Flea Markets

In the state I live in, and the state next to it, it's illegal to sell animals at Flea Markets. However, in this state, someone was selling a dog cage with all the contents included. A puppy was in the crate. Broken tail, obviously starving. Very badly starving, almost dying. A woman took pity on the dog, bought the crate, and immediately brought the dog to a highly respected rescue. Someone fostered the dog for a few months until it was relatively healthy. Someone close to me adopted the dog, based on my recommendation on a dog that would match well with his other dog's personality. The dog was a Pointer. At 9-10 months old, he weighed 19 pounds. As adults, they are supposed to weigh 55-75 pounds, depending on if they are 25-28 inches at the shoulder. At 9 or 10 months old, they should be weighing close to 50 pounds. So, this dog was about 25-30 pounds underweight. The someone close to me (SCM) was awesome, and gave him the care and support and the love he needed. Broken tails that have healed cannot be fixed, so the end of the Pointer's tail was always at about a 40 degree angle. Not only did this dog fatten up, get heavily muscled, but you could see the bones in his legs straightening over time, because of the nutrition. He was finally able to run like a regular dog, instead of a fucked up way of running because the bones in his legs were actually soft and rubbery, instead of hard like they should be. His personality was completely unscathed, thankfully. Happy, loving, a joy to be around. He was about 55 pounds, I believe, something like that, not an inch of fat on him.

He had a helluva nose on him. SCM's other dog was a type of pointer, and they hunted. He didn't get the second dog with the expectation of hunting him, but he turned out to be a great hunter. When he turned three, he died. SCM had him for just a little over two years. At three years of age, Pointer's immune system failed and he had massive Mast Cell Tumors all over his body, internally in his intestinal system, you could see a tiny spot of tumor grow to the size of a quarter over just a matter of 3-4 days. When he started pooping pure blood, he was put down. Unfortuantely, it had never bothered him emotionally. He was the same cheerful, loving, happy dog that we had to kill. And yes, I was there and held him as he went.

He was a product of hunter greed. Many many shit hunters breed a litter every year, try and sell off the puppies to keep just one. They dump the puppies in shelters or on the sides of the street, for all I know, to just keep the one that they will hunt with for a year. Then they dump that dog in the off season, because it's too expensive to keep a dog for a year. But somehow it's less expensive to breed every year?

On the other hand, there are extremely responsible hunters who do not do this, who rescue the dogs of the breed they choose (you can't rescue everything, no matter how much you'd want to, and by choosing to rescue the breeds they hunt, that means those dogs won't end up in shelters, which relieves the overall burden of dogs in rescue).

So, watch out at your local Flea Markets for this thing. It happens all the time.

Note: I got the initial weight of the dog wrong so I fixed it. It was less than I remembered. Plus, I checked his history with the rescue, and the information on the site was different than what was given to SCM. It wasn't very different, so I'm not going to bother to change it, other than it happened in this state. The end result is the same.