She's only a broken down angel

[lizblackdog]

Just spent twenty minutes chatting with one of my dog walking acquaintances. She's a sweet elderly lady with an even sweeter elderly Cocker Spaniel called Daisy. Daisy's owner is one of my favourite local dog owners. She's never without poo bags, she's ready to slap down anyone she sees failing to use them, she identified Squish's breed accurately at first sight, and I once heard her comment on a revolting squelchy heap of dog turd some mannerless barbarian had left - "If my dog produced something looking like that she'd be at the vet's." I love this lady and her immaculately cared-for rescue dog.

Today I learned something about Daisy's history prior to her rescue:

• She's been debarked.
• She's had surgery to remove the loose skin round her jowls and it's left her with difficuties drinking. This was done to prevent her then owners having to clean her food off her face as one has to do sometimes with jowly long haired dogs.
  
• One of her hind legs is distorted and twisted from spending six years of her life tethered by it.
• When her owner adopted her she didn't know what grass was.
  

Yep, Daisy spent her first six years as a puppy farm brood bitch.  I know that with my own friends list I'm mostly preaching to the converted, but not all of you are dog people.  Not all of you know the whole story behind cute puppies in pet shops. I knew it in theory, myself, but this was the first time I've actually seen one of the victims, because the creatures responsible tend to go to a lot of trouble to prevent them being seen or heard.

Read about it: http://www.bordercollierescue.org/puppyfarm/introduction.html

P.S. if you saw this in the first fifteen minutes after posting, please excuse delete/edit rich text b0rkage. My bad. I should know Rich Text Mode is evil, I was just too lazy to learn how to make bullet points in HTML.