Home Sweets Home!

Sweetheart is home.  Les and I picked her up today about 2:00.  She was really excited to see the both of us!  I had this fear in the back of my mind that she would forget about me.

My friend and her family had a good time with Sweetheart.  They said she was a great dog and that they are in love with her.  :)  I am so glad she was a good girl at their house.  My friend said Sweetheart would lay her head in her lap and across her arm whenever she would sit down.  She also did great when they were gone from the house and left her out of her crate.  She gave them the sad eyes when they tried to crate her that they only crated her twice.  Sweets is no fool, she knows how to work her humans.

Les and I had a great time at the bed and breakfast by Ardmore Oklahoma.  They had a cat named "Eggs" that lives on the front porch of the Inn.  He would greet you each time you walked outside.  I loved having a chance to be around a cat again since I lost Kitty in February.

I hope everyone had a nice weekend.  I will bring the rest of my pack home tomorrow afternoon sometime.

Jess and Sweets

Sweets in a new home!

This weekend Les and I are taking a well deserved mini vacation at a bed and breakfast.  Sweetheart is being watched by a good friend of ours.

I took Sweets to her 'new' home this morning.  First thing she does is squat and pees on their living room carpet!  ARGH, bad, bad girl.  I yelled "what are you doing"!  She instantly stopped peeing and hoofed it for their backdoor.  Yeesh.

Below is a picture of Sweets and Tracy on the couch this evening.  I think she is settling in quite nicely.

Hopefully Sweets won't do anything else this weekend to embarrass me!!

I sort of feel like a new mom, worrying about my child's first sleepover.  Besides a few times being at the vet's, I have not been away from Sweetheart since she came home September 2010!!

Jess and Sweets!

Bittersweet Ending

Today Paul and I decided we are going to close Fasthound Greyhound Adoption after being in the greyhound rescue business for close to7 years.  For the last year or so I have not felt I have been giving my all towards the group.  It has taken a lot of soul searching to come to this decision but I think it is the right thing to do.

I am very grateful to have been a part of helping save the greyhounds we have over the last 7 years.  I am also grateful to have been able to introduce the breed to people who never thought about having a greyhound as a pet before.  To say these dogs are the greatest in the world is an understatement!

The thing I am most proud of with my time with Fasthound is Sweetheart.  She is my biggest accomplishment (even though I really owe everything to Dr. Kolar and staff) and the greatest gift Fasthound gave to me.  She will always be a part of my family for as long as she lives, as well as Monte, Benny and Cleo.

I hope one day soon I will take up volunteering with a greyhound group.  Right now I just need some time to relax and let this sink in.

I will keep updating the blog as it is Sweetheart's blog and she isn't going anywhere.  :)

Jess and Sweets

Mann's Best Friend Show & Tail.

Sweets doing her thing.

Elise on the left Admire on the right.
Admire will be going out for a foster to adopt Saturday.

Our typical setup for Show & Tails.

Another of the Diva!

Mann's Best Friend invited us to do a Show & Tail during a  wine tasting they had .
They are absolutely the best if you're in OKC definitely stop in and say hi. 

Benny our 112 lbs door stop and draft blocker.

Sweetheart: Road Warrior

Sweetheart got to go on a mini road trip today.  We loaded her up and visited the Round Barn in Arcadia Oklahoma.  I tried to get her to walk up a flight of stairs but halfway up she went into 'mule' mode and would not take another step forward.  She did however about kill me running back down the stairs.  Yeesh.

Gorgeous roof of the Round Barn

Dance floor of Round Barn.  Can be rented for wedding and parties.

Round Barn off Historic Route 66 in Arcadia Oklahoma
The Round Barn was built in 1898 and fully restored in 1992.
A must see and free to the public with very nice
volunteers who are happy to answer all your questions.

We then went to Pops, a neat convenience store and soda shop right up the road from the Round Barn.  She was not too thrilled about sitting in the car a whole 10 minutes as we purchased sodas.

She ended her day by killing one of our hens that found its way into their back yard, with her muzzle on I might add.  *Sigh*  Now she keeps wanting me to let her back outside so she can scout for another chicken.  Rotten should be her name because she is definitely not sweet to chickens.

I'm really not looking at that chicken, honest.

Elise is doing well.  She has gained all of her weight back and is becoming quite a solid block of muscle.   Her undercoat is starting to shed out.  This is a good thing and a bad thing.  It is nice to get rid of that old, ratty hair but the more it sheds out the more prominent the scars from all her tick bites have become  :(   I hope hair grows back over these scars one day but if not, oh well, she is still a doll!  Violet, Elise's sister is being fostered at another foster home and Elise seems to have blossomed quite nicely since her sister has been gone.  Violet was a bit more pushy and the dominant of the two and Elise would just take the submissive role when Vi was around. Elise is very very sweet and is starting to really play a lot with toys (and shoes if we don't watch her close).

Below is an adorable picture of Elise taken last week.

Hope everyone is doing well.

Jess and Sweets aka Chicken Destroyer

Cute pics

Sweets in attack mode.  Are you scared?

Diva!

Lots of new pounds gained!

Les took Violet and Elise to Dr. Kolar's today to have their spay stitches removed.  The stitches came out smoothly and the incisions healed nicely.  Dr. Kendi said Elise's leg wound is healing well and has made good progress since we brought them in two weeks ago.

The best part is both girls have gained a good amount of weight.  Violet has gained eight pounds and Elise has gained twelve!!!  Violet weights 65 pounds and Elise weighs 62 pounds.  So proud of the girls for getting healthy so fast.

Violet will go to another foster home sometime this week.  I am going to foster Elise until her leg wound fully heals just in case she gets an infection or other set back (even though I am doubtful this will happen).

This weekend Les and I took Sweetheart to Joplin, Missouri to look at a car.  She did great the whole time.  It was an eight hour road trip altogether and she didn't have an accident or whine or anything.  She did, however, raid her 'treat' bag.  Les went to give her a snack and discovered she had rooted the ziploc bag out of the grocery bag, chewed a hole in the ziploc bag and ate ALL the treats in there.  :)  I guess she thought she would teach us a lesson for leaving her in the car when we went into the candy shop for thirty minutes.

Hope everyone is doing well.

Jess and Sweets

Violet and Elise

Les picked the girls up from Dr. Kolar's last Thursday.  The staff at Dr. Kolar's did such a good job getting the girls all clean and almost tick free.  It was quite a job as they had hundreds of ticks on them.  Both girls have some space issues and had a bit of food aggression at first.  The food aggression has been dealt with but the space issues are still going on a bit.  All of this is to be expected from dogs that were neglected and left to pretty much fend for themselves.

Violet is the more outgoing of the two.  She is very sweet and learned what the couch was the first night she was home.  She has also discovered our bed and has laid on it a few times.  The picture below is of her staring at me while I was sitting in my recliner.  It was taken last night.

The girls have been adamantly refusing to go outside and we have to drag them out, literally drag them by their collars.  It is quite ridiculous at times.  Violet is doing a bit better at going outside on her own but Elise is still terrible.  She will run in her crate and just lay there if she thinks she has to go out.  I guess if you had been left outside in your own filth, crawling with ticks and going hungry you wouldn't be so excited to go out either.

We did find out Violet has ehrlichia so she has to be on doxycycline for a month.  Violet bit Cleo in the middle of the night last night when Cleo jumped on the couch, onto Violet's leg.  Just a small puncture and a small tear in Cleo's back thigh.  Les ran her to Kolar's this morning and Dr. Kendi put six stitches in.  Ahhh, good times.

Both girls have gained weight and will have their spay stitches out Saturday.  Their tick scabs on both girls are healing nicely as is the gash in Elise's back leg.  The gash has to heal on its own since it had been open for about two weeks prior to us rescuing them.

So now we have Cleo on pills for a week, Violet on them for a month and Elise needing ointment on her leg for who knows how long.  :)

Sweets is doing pretty well with the girls overall.  She doesn't seem too terribly jealous, whew!

Jess and Sweets.

Shelter girls

This past Sunday I received a text from one of our volunteers that there were two greyhounds in a shelter in Altus Oklahoma.  I called the shelter and left a message letting them know that we could take them if they were full blood greys.  The Animal Control Officer called me back and said he thought they were pure breed greyhounds and that since they were owner surrender dogs they could be picked up Monday when the shelter opened.

The ACO said that the dogs were more like a seizure instead of a surrender.  The ACO states that he drove by the owner's house and saw that the two greys were in rough condition and covered with ticks.  The owner stated that he was 'about to sell them to a guy' but the ACO told him that he either surrendered the dogs voluntarily to him or he would seize them forcefully and fine him.  The owner wisely chose to go the owner surrender route.

Monday morning I called in sick *cough cough* to work and Les and I made the two and a half hour drive down to Altus.  We arrived around 11 a.m.  They had the girls crated together as the ACO said that they were inseparable, that when one would get out of sight of the other they would whine.  One of the volunteers brought the girls out and sure enough, they were pure blood greys.  I checked their ears and they are even tattooed.  Both are a blond/fawn color and both were covered in big, fat ticks, even though they had been dipped by the shelter a day or so before.  Les and I loaded them in the car and headed to Dr. Kolar's at 85 mph with the windows down. Those two girls stunk to high heaven, as though they had been living in their own filth for quite some time.

Below is a picture of them riding in the car on the way to Dr. Kolar's.

 

I named the blond one Violet, she weighed 57 pounds and is the bigger and healthier looking of the two.  The darker, smaller one is Elise and she weighed 50.5 pounds.  Per their tattoos they were born in August 2009 and are indeed littermates.  Dr. Kendi has been giving me updates by text since Monday.  She finished their spay and teeth cleaning today.  Both are heartworm negative, whew.  They will be bathed tomorrow and will come home tomorrow afternoon after I get off of work.  We will get their blood panel back in a few days.  Hopefully they do not have any tick borne diseases.

Sweetheart is going to hate me for a few days for bringing these two girls home.  She doesn't like to share her 'mom' with other dogs.  Big, spoiled baby that she is.

Sweetheart is doing fine.  Eve is going to be formally adopted this week.  She is being adopted by a dog groomer who owns her own shop and takes Eve to work with her everyday.  I am so happy Eve has a great home, she is such a great dog!

Jess and Sweetheart!

The power of Google!

The story below is real.  :)  

Wednesday, around 12:30 p.m., I was sitting at a local Shawnee OK restaurant having what I initially thought would be a relaxing lunch.  About halfway through my meal I receive a phone call from a woman who works at a school in Oklahoma City, OK.  She states she found a greyhound that wandered onto school property that morning.  She said the greyhound is rather thin and that the tag on the collar has the name of Joey and a serial type of number on it, but there is no rabies tag or local phone number on the tag.  She goes on to ask me if Fasthound has room for him and I said "of course" (there is no way I am going to turn away a stray).

We decide to meet at a parking lot in Oklahoma City at 6 that evening so that I can get the greyhound from her.  I had already talked to Dr. Kendi (her official name is Dr. Horner LOL) and she said I could bring Joey in after hours and they would board him for us.  Les and I pull up in the parking lot.  Les saw Joey before I did and the first thing out of his mouth is "That isn't a greyhound, that is a whippet"  I immediately look up and see that it is indeed a whippet.  A somewhat smallish looking whippet at that.  

Les and I get out of the car and let the woman know he is a whippet (she has had no prior dealings with sighthounds) but we assure her we will take him and find him a good home.  We head to Dr. Kolar's and take a few pictures of him while we are waiting for Dr. Kendi to arrive .  

Joey

Dr. Kendi arrives and we bring him into the clinic.  All of us, Les, Dr. Kendi and I, feel like he is in good shape.  A tad thin (not unusual for an un-neutered sighthoud) but his coat is in great shape and his behavior is sweet and loving (not like one who has been abused).  Dr. Kendi suggests that his collar number might be a microchip number since some folks will put the chip number on a collar tag versus a phone number.  Dr. Kendi puts Joey in a crate at the vet's office and Les and I go home.  (She did not scan him for a microchip at that time since it was after hours and we were just trying to get him settled in).

As soon as I got home I called three separate pet microchip companies and asked if they have any information related to the number on his collar.  None did.  The third company I called said that the number was not a valid chip number.   

After I struck out on the microchip companies I decided to Google the number.  Google pulls a sort of Craigslist ad in, of all places,  a military base in Okinawa, Japan.  I click on the ad and there are actually three separate ads posted by the same person.  The ads are recent (2012).  It turns out that the number on Joey's tag is actually a phone number in Okinawa, Japan.  Les tries calling it but of course we cannot get through because we do not have the right country code or international calling on our phones.  Les goes back to the ads and discovers that you can email the person who placed the ad.  He emails all three ads and asks if the person has recently lost a dog.

At 8:00 p.m. (just ten minutes after Les placed the emails) I check my yahoo email and discover a reply.  The reply is "Yes, please contact me" and a local Oklahoma phone number is given.  I call the number and the call is immediately answered.  The woman states she lost a whippet named Joey that day,  fawn and white, who is not neutered and that she lives in Oklahoma City, OK.  I tell her that we have her dog (well Dr. Kolar's has her dog) and how we came into possession of him.  She was so happy.  She and her husband had just returned to the states at the end of January and she had not updated his tag.  

I gave her Dr. Kolar's information.  She stated she had made flyers and put all around her neighborhood offering a $100 reward for his safe return.  She wanted to give me the reward money but I told her I did not want it.  I told her I just wanted her to have her dog back and that I wanted her to get his tags updated.  I let her know that if she wanted to put the money on Fasthound's vet account as a donation we would appreciate it.  

I emailed her today and she picked up Joey yesterday and donated the reward money to our group!!!  How cool is that.    She said Joey is doing well and that they are happy to have him safe and happy at home.  

It just goes to show you that Google really is an amazing tool!  Not only am I happy that Joey is home with his family, I am also happy I didn't have to bring him to my house because Sweetheart would NOT have been happy with me at all.  :)  She would have been SUPER jealous that her 'mom' had brought home a 'portable' greyhound!

Jess and Sweetheart