The dog's tale

Today's is a sad tale. It's the story of someone's former friend who no one seemed to want anymore. A friend who needed help, but none would come. That is, until I happened on the scene.

An old dog, lying beside the busy highway, broken and alone. No one stopped. In the pre-dawn gloom, the hollow in the embankment next to her was human-like. I circled the block, pulled to a stop. The old dog looked at me sadly. The hollow was just a hollow, and not, as I had first feared, an injured or dead human being.

I ushered the dog into my car. Her back legs no longer worked. I drove her to the nearby vet, but it wasn't yet 7am. I rang the office number and got a long and deeply involved recorded message about how to contact the on-call vet in an emergency. It was so long and deeply involved, with convoluted instructions about opening hours, various numbers, different clinics and the like, that I hung up before I got to the end. I put a call in to my regular vet, and he told me his nurse would be at the surgery about 8.

I drove home. The dog was silent, only her eyes showing me the pain she was in. I took her to my vet's surgery and the nurse helped her hobble inside.

Sometime later, they eased her pain forever.

She had a collar and a chip, but her owner could not be found. Who could have lost this lovely old dog? And how many people saw her there, struggling to move with a broken pelvis, alone and in pain beside the road, before I stopped to help? Who hit her in the first place, and left her to die?

You should be ashamed.