THE McELROY ZOO: Meet Alex, the dog who was dumped with a bowl

By David McElroy · July 31, 2011

The first time I ever saw Alex, he was lying next to a food bowl outside of the Winn-Dixie grocery store near my house.

He looked up at me with big sad eyes as I walked into the store one night. I didn’t know who he belonged to or what he was doing at the store, so I asked while I was checking out.

“He’s been here all day,” the cashier said. “Some woman put him out of the car this morning with that bowl and a ball. She took off and he’s been here ever since.”

On the way out the door, I stopped to visit him. He didn’t have a real tail, but he wagged a little stump of a tail at getting some attention. Another store employee told me that people had been petting the dog all day, but nobody was interested in taking him home.

As I was petting the dog and trying to figure out whether I could help him, a couple of other customers stopped to talk. They were both big animal lovers, they said, and they both expressed a willingness to help. Each said she knew someone who wanted a dog, but neither had a place to keep him that night.

I was confident that both women were serious and that one would come through with a home. I certainly didn’t need another dog. My then-wife and I already had two dogs and about four or five cats. We were full.

But I could keep him overnight — until one of them had made arrangements for a new home for him the next day. The two women joked about which one of them could call me first to make sure the other didn’t get the dog first. You know where this story is leading. I never heard from either of the women again.

Alex is an Australian cattle dog, sometimes known as a blue heeler. They are very smart, very energetic and very stubborn. Needless to say, this fellow ended up joining the zoo at my house.

Naming him was tough, so he went nameless for a few weeks. After trying out a lot of ideas for finding a name that fit, I stumbled onto a list of passengers from some of the early English ships to take settlers to Australia. I came across a young boy named Alex McElroy. In a nod to his breed’s Australian roots, this energetic fell0w now had a name.

When Melissa and I divorced, the hardest thing was splitting up the animals. Alex ended up going with her. I rarely see him, but still think about him, so in that respect, I suppose it’s a bit like human children in a divorce. Melissa and her new husband have taken great care of him over the years, but he’s old and frail, a mere shadow of the energetic young dog who I found.

Alex is 15 years old, which is rather old for a dog like him. He’s been blind for several years now, and his hearing is fading badly. At his annual checkup last year, he was 41 pounds. At this year’s checkup, he was down to 35 pounds. The vet thinks he’s lost a lot of muscle mass in his hindquarters and arthritis or some other type of inflammation has set it.

I got an email from Melissa about him Saturday. She’s worried and told me what had happened earlier in the day:

“He was fine this morning, but when I tried to get him to go outside about noon, he couldn’t get up. He was in tremendous pain. [The vet] gave me some anti-inflammatory meds last week, so I gave Alex one of them. He had great trouble going to sleep, and I had to lie down in the floor with him and stroke him until he dozed off. He then slept for almost three hours. When he woke up, it was dinner time, and he was hungry. We had to place a towel under him to hold up and take the weight off his back hips and ‘walk’ him to the kitchen. He managed to stand/sit and eat, but he was in pain.”

It’s clear that Alex is going downhill rapidly, so I don’t know how much longer he’ll be with us. If he’s still this way Monday, Melissa is taking him back to the vet to see what else she can do for him. She said:

“It’s extremely hard to watch him be in pain. He’s 15 years old, so he’s achieved a ripe old age, but I really don’t want to give him up. I guess we never do.”

I don’t know how much longer Alex has, but he’s had more than a dozen very good years with people who’ve loved him very much. His life took a dicey turn when someone dumped him at Winn-Dixie one day a long time ago. I don’t know why she dumped this little guy who we’ve loved so much.

I just know that her loss was our gain.

Editor’s note: If you enjoyed meeting Alex, you might enjoy previous stories and pictures about Bessie, Molly, Oliver, Munchkin, Sam, Maggie, Henry, Lucy, Amelia, Charlotte and Emily.

Update: Alex was tough enough to survive for almost two years after this story was written. He died on April 5, 2013. We will miss him.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts