THE McELROY ZOO: Meet Lucy, the dog who used to live on a chain

By David McElroy · May 22, 2011

About 12 years ago, I suddenly started seeing a beautiful chow mix dog in the yard of a home not too far from where I live. It was an unfenced yard, and she lived on a chain all the time. The couple who lived there didn’t seem to care about her.

I never once saw her off the chain, and I never once saw them give her any attention. When I’d happen to be walking by and the people came home, she would strain on the chain trying to get to them as she wagged her tail hard, but they would ignore her. She obviously wanted attention badly. It broke my heart, but I watched this for months — until after the dog got pregnant and had five puppies on that chain.

The puppies would wander around — beyond the reach of her chain — and she would seem frantic in trying to get to them to care for them. It was upsetting to me to watch as I’d drive by or walk near the house. The last straw was when the couple who lived there left town for a week and left this mother dog and her puppies out in the yard. After making inquires across the street, I found out that they had asked a neighbor to feed her while they were gone, but that was all the provision they’d made for her or the puppies.

I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I wasn’t going to leave her there. There were already three dogs in my household at the time, so I didn’t need any more. I had no intention of keeping her, but I couldn’t leave her where she was with five puppies she couldn’t take care of.

I took the mother and the puppies back to my house and put them in a fenced enclosure in my back yard — where she could care for the puppies. I let the neighbor know what I was doing, and I left a note on the door of the other house saying that I was taking care of the dogs until they returned. Honestly, I figured they would probably be angry at me for taking their dogs, but I didn’t care.

When the owners returned, they didn’t seem bothered in the least that I’d taken the dogs. In fact, the man told me they were about to move, so they were about to take all of them to a shelter. After he told me that, I volunteered to find homes for them — and Lucy’s been with me ever since. (She was named for another silly redhead, so you probably know where the name came from.)

I found homes for the puppies and got medical care for Lucy. (She had never been to a vet.) It turned out that she had heartworms and would have died without treatment. But that’s been many years, and she’s lived a happy, healthy life instead. (She likes to lie underneath my chair while I work, as you can see in the photo above.)

My ex-wife ended up keeping one of the puppies — the runt of the litter who was stuck with the name Munchkin. She was a sweet dog, but she escaped from a vet clinic when she was being boarded about four or five years ago. You can read her story here.

Lucy gets along great with my cats and she and the felines sometimes sleep together in cold weather. She’s also the biggest chicken in the world, scared of noises or objects that she can’t control. In fact, she’s so afraid of unfamiliar things that she turns her head whenever I point a camera at her. So I treasure the few pictures I’m able to get of her before she turns away.

Based on the vet’s estimate when I got her, she seems to be about 14 years old now, which is pretty old for a dog her size. Her health has been declining — and I sometimes have to carry her up and down stairs — but she’s still the sweetest and most loving dog you could ask for.

Share on Social Networks

Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

The Republican Party is dead. It still exists in name, of course, but it’s nothing but a shell. All that’s left are idiots and stooges and con men of the MAGA party. When Donald Trump is gone — which won’t be long — those populist idiots and pragmatic fools will have no one to follow. Democrats will thrive. They will take more power than ever and they will push the federal government further to the radical far left than ever. When that happens, don’t just blame Trump if you’re a conservative. Blame every person who has claimed to be a conservative and has given up on principles, character and everything else that Republicans once claimed to stand for. As someone who worked as a GOP political consultant for many years, this is disgusting and disturbing to me. Those who have enabled Trump to have almost unchecked power are going to be shocked when they see what they will unleash in the long run. It’s been plain all along what this narcissistic con man is. It’s your fault that you chose to pretend not to see what he really is.

We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

Related Posts