way home, but after I took Ginger in the house, the stray dog went on its way. On Tuesday, my next-door neighbor rang my doorbell, and when I answered the door, I was greeted by the same dog, who had followed my neighbor home while she was walking. Not being a "dog person," she figured I'd know what to do. So I agreed to put the dog in my yard and try to come up with a plan. The dog had a collar but no identification tags. I called the city's animal control bureau and asked them to come get the dog. They did not arrive that day, and when I took Ginger walking that night, I let the stray out of the yard. She followed us around for a while but eventually took up with another dog who was being walked. Silly me, I thought that was the end of that. On Wednesday, I noticed a handmade "LOST DOG" sign on a lamppost with a description that could have been this dog, so I made note of the phone number in case I saw her again. Thursday morning, Ben saw the stray up the street and tried to coax it back to our house, but the dog had other ideas. That evening, she found Ginger and me again and followed us home, so I called the number on the "LOST DOG" sign, but that person said he'd already found his dog. We decided to call animal control again if she was still there in the morning. After listening to her bark many times during the night, and after having our neighbors call and ask about the barking dog in our driveway, we were happy to confine her to our yard and wait for the city to come get her. In the meantime, I took her to the vet's office that's a block from our house and had her scanned, just in case she had a microchip implanted. No such luck...and the animal control people didn't come on Friday. We went out for a LONG walk on Friday evening, and she came back home with us. I was worried about having her around overnight again, both because of her barking the previous night and because of the fact that by this time Ben had started to bond with this dog. He found out that she liked to play "fetch," something which Ginger has never been interested in doing. Finally, on Saturday morning, I walked them both again and found a new set of "LOST DOG" signs several blocks away. That turned out to be the right match, and "Casey" got reunited with her family of four young children. The weird ending is that the animal control bureau called us at 7:30 SUNDAY MORNING to ask if we still had the dog to be picked up...who woulda thought they worked on SUNDAY!!!!

Bye-bye, Casey!