She saw a dog get hit by a car. The car drove off. A driver in front of her stopped and comforted the dog while waving drivers to go around. It was trying to get up and couldn’t, she thinks it’s legs might have been broken. She didn’t know if it was a stray or someone’s dog.
She felt guilty because she didn’t stop and didn’t do anything. Is there anything she could have done? I told her, I didn’t think there was. Comforting an injured dog is dangerous. I don’t believe pet hospitals provide emergency services unless someone agrees to pay. The local Humane Society operates during business hours. We have called Animal Control about stray puppies, and they weren’t very responsive. I tried calling the Humane Society and Animal Control for advice on what you should do in such a situation, but there is no answer.
One option would be to take the animal to a vet, pay the bill, and then turn the animal over to the local animal holding facility (like the Humane Society) if it survives. Then you hope the owner shows up to claim the dog.
With luck, there’s a bereft owner out there who will always thank their lucky stars that someone had the humanity to do the right thing. Maybe the dog has a collar with ID or an imbedded chip and the owners can be contacted.
Unfortunately, there’s a good chance the owners believe that dogs running free is something “that dogs do” and they’ll have plenty of others around because constantly breeding is something else “dogs do”.
In that case, they won’t bother to look at the shelter and you can adopt Fido.
How completely awful. That poor dog. I’d be hesitant to run to get the animal and bundle it into my car because an injured or badly frightened animal might lash out at the people near it- out of confused signals and hurt.
Having said that, I’d call 911 immediately and tell them to contact Animal Control and have the dog cared for. I live pretty far out there in the country/far suburbs, and I know just where the closest 24 hours/weekends hours Animal Hospital is. If you get th adopt the dog, all the better- it will likely be loyal and loving to you forever, knowing you were the one who saved it’s life.
( This may seem incongruous with my take on dogs in general, as expressed in recent threads. However, a victim is a victim, and the dog deserves the fastest response by a trained person one can arrange ! )
Is calling 911 really a good idea? Unless it’s allowed in your area, I don’t like the idea of possibly diverting help from a human emergency.
(Lest animal lovers think I’m an unfeeling bastard, while on a walk I did once see a cat that had been hit by a car. Its major injury seemed to be a gash on the head which really wasn’t bleeding much, so I carried it off the road. It was meowing, but fortunately it didn’t resist. Another person came by and called Animal Control, so I went on my way.)
I saw a dog get hit by a car once. It was dragged under the car, and I’ll never forget the awful yelping sound during the eternity (actually only a few seconds) that the car took to stop. It had no apparent injuries when it got out from under the car, but the young couple in the car wanted to take it to a vet. The cool thing was that this frightened, possibly injured dog somehow knew that this same huge metal thing which had just hit it was now going to be its only source of help - the dog promptly jumped in when the door was opened for it, and it curled up on the seat like a cat. It happened outside my house. I didn’t know the dog and the couple in the car were strangers, so I never found outwhat eventually happened. They were nice people though, and the dog looked friendly, so I hope it ended well. It’s something I still think about more than twenty years later.
When I worked for Animal Control (over ten years ago!), we officers rotated on-call nights for just this sort of thing. We wouldn’t get out of our beds for everyday things, like stray dogs running around, but if an animal was injured, we sure would. We got the calls at night from the Sheriff’s office dispatcher, so she might have got them either from 911 or the non-emergency number.
And yes, best to not get to close to an injured strange dog if you don’t know what you’re doing. Even your own dog in shock can react by biting. We knew how to handle them to get them safely to the emergency vet clinic.
Well, it depends on the situation, really. For a crazy out-of-control injured animal, we might use the snare, yes. That typically goes around the neck, not the mouth, but I’d have an assortment of muzzles in the truck that I could then put on the dog if I needed to. I also had a stretcher that had velcro straps on it to secure the dog to keep it from jumping or flailing off and hurting itself worse. And if worse came to worst, I did have a .22 rifle in the truck for the mortally injured, although I don’t recall ever using that on a domestic animal - that was more for severely injured wildlife. Oh, and cages for the smaller animals to confine them.
But there are things you can do, especially if it’s your own dog that’s hurt. The first thing is to not forget that a dog in shock may not recognize you, and might try to bite or run out of fear and pain. It’s relatively easy to make a makeshift muzzle out of a roll of gauze to make it safer to transport an animal. And you wouldn’t really want to just lift the animal by itself - it’s easier on all involved if you can slide it onto a blanket to use as a stretcher. And covering the animal up with a blanket while en route to the emergency clinic is also a good idea - animals react to shock similarly to people, and get cold easily.
Maybe vetbridge can come in here with some more practical suggestions? As I say, I haven’t been involved in animal rescue (except my own) for over ten years, and the brain, she gets fuzzy.