We had a very bad and extremely sad experience on Sunday evening. Ivan and I went for walk in the countryside to collect pine cones; we like using pine cones to start the fires in the wood-burning stoves instead of fire starters which tend to smell too much of gas for guest rooms. There is a particular location we found which is full of conifers that have lots of cones. We took the three dogs with us as usual.
While searching for cones, the dogs run up and down the road following us. Well they came across a piece of raw meat that some evil dark hearted person left with poison in it. Ivan caught the dogs sniffing it but unbeknownst to him, Pasky, our German Shepherd had consumed something of it for a few minutes after we got in the car to return to the hotel, there was some odour coming from the back of the car where the dogs were. We stopped to check what was happening and Ivan knew immediately that Pasky was reacting to the poison he was afraid the meat had; Pasky was vomiting, frothing at the mouth, having convulsions, muscle spasms and diarrhoea. We called the vet on call right away and then rushed to the hotel and then on Ronda but the poison was very strong and fast acting. Poor Pasky was dead on arrival at the vet. He attempted to revive him but without success, he was gone, just like that. This all happened in the space of an hour.
The vet said he had not seen a poison kill that fast before and he has seen several dog poisonings of late in Ronda. Some horrible person leaves poisoned meat in the street for dogs to find and kill themselves with, nice eh? He urged us to report this event to the police as there is an on-going investigation into these occurrences. We reported it to the Forest Services as we found out that the land where we were is actually owned by the Junta de Andalusia, the regional Andalusian government and that the area is open to hunters. They think that it is just mean spirited people that leave meat around to kill the hunters dogs; it could also be local shepherds attempting to kill off any predators of sheep and goats. Whoever it is, they are breaking the law as the Spanish central government realised that poison should not be just left lying around for anyone to consume because some beings become unintended victims like our Pasky!! We heard that the Guardia Civil are out questioning people in that area now and the rangers are searching for more poisoned meat with trained dogs.
Noble Pasky
We miss our Pasky very, very much; we only had him for four years, since he was 7 weeks old. He was a beautiful, loving, affectionate dog who was never aggressive, always gentle, sometimes (well, a lot of the times) seeking attention and jumping up on his owners and anyone else around which was too much. But it was all in search of love and attention, which I think he got a lot of. He now lies not far from where we will be living inside the hotel.
