Thur 14th January: Pug becomes a GR puppy

First thing this morning Kathy had a special assignment.  She had to go to Kowloon to take delivery of our brand new Nissan van, although it will stay at the dealers for a while longer to have the HKDR logo put on.  This is such an amazing donation and so exciting, and I can’t wait to have a drive round in the new Mutt-Mobile just to show it off.  (I must remember to renew my driver’s license too).

The dogs we had been waiting for from the Shatin AFCD Animal Management Centre arrived in the afternoon, though somehow the pug that I had already named Jasmine had become a six-month golden retriever puppy.  I got a message from the kennels to say that it had been adopted before even knowing it was there, so no complaints please about not having informed anyone that we had this puppy available.  I still need to find out what happened to Jasmine.

Skinny golden retriever boy

We do have another young golden retriever coming in on Friday.  He has been starved so is small for his breed.  He was lucky to have wandered into the garden of one of our supporters, but he had had stones thrown at him by others as he was trying to find shelter.  I hope his sad story will mean that he too will quickly find a home, but even if he stays for a while we can guarantee that he will have as much food as he wants.

One of the dogs from Shatin that did turn up was Sassy, an adorable young pug/shih tzu cross girl.  Like all new dogs she went straight to the vet for a checkup including a heartworm test, and this was one of those times when the test came back positive.  Heartworm is treatable but the treatment itself is dangerous and can be fatal in some cases.  It’s so important that all dogs are given heartworm prevention, and it’s so easy.  There’s really no excuse.

Tinky, the Yorkshire terrier from the Shatin batch had a line of potential adopters waiting, so he was one of those lucky dogs that was homed before having to spend even a night with us.  I’ll be posting details of the next group due to arrive and I’m sure that they will also have a queue of adopters waiting as there is a poodle, a chihuahua puppy and a very young dachshund girl among them.  Pet shop puppies: easy come, easy go.

I took a batch of puppies over from Lamma to have their second vaccinations, and had a bit of a problem identifying them.  They have only recently come back from their foster homes, and being from the same litter are all very similar.  Using the sex and previous weight shown on the computer records, we (the vet and I) worked out who we thought was who but it was all pretty much guesswork.   We then went through the same process with the Nutcase puppies living at kennels, as they were also due their second vaccinations.  Four of them are pure black and virtually identical.  Only the sex and the fact that one of them has a small umbilical hernia gave us clues as to their names.  Strangely the four light coloured pups from this litter are friendly and happy to be handled, while the black ones are still a bit nutty.  They’ll come round in time.

You may have noticed that our website is gradually changing as we’re adding and moving and generally making improvements.  The dog information pages were the first to get their mini facelift, and now the link buttons for the blog, Facebook Fan Page, YouTube and  mailing list have moved to the bottom of the Homepage, and the Blog button at the top will soon be replaced.  The changes won’t interfere with the website function, they’re just things that have been niggling for a while and needed fixing.