This past weekend I helped a co-worker load a moving van. He and his wife were splitting up and he was helping her move her stuff back to Florida. I showed up around 9am Saturday and met their dogs, her pug and his beagle. I have a Boston Terrier, they're so similar to pugs in facial structure so I bonded with the pug right away. It was a friendly little dog, coming up to me and making sounds through its nose like a cappuccino machine! It took us about an hour and a half to load all of her stuff on the moving van, there was something sad about helping them divide up their stuff and go their separate ways. To their credit they behaved like adults and they didn't hate each other but it was still tense. I finished around 11am, they started loading her car with things that weren't to be packed in boxes, she was driving her SUV and he was driving the rental van with all the boxes and larger stuff. They were driving to Jacksonville Saturday then he would help unload and ride his motorcycle back here. He had loaded the motorcycle in the van also.
This morning at work I asked him if the move went well. He got a funny look and started telling me what happened. They had decided to stop for lunch in Georgia and she asked him to take the pug out of its carrier and walk it. He said the dog was unresponsive when he opened the carrier, it had suffered a heat stroke! Those dogs don't get rid of heat very effectively because of their small snouts and poor breathing, it was in a bad way. They got water and ice from McDonald's where they stopped and managed to cool the dog down and revive it but it started having seizures. They rushed it to an emergency vet in Savannah but the vet had to put the dog down, her systems were shutting down.
As if splitting up wasn't bad enough, her dog had to die the same day. It was odd, knowing that I had just met the dog and petted it only four hours or so before it suffered the heat stroke.
Damn. |