Penny

Our last dog Penny, the one before Ellie and our second dog, was a dear soul, a rescue animal with whom both Frog and I fell instantly in love when we went to the rescue centre to find a new companion. We both had the feeling that she was talking to us, asking us to take her home.

 

Penny, the rescue dog

She'd obviously had a troubled life and to start with whenever we left her alone used either to wreck the place (scratching all the doors and windows) or tear the catflap off the door, chew round the hole, squeeze out and charge off down the road looking for us - or, on one memorable occasion, climb on to Frog's car and walk all over it leaving scratch marks. 'The little sod,' he said. He loved her really.
    After a year however, with us gradually increasing the time we left her alone or using tricks designed to reduce the stress for her such as pretending to go and then coming back immediately, she settled down, her only vice chasing deer - well, she was a lurcher (part greyhound).

    The rescue centre thought she was about three years old when we got her but they didn't really know. We thought she was younger than that. One day after she'd been living with us for six years she and I had just returned from a walk when she started pacing and panting, obviously extremely agitated and not well at all. I rushed her to the vet 15 minutes’ drive away on to whose floor she proceeded to vomit vast quantities of blue slug pellets.
    A couple of days later, after the vet had done what she needed to do (I can’t quite remember what - stomach pumping? feeding her charcoal?) we were able to take her home, apparently cured. But she was never the same again.

    She seemed to become more and more tired, not enjoying her walks, not even getting up to greet us in the morning, and then a few months after the poisoning she started to have fits.

    ‘I think this is it,’ said the vet. 'There's nothing we can do except operate on her brain and that would be traumatic for her.'

    We brought her body home and even though it was dark and 10 o’clock at night Frog started to dig her grave: it was his way of working through the grief. As he sweated and laboured, and Penny's body lay on the grass, I looked over to the western horizon and saw a shooting star. I knew it was a sign, and the next day there was another sign when a cloud of sweetness hovered above her grave. 

Because of the large quantity of slug pellets that Penny had managed to ingest, Frog suggested that someone had laced some bait (a dead rabbit?) in order to kill perhaps badgers. A horrible thought and one that's possibly not legal so (with the encouragement of the vet who had seen several poisoned dogs around that time) I reported the incident to the police. Unbelievably, it is legal – with certain provisos - for farmers to spread slug pellets on their fields. Which is what - to my horror - has happened here recently, with three nearby fields around which I walk most days (with the farmer's permission for which I am grateful) so treated.

  

Blue slug pellets scattered over a field next to our house. With the recent rain most of them have now sunk into the mud which is why they are quite widely spaced in the picture. Whether this is better or worse for wildlife I don't know.

    

The day after I first saw the slug pellets, I found in the middle of another nearby field a dead buzzard. I didn't touch the bird (and could hardly bear to photograph it) but it didn't appear to have any wounds or reason for its sudden death - and you don't usually see dead wild creatures out in the open. I wondered whether there was a connection between the bird and the slug pellets.

The dead buzzard I found

I wanted to do something, so Frog (who works as a technician in the sciences department of our local university) told me about the Predatory Bird Monitoring Scheme which studies environmental pollutants in birds of prey. Yes they were interested in my buzzard, but they didn't want it if it was full of maggots. Unfortunately when we went back this morning, it was (and, no, I couldn't quite bring myself to photograph the maggots).

So, why am I telling you all this? I suppose I wanted to give you a more accurate picture of life in the country. Yes, we have lovely views, space, silence and clean air, but we also have death and destruction, just like anywhere else.