My brave, gutless dog

August 14, 2022

Dori has featured in this blog several times. She began as Dory last spring when we acquired her, then became Dorada (‘golden’) and, finally, Midori, a Japanese word that literally means ‘green,’ but can also mean the force of the natural world. She’s indeed strong and forceful, while also being intensely affectionate. But we still call her Dori, because that’s the name she more or less recognises.

She began to look unusually thin a few months ago, and so our usual vet suggested a course of de-worming meds and some vitamins. I thought it had some effect, but not much.

Dr. Barajas, in the nearby city of Cuautla, is our guy for complicated cases. He has sophisticated equipment and a full operating theatre. He is also usually training a couple of young assistants, so the place is well-staffed. My friend Lucero, who rescued Dori early last year when her original owners largely abandoned her, came with me to see him yesterday, and to get a proper diagnosis of why our dog, while still a little wild and strong as a horse, has her ribs sticking out. We suspected she had a thyroid condition, but that isn’t what the good doctor found.

First, he ran a blood sample through an instrument that does counts automatically. Overall, she is in good condition, he said, so we’d not found the problem. So, next I got to help the assistants hold down Dori as she was given a sideways-on x-ray. Some dogs are a handful, but predictably, she was six handfuls.

“What do you see here?” he asked his assistants when the image came up on the screen, asking us to wait a minute for the verdict until they’d had a chance to offer their opinions. 

“I can’t see her intestines – where are they?” one of them finally asked. “And is that a spot on her liver?”

And then he took us through what he’d found. Which, weirdly, was that she has almost no intestines where a dog always has intestines. The food goes in, and the by-product comes out the other end, but somehow her intestines are either not fully present, or more probably, are pushed up into her thorax. Dr. Barajas assured us he’d not seen a case quite like this before. The problem needs surgery to explore and, hopefully, to fix. But clearly, with strangely positioned or formed innards, she can’t extract maximum nutrition from her food.

But the round white spot – on the x-ray here, above the spinal column, about one-sixth the way from the right-hand edge of the image – was the other surprise. This x-ray was the second one, because the first showed where it was longitudinally, but not how deep into her body. Because, when he said it was a small lead bullet or gun-pellet, he had to determine if it was close to the skin (as we hoped), or deeper inside (which it was).

Outsiders still assume that gun-violence is a problem for humans in Mexico, and it is in some areas. But a lot of people own firearms of one type or another, and street-dogs can be considered legit for target practice. Dr. Barajas told us that with a street-rescue dog that’s brought in, he always checks to see if they’ve been shot.

Lucero and I were in shock by this point in his explanation. How does an animal survive in such a condition? She shows no external signs of distress, apart from the complete lack of fat on her body. But it’s possible the lead pellet is poisoning her slowly.

I’ve often remarked that being a woman in rural Mexico can be a tough gig, but being a dog would be a worse one. There are many half-starved dogs running around, sometimes with mange or matted hair. Survival is all they can achieve, and often, not even that for very long. 

Ours often whine to be let out to run around and get into fights, and Dori still misses her half-wild first year or so of life, when she picked up various scars and gave birth to two litters of puppies. But letting them out the gate except on a leash, when they have an ample, hillside corral here in which to play and run, is something I’ve never done except through rare carelessness. I value them too much for that.

So, our Dori goes in for surgery. She’s on an enriched diet (she doesn’t complain at that) and we hope that builds her up a little. But as the vet says, she’s mostly healthy and strong for now, but that could change at any point. Accordingly, in fourteen days, he’s going to see what he can do about the presumably compacted intestines, and try to extract the lead pellet from her liver.

Dori is not an easy dog to live with. But boring, she isn’t.