Angel to the rescueAround 5:30 Sunday evening, Austin went out with a wheelbarrow to bring in wood to feed the family’s wood-burning furnace. At that hour at that northern latitude, it was already dark.
Angel went along with Austin, and the boy found it curious that instead of playfully galumphing around the yard as she normally did, the dog stayed close by his side. He would shortly learn that there was a reason for her actions.
Austin was a few feet from the woodshed when he saw the cougar, which he first assumed was another dog. Although cougars inhabit the surrounding forests, they usually stay away from towns.
There was a light in the backyard, and when the animal got under it, Austin saw it was a cougar getting ready to pounce from less than 10 feet away. But just as the animal leaped, Angel came to the rescue.
“The dog knew something was up, because she ran toward me just at the right time, and the cougar ended up getting her instead,” Austin said. “I was just lucky my dog was there, because it happened so fast I wouldn’t have known what hit me.”
Dog in dangerThe cougar clamped its jaws around Angel’s head. Frantic, Austin screamed for his mother and ran inside the house, yelling, “There’s a cougar eating Angel!”
Sherri Forman looked out the window and saw the cougar on the patio with Angel’s head in its mouth. It didn’t look good for the heroic pet. Angel, Sherri said, was “whining and making noises like we’ve never heard before. We knew that cougar was killing our dog.”
She called her father-in-law, Lloyd Forman, and he told her to call 911.
Boston Bar is a small town of fewer than 1,000 people about 150 miles outside of Vancouver in British Columbia. It’s the kind of place where everybody knows everybody else, and that applies to Constable Chad Gravelle, who was finishing up the day’s paperwork when he got the call at his office less than a block away from the Forman home.
The 911 dispatcher told Gravelle that a cougar was attacking a young boy. When the constable took down the address and family name, he knew immediately that the boy could only be Austin Forman.
“The dog and the cougar were all kind of tangled up as one unit,” he said. But he was able to see the big cat’s hindquarters and fired one shot, hoping to sever the animal’s spine.
When the cougar kept up its attack on Angel, Gravelle moved around to get in front of the cougar, which was less than 6 feet away.
“It was really dark out, and I was just trying to line up my shot as best I could. I could just see about two or three inches of the cougar’s head sticking out from behind Angel, and luckily I was able to get a good shot off,” Gravelle said.
“Without him, there’s no way Angel would have survived,” Sherri said. “The sounds had all stopped, and it was just a matter of seconds. The timing was perfect.”
The shot killed the cougar and missed Angel, but the cat still had its jaws around the dog’s head.
Hero houndAustin’s cousin, Travis Comkin, was also at the house, and he went to help Angel.
“The cougar had its mouth over the top of the dog’s mouth, trying to suffocate it, blood all over the animal,” Comkin told NBC News. “And out of nowhere, the dog breathed a gasp of air, just like it comes back from being dead, and just spits up blood. And I’m looking at her, and I’m holding her, and I’m like, she’s going to be all right.”
From being all but dead, Angel went back to romping around the backyard, her head covered in blood. The Formans took her to a veterinarian, where she was treated for extensive — but not life-threatening — injuries.
“She had surgery yesterday afternoon,” Sherri told Lauer. “She was in for about an hour in surgery: extensive injuries to her head. Her skull was fractured, and they had to piece it together along with numerous other wounds. We’re hopeful for a full recovery.”
Angel was expected to return home as early as Tuesday to a hero’s welcome and a thank-you present purchased especially for her by her best friend.
Plants: Many plants are toxic to dogs. Levels of toxicity range from mild to severe and can cause seizures, coma or death depending upon the size of your dog (puppies are more susceptible) and how much plant material is ingested. Here are a few common holiday varieties that can spell trouble:
Christmas Trees: Trees and trimmings pose numerous hazards:
Overnight guest(s): Suitcases come packed with hazards – small items can choke, toothpaste can be deadly, and prescription and over-the-counter medications can be lethal. Avoid an accident by providing your guests with a bureau or locked storage area so they don’t leave an open suitcase on the floor.
If your dog has an accident, or you suspect she has ingested a toxin, Dr. Melinda strongly advises immediate action by calling your vet, local animal emergency hospital or the ASPCA’s national animal poison control center at 888-426-4435. If possible, take a sample of the suspected toxin to your vet.
What Is a Puppy Mill?
A puppy mill is a large-scale commercial dog breeding operation where profit is given priority over the well-being of the dogs. Unlike responsible breeders, who place the utmost importance on producing the healthiest puppies possible, breeding at puppy mills is performed without consideration of genetic quality. This results in generations of dogs with unchecked hereditary defects.
Puppy mill puppies are typically sold to pet shops—usually through a broker, or middleman—and marketed as young as eight weeks of age. The lineage records of puppy mill dogs are often falsified.
What Problems Are Common to Puppy Mill Dogs? Illness, disease, fearful behavior and lack of socialization with humans and other animals are common characteristics of dogs from puppy mills. Because puppy mill operators fail to apply proper husbandry practices that would remove sick dogs from their breeding pools, puppies from puppy mills are prone to congenital and hereditary conditions. These can include:
On top of that, puppies often arrive in pet stores—and their new homes—with diseases or infirmities. These can include:
How Are Animals Treated at Puppy Mills? Puppy mills usually house dogs in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, without adequate veterinary care, food, water and socialization. Puppy mill dogs do not get to experience treats, toys, exercise or basic grooming. To minimize waste cleanup, dogs are often kept in cages with wire flooring that injures their paws and legs—and it is not unusual for cages to be stacked up in columns. Breeder dogs at mills might spend their entire lives outdoors, exposed to the elements—or crammed inside filthy structures where they never get the chance to feel the sun or a gust of fresh air on their faces.
How Often Are Dogs Bred in Puppy Mills? In order to maximize profits, female dogs are bred at every opportunity with little to no recovery time between litters. When, after a few years, they are physically depleted to the point that they no longer can reproduce, breeding females are often killed. The mom and dad of the puppy in the pet store window are unlikely to make it out of the mill alive—and neither will the many puppies born with overt physical problems that make them unsalable to pet stores.
When and Why Did Puppy Mills Begin? Puppy mills began sprouting up after World War II. In response to widespread crop failures in the Midwest, the United States Department of Agriculture began promoting purebred puppies as a fool-proof “cash” crop. It is easy to see why this might have appealed to farmers facing hard times—breeding dogs does not require the intense physical labor that it takes to produce edible crops, nor are dogs as vulnerable to unfavorable weather. Chicken coops and rabbit hutches were repurposed for dogs, and the retail pet industry—pet stores large and small—boomed with the increasing supply of puppies from the new "mills." Today, Missouri is considered the largest puppy mill state in the country.
Seeking a puppy supply source on the East Coast, puppy brokers—the middlemen who deliver the dogs from mills to pet stores—convinced many of Pennsylvania’s Amish farmers in the 1970s that puppies were the cash crop of the future. Brokers conducted seminars to teach farmers how to operate their own breeding facilities. Thirty years later, Lancaster County, PA, has the highest concentration of puppy mills of any county in the nation and has earned the dubious nickname of “Puppy Mill Capital of the East.”
How Can I Help Fight Puppy Mills? There are many ways you can fight puppy mills, starting with refusing to patronize the stores and websites that sell their dogs.