dogs don't look both ways

How do you find out what happened, from a dog who won't tell you anything?

A lot of neighbors knew that a "brown dog" had been hit and they shared this information with each other and with our mail carrier.   Our mail carrier, in turn, suggested to them that it was "Joey, the chocolate lab". "No", they replied, "it wasn't a chocolate Lab."

So, for a while, information about Joey's little excursion and ensuing accident was flimsy.  After the frantic hours of the emergency, once Joey was back home from the Animal Hospital, we phoned our good friends at Animal Control and reported that Joey was going to be okay and to please contact the woman whose car had hit Joey and let her know that Joey had come home and was going to be okay.  Still, we knew very little ourselves.

Eventually, we finally able to piece together from neighborhood gossip the answers to our questions.

Joey, mind you, was quite a site hopping on three legs, with stunning colored bandages, and absent most of his body hair!  So in the ensuing weeks, people in the neighborhood couldn't help but laying eyes on our bandaged and shaved dog walking - hopping - slowly; and gradually our concerned and shaken neighbors realized that the dog of the gossip was indeed our decorated Joey, the chocolate Labrador Retriever. Our mail carrier, a dog-lover herself, helped us to put the pieces together.

What we learned from our mail carrier was that neighbors who had witnessed the accident were terribly concerned and upset. None of them knew if "the dog" had lived or died. They were shaken.

Our mail carrier was able to point us to one neighbor who had been right there the morning of the accident. We went to this neighbor's home: She said that until we showed up and she knew that "the dog" was alright, she wasn't able to sleep at night, such had been Joey's haunting cry when h'd been hit. Now she would be able to sleep at night.

Since we now had a recuperating dog who had to be dearly cared for, the ensuing months provided me the time to read and learn a lot about dogs. Dogs. Labrador Retrievers. Other breeds. Joey's genealogy. So much to read! So much to learn! One piece of information followed another and the process has never ended.

Please continue with "Reading about Dogs"!