It was a happy ending that wasn't. In fact, it ended tragically.
That's Luke in the photo, a blind hound in a rural Virginia animal control shelter. The day he started his journey to a new life here in Montana turned out to be his last day. It really doesn't get worse than this.
A week ago today, I received an email from Tina R., a shelter employee. Tina wrote:
I was told to contact you to see if you can help a blind hound we have at our shelter in Berryville, Va. I see you are in Montana so I don't know if this is possible. But maybe you have other contacts closer to us. Luke came in as a stray. He had a head injury. The vet thinks someone hit him. He is currently blind. He is on Prednisone but it is not helping so far. The vet said he is probably going to stay blind. I attached a picture of him. Please let me know if you can help him in any way.
After a couple of phone calls and emails with Tina, we had our vet in Helena, Dr. Brenda Culver, talk with the shelter's vet about his diagnosis. We wanted to have a better idea of what to expect. He told Brenda that the dog had come in with a very swollen head but no other signs of injury ... no broken bones, no blood. The only other visible sign was blindness. He assumed that the dog had suffered trauma of some sort, either at the hands of a person or was hit by a car. With a very limited budget from the shelter, he was only able to give Luke an injection of a powerful steroid to reduce the swelling, and he prescribed continued prednisone therapy. The swelling disappeared, Luke went back to the shelter, and that's when Tina contacted us.
Still, we were puzzled, as was Brenda, by this scenario and the impact on Luke's vision. It just seemed odd that a dog could sustain enough trauma to produce that kind of swelling and lose his vision, but not have any other cranial nerve or other symptoms resulting from the impact. The shelter's vet said he had never seen anything like it in his 25 years of practice. Brenda called our veterinary ophthalmologist in Spokane, Washington, to discuss Luke's case, and the eye specialist said he hadn't encountered anything quite like that before either.
We agreed to take Luke, and I set about last week trying to figure out how we would get him from northern Virginia to Montana. We needed someone who could pick him up from the shelter, take him to a vet for a medical exam and health certificate for travel, purchase an airline crate, board him for a few days, and then get him to the airport to catch his flight. I contacted one of our wonderful supporters in the Washington, D.C., area, Becca K., and asked if she could help. Becca has two disabled dogs of her own.
Becca graciously offered to help, and yesterday morning she and her sister drove out to the shelter to get Luke. She had already made an appointment to take Luke to her vet on Saturday afternoon, and in the meantime I had made a reservation for Luke at a doggie daycare and boarding facility near Dulles airport that Becca had recommended.
Alayne and I were just sitting down to lunch yesterday afternoon when the phone rang. It was Becca, calling with a report on what her vet had found out about his eyes and how he was doing. She said, "You've got a very sweet Foxhound coming to you!" Becca said he was friendly, energetic, and bayed like a true hound. He had done well on the car ride from the shelter to the vet clinic, about a 45 minute trip. She said he was a really nice boy. Becca said that on a leash, Luke seemed to walk into everything, but when they took the leash off in the exam room, he managed to navigate around without running into much. This despite the fact that he had no pupillary light reflex, or PLR, and no menace (or blink) reflex. Becca's vet also thought Luke had suffered head trauma, but was perplexed by the absence of other symptoms.
The vet clinic was located in a PetsMart, so after the exam Becca was going out to purchase his crate and then call us with the dimensions, which we needed to know to make flight reservations. We hung up, and I filled Alayne in on the conversation.
Just 15 minutes later the phone rang. It was Becca again. I could tell right away her voice was anguished. She said, "We've had a serious turn for the worse, Steve." I said, "What do you mean?" I was incredulous, then sick to my stomach, as she told me what happened.
After getting off the phone with me earlier, Becca said Luke had started mouthing the coat she was wearing. Then he began snapping at it. As Becca tried to brush him off and tell him to stop, Luke began biting her coat furiously, ripping at it. He was oblivious to her efforts to get him to stop, and getting more aggressive by the second. When Becca started pushing him off, Luke growled and then lunged at her, biting her in the chest. Becca's sister rushed over to pull him off, and Luke whirled around and bit her, too. Becca's vet stepped in and Luke bit her, too.
In fact, the vet told me later, Luke was biting "anything in front of him ... clothing, people, furniture. It was uncontrollable. I finally threw a towel at him, and he shredded the towel in seconds." He attacked everything in the room.
And then it was over, just as quickly as it had started. Whatever had possessed him was suddenly gone. Becca's vet carefully led Luke down the hall and into a kennel. Fortunately none of the three people Luke attacked suffered serious injuries.
Becca told me it was so frightening because they couldn't get him to stop, and he seemed to be in a "zone" where he was unreachable. She said it wasn't the same dog. Becca was in shock, as was I, listening to her describe what unfolded in the exam room.
The vet told me it was almost as if it were a seizure activity of some sort. "But," she said, "I've been practicing veterinary medicine for a very long time and I've got to tell you, I've never seen this before in my career. I can't explain it. Clearly it's neurological, but what ... well, I have no idea. This is, I'm sorry to tell you, a dangerous dog." She didn't think it was rabies because Luke had been at the shelter long enough that other signs would have appeared before now. He also didn't show any of the other symptoms of a rabid dog.
Becca and I stayed on the phone, replaying what had happened and trying to figure out what we could do. We were in disbelief. A day that had started out with such joy and promise was ending in tragedy. As we worked through what we couldn't do -- put anyone else at risk, take him to the boarding facility, let alone put him on an airplane -- we were left with the only thing we could do ... and that was to put Luke to sleep at the clinic.
As we reached that decision, Becca and I both started crying. I could not believe we were going to euthanize a dog we had never known ... and a dog who was just about to get a second chance at life with us in Montana. And yet Luke was now our responsibility. He was our dog, and it was up to us. Here we were, making that awful decision and grieving for a dog we'd never met. It really was one of the worst moments in my life. Having just put our beloved old Dillon to sleep a week ago, I sure wasn't ready to make that decision again so soon.
I had asked the vet if she thought we had any option other than euthanasia. She said, "I wish I did, but I think the best place for this dog is heaven."
We wondered whether Luke was beaten over the head because he had done this before, or whether this "aggression seizure" was a result of the trauma and thus neurological damage. There is something called "Canine Rage Syndrome" -- or more accurately, "idiopathic aggression" -- described in the literature, and maybe this was it. But we'll never know.
Becca and I talked through it some more, hoping to find some other answer, but it was clear what we needed to do. I asked Becca to tell her vet what we decided, and to please proceed. We both hung up the phone in tears. I just couldn't believe the first day of Luke's new life was also his last.
Alayne had come into my office after hearing my end of the conversations with Becca and the vet. She was horrified when I told her what had occurred. I called the shelter and left a voicemail message asking them to call me. A short while later Tina called, and I told her what had happened. She had the same reaction we did, which was complete shock. Tina said they had never seen Luke do anything like that, and if they had, they obviously would never had asked us or anyone else to take him. She said the entire shelter staff had been so happy Saturday morning, knowing Luke was going off to Montana to live with us. I thanked Tina for contacting us in the first place, and assured her that we knew Luke hadn't shown this kind of behavior before or they wouldn't have contacted us. I told her how sorry we were -- for Luke, for them, for Becca and us. I asked Tina to let us know the next time they took in a blind dog and couldn't adopt it out, because we would certainly help if we could.
Not too long afterwards, Becca called again from the vet clinic to say Luke was gone. She said, "He's in a better place now."
And that's how Saturday ended. With a lot of broken hearts across the country, for a dog we couldn't save after all.
