February 2021
It has been a little over a month since eleven year old Sophie arrived. We initially referred to her as “Sophie 2,” since we already had a Sophie here, but when we realized she didn’t answer to her name we changed it to Abby. We know she doesn’t hear well, but she seems to answer to Abby now more than she did to her former name. Kathy has been working on her coat, making significant progress, but just a few minutes at a time. Abby is the barkiest dog we can remember. It is primarily food-motivated; she acts like she is starving. It’s easy to see why she weighed 88 pounds the first time we had her in 2015. Since we can’t speak to the adopter from that time (he is in a care facility), or the man he gave her to because we don’t know who he was, we don’t know if once of them got her weight down or if she was on the run a long time before she made it to the animal shelter. The result of the weight loss is a desperate desire for food. She has a number of small wounds either healing or where her coat hasn’t grown back. We gave her Amoxicillin for a UTI when she first arrived, which cleared up her incontinence, but in recent days she has asked to go out in the middle of the night, so it may be back.
We know Abby came from Falling Cedar Farms. They sell to anyone wanting a puppy, do no health checks on parents, and they have accounted for more dogs we get than any other breeder since Misty Mountain, back when we started rescue in 2001. There is another connection. In looking at the pedigree we received with Abby (Sophie) in 2015, we know where many of the Falling Cedar Farms dogs came from. They were from Misty Mountain. Besides the pedigree, there is a head shape that’s common among them, shared by our own boy Rowdy. If he or Abby looks into the office we have to check nose color to be sure which one it is.