Wed, 19 Aug 2009
At 8 AM, we started our quest on DN1, the busiest road towards north. We stopped at a gas station and found a sad image: Two female dogs and two male dogs. A female dog had just had a litter 3 days ago, and the other one maybe a month ago. One was tame, the white one, and was the first one to be spayed. Spaying does not interfere with milking so it is okay to spay a nursing female dog.

One male was tame and we caught him easily. The second one was wild. We managed to catch him, though. The hardest one to catch was the female dog that was shy and afraid. I spent half an hour just talking and feeding her. It was impossible to grab her. At one point she went under a truck. I went under after her and injected her with a tranquilizer. She ran along the road. We chased her until we almost lost her when she entered the forest. We ran after her and after we thought we had lost her we caught her and spayed her.

A woman came and told us she feeds a dog just near the road. We ask her she to bring it to us for spaying. We felt sorry for the puppies that were there. They would be taken care of by this lady and we would return this autumn or next year to spay them. We hope to find them there. Sometimes truck drivers take puppies with them and leave them in another town, or the traffic.

At another gas station, another female dog. The person there did not want to give her to us. He said that he does not like the puppies that have been run over by the cars, but he did not want to interfere. This is life. This is where we called the national television. They arrived and under the pressure from the camera, the guy surrendered the dog to us. The dog had no name so we called her Beady. In the same area three more dogs were found and spayed.

We moved further and found more dogs at a gas station. We were asked if we were the dogcatchers and if we take the dogs away. After a few minutes of explanation they surrendered the dogs to us.

We were already tired. It was 6 PM when we stopped to check one resting area. What we found was incredible. We heard a cat cry. We looked around in the bushes but she was not there. We searched more and spotted her in a tree. We retrieved her and decided to take her with us. There was one more dog that was shy and could not be caught.

The cat was taken to the clinic in Bucharest. After that I took it to the clinic in Craiova. Next week she will go to a home and will have a good life. I called her Branchy.

Follow up: The volunteers went to check the dogs operated by us and they are all fine!