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"While visiting my mother-in-law in a small town
in Illinois, I took her shopping in nearby Richmond. Traveling
on I94 on the way home, we saw a small black dog run across all
4 lanes of the highway. I pulled to the side of the road and
got out of the car.
The dog was a small black poodle with terrible mats in his hair
and very frightened. When I tried to catch him he would run away,
stop and look back. As I neared him again, he did the same thing.
Frustrated after several tries, I looked to the sky and said,
"God, you know how dangerous it is out here on the highway.
If I don't catch this dog it will get hit by a car and die".
Immediately the dog stopped and sat down. I walked over to him,
picked him up and put him in my car. He was full of burrs and
all kinds of ticks. His ears were black and gooey, his eyes runny,
and he was very thin and dirty.
When we got back home, I called the vet on the dog tag and got
a phone number. When I called and asked about a dog, they said
"We don't gots no dog here" and hung up. I called a
local vet and asked about the tics. She said that there were
a number of different types of tics, and by my description, the
dog had them all.
I gave him food and water, a bath, cut the mats out of his hair,
and sat on the porch and picked the tics off him with rubber
gloves on for well over an hour. I cleaned his ears and eyes.
He was very weak, but ate and drank and licked my hand. Because
I had to fly back home the following day, I had to do something
about him, and fast.
I called the Animal League and they connected me to a retired
couple who was looking for a poodle as a pet. I called them and
told them of "Lucky" and his plight. I had removed
all of the tics - more than 40 of them - and he was clean.
I took him to the couple's home, and they fell in love with him
immediately. They took him to the vet I had called, who told
them that Lucky would only have lasted a few more hours and he
would have been dead from dehydration and from weakness because
of all the tics.
Lucky now has a fine home with people who love him and care for
him, and I am a happy person to know his life means something
to someone now."
We would like to thank Patricia Elias
for this great story!
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