Dog lays in ditch for a while after getting hit by car

By isak, April 6, 2009

I was walking out the door to mow the backyard on Saturday afternoon when the phone rang. So I paused in the doorway to see if the caller would leave a message. It was Andi. She and her husband were out on their motorcycle. They passed a woman standing in the ditch along the highway looking at a dog laying at her feet. Concerned that the lady may need some help, they stopped.

The lady was heading to her mom’s house from out of town. As she was driving down the highway (a two-lane highway), she noticed a dog laying in the ditch raise it’s head. Pretty amazing seeing as the dog is brown and black and without that movement might not have even been noticed. She brought him water and dog food from her car (funny how many people have water and food in their cars most of the time) and he drank and ate like crazy but would not get up.

When Andi and her husband tried to touch him, he winced with pain. Maybe he even snapped at them. They were on a motorcycle so they had no way to transport him to wherever, so she called me.

I packed a couple muzzles, some canned food, a leash and a piece of thick cardboard we could use as a backboard and headed for “just passed the Exxon station.”

The directions sounded simple enough until I drove just past the Exxon station and saw no one on the side of the road. So I turned around and drove a few miles the other way. Nothing. I don’t have a cell phone. I decided to drive still further the other way. About a mile and a half past the Exxon station, I found them.

I parked just down the road and walked back through a BUNCH of poison ivy (damn I hate that stuff) to where everyone was. There laying on his side with a smile on his face was a small brown and black mutt. His front right shoulder was swollen but the leg looked pretty good. He has a couple cuts on his head, but they seemed scabbed over. He had some pain in his hind leg, but even with these strangers standing around him, he made no attempt whatsoever to stand up. I thought maybe he had a dislocated shoulder. I petted him and looked him over and talked to him. He was so pleasant… he seemed so genuinely happy to see someone. We wondered how long long he had been laying in the ditch. Fortunately, the weather for the past couple days has been nice.

We decided to take him to Andi’s house.

I moved my car closer. Then muzzled him and loaded him into my car. On my way to Andi’s house, I stopped at my neighbor’s house. For a time she was a vet tech. I wanted her opinion on his injuries. She looked at him. She squeezed here and pushed there and pulled this and that. She thought the front leg was dislocated, but said that without x-rays, we could not know for sure. He whimpered when she was working on his back leg. We had him on his feet and I noticed he was knuckling under a bit on the back leg.

She injected him with some anti-inflammatory and pain meds. Then gave me some pills to hold him until we could get him to the vet the next day.

Initial x-rays done yesterday show the front leg is broken in four places — a far cry from the thought he had a dislocated shoulder. She also feels he was out there for a while and that the scabbed over cuts on the top of his head are part of the same accident. Initial treatment possibilities for the front leg are: splinting the leg, surgery or amputation. I am so hoping for splinting. The vet has him medicated and is to do further tests today to see what we can do for him.

Next thought is “who are the owners?” He has a collar but no tags — standard fare in more cases than not it seems. I say we put up FOUND DOG signs around where we found him and include “hit by a car” and “in vet care” to see if we get a call. If they call, there is a better chance they will step up and pay the vet bill. If they don’t call, that’s probably better to me than talking to someone who knows their pet is injured but they don’t want to take responsibility. I haven’t the patience for that.

A child stopped at Andi’s house one day looking for her lost dog. She knew Andi had a lot of dogs and thought hers might be there. But it wasn’t. The girl asked Andi if she could have one of her dogs. She said she gets lots of dogs: she gets a dog and takes it home, then it disappears. So she gets another one. And so on. You see, this is rural countryside with all kinds of wild critters — coyotes, bobcats, dog packs, etc — and the girl does not have a fenced yard.

None of Andi’s dogs will be going home with that little girl.

Andi has named the little dog from the ditch Harley because she and her husband were on their Harley when they came upon him. I guess that is better than naming him 1488 after the name of the highway…

Keep your fingers crossed for splinting.