A Dying Dog?

View towards Crieff from the old railway line by Auchterarder

By the time I'd stuck a meal in the slow cooker, driven to Auchterarder & cleared & gritted the folks' drive it was after 4pm, below freezing with just an hour of light left for a short walk along the old railway line to Crieff. Much of it was spent as shown, which might account for what ocurred later.

The short walk over we returned to the car. Last week I'd moved Max from the boot because, increasingly, he was barking at people & bikes making it difficult to drive. Tied in the front he lay on the passenger seat and had been fine. But now, almost as soon as we started the return to Perth, sitting with ears cocked he began staring up & left as though he was seeing a ghost.

Then he crawled his front half onto my knees whining all the while. In the year since we had rescued him he had never whined. I pulled into a layby to see if he would be sick but he just sniffed for food among the rubbish & cowered, terrified by any large vehicle passing but this had been characteristic since we got him aged approx 2.5 years.

But back in the car the craning & whining intensified. He seemed in terrible pain. He crawled right across my knee, panting & whining & seemed hot. I phoned Miguel asking him to find an emergency vet & drove home with the dog in this terrible state. I was convinced he was dying.

A couple of minutes from home Max returned to his own side, stopped whining & sat up. I had expected him to be unable to move from the car or to collapse on the ground but he jumped out & ran to the house. Not wanting him to be ill indoors Miguel grabbed his collar & dragged him outside as I berated his callous treatment of an animal clearly in his final moments. Miguel looked at me askance. The poor, dumb creature ran away, scared, to the end of the yard, though surprisingly swiftly for one in such desperate straits. I coaxed him in. He spent the rest of the evening snuffling for spilt popcorn & dozing contentedly on my feet. In anxiety, I waited for the paroxysms to recommence and was relievef when they did not.

And the squiggles? Those were made as I chased him round and round after he snaffled a dead pigeon under a tree. He danced his way, snowy feathers stuck to his nose, through the woodland as I pursued him, cursing and cajoling through bracken and snow. In the brief intervals before I caught up he cracked through bone and stuck a bloody muzzle insolently inside the cavity of the bird. As the pigeon fell apart he chewed upon a vile, green and stringy looking innard. We both dived for the last wing on the ground. My hiking pole speared it first. Tugging long feathers from his mouth I clipped on his lead. "A whole bird?", said dad. "Feathers and all? Get away!" And went on to tell me about his dog and the wild duck with at least three lives.

Update: it seems Max's experience in the car may not have been related to the bird. A day or two later we drove ten minutes to a nearby wood and he demonstrated the same symptoms though nothing like as dramatically. He whined a little, stared at at the dots at the top of the windscreen, licked his chops a lot, yawned abnormally often and on the return journey tried to stand on my knees. So he will have to back in the boot and perhaps wear a barking collar while there. We surmise something is scaring him terribly in the front of the car.

That's not to say the pigeon has had no effect. There has been two days of diahorrea & barking at night to be let out...