I can’t begin to describe the level of stress I was under last week. The plan was to get thru a short work week and then travel up to North Austin to treat my niece to a concert and some South by South West activities. More on that later…
We had some rain storms swing thru San Antonio 2 weeks ago and as soon as the rain letup, I took Canelo for a much needed walk around the neighborhood. Roughly a block away from our front door, a little dog runs up to us. This will occasionally happen…. a neighbor will have their dog off leash and it will run up to greet us. This time, there wasn’t a neighbor insight. The dogs played for a minute and I noticed he had a leather collar with the name “Julian” blazoned upon it. Kinda like one of those belts you get your named engraved into when you go to Mexico. As the dogs continued to play, I assumed the dog would lose interest and then run back to its front door. I then noticed a few scrapes on its face and noticed he wasn’t fixed. It occurred to me at that very moment that Julian was likely a run away in search of a dog in season. Got home and called a local veterinarian in hopes of the little guy having a microchip under its coat. Outside of having his name on his leather collar, there wasn’t a tag or contact information for its owner. Took him to the vet and learned he wasn’t microchipped. Then was given some steps to take to help find its owner.
The steps are as follows:
Go onto the NextDoor app and upload a picture. People usually look for their dogs there.
Go onto Pawboost - broadcast that you found the dog. People also look there.
Go onto Facebook and see if there’s a local community page and post the dog picture there.
Did all three things above and found no owner. The next two days I drove around local neighborhoods in hopes of finding posters/flyers for the missing dog. Randomly stopped and talked to strangers if they knew anyone who was missing a Boston Terrier. No luck.
In San Antonio - after 72 hours, a dog without a Microchip becomes yours. I had to drive up to Austin in a few days so I started to look into local non-kill shelters to surrender the dog. I quickly learned that all of the options near me are filled with dogs so I would have to keep him for a minimum of 20 days before I could even take him in for an evaluation.
A number of places have different steps and requirements. Some places require you to pay a fee to help re-home him and get him into a no-kill shelter. I then learned that “no-kill” isn’t always no-kill…. so I turned my energy into finding him a forever home after 72 hours.
Thankfully my sister had a co-worker who was looking for a second dog so I was able to get Julian into a loving home. Those 72 hours however were really stressful. Doing the right thing is always the right thing but if you ever help a pet - be prepared to keep it.
10/52
