Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Little girl, big cough


This is "newest girl," I'm calling her Candy for lack of a better name.  She is the one I got from the Rockingham-Harrisonburg SPCA last Friday.  She was technically a stray and had to be held for 10 days, but she had been seen tossed from a car in a park in Harrisonburg so it's no surprise that no one came to claim her.  My fervent hope is that the person or people responsible for that find themselves abandoned by family and friends at some point in their life and have a flashback to the moment that they pushed her from the car and sped away.  Karma can be a bitch and will come back to bite you on the ass. 

Candy has a cough.  A BIG cough.  She is a petite little girl, probably not more than 30 lbs, but she coughs like a 2 pack-a-day, 30 year smoker.  She has a respiratory infection, broadly identified as "kennel cough" that she probably picked up and spread around in the shelter.  We went to the vet yesterday (after things had settled down from the earthquake) to get her checked out.  The good news is that she feels fine, didn't have a temperature, and she tested negative for heartworm/lyme/erhlichia.  She got a rabies vaccine and the others had supposedly been done in the shelter although I'm waiting on paperwork to show it.  I'll get her other vaccines done (or repeated) when she's over this cough. 

She is a sweet little girl too.  Very squirmy, but I expect this was her first ever vet visit although she appears to be between one and two years old.  She's in a kennel by herself in an attempt to isolate and contain whatever she has, so I can't try her with other dogs.  She had a big bark for everyone when she first arrived, but she has settled down nicely and has been an easy foster.  She can and does eat a like big dog, and she needs to, so I'm feeding her 3x per day for now. 

I'd love to move her to another foster home; she's cute, sweet, and probably very adoptable, but I'm not sure a lot of folks other than me will welcome her until the cough is gone.  She got doxycycline and a cough suppressant from the vet.  We are hoping for a quick cure. 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Poor little doggie. Coughing is terrible enough for a person...She looks like a real cutie. What should her weight be at? 30 lbs sounds awfully low for a GSD.

BudsBuddy said...

She looks like she still needs to grow into that tongue and those ears! Hope she feels better soon.