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.

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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