The firework season is upon us. Poor us and the same goes for our dogs 😢. Dogs are more sensitive than cats to fireworks and cats are very sensitive to them. Personally, I hate fireworks so I must have been a dog in my former life. There are two stories in the newspaper today which highlight how dogs fear fireworks. They don’t understand them. The noise signals danger to them and they run and hide.
And sometimes they run away if they are outside when the fireworks start.
Dog “returns from the dead”
Maisie is a nine-year-old Springer Spaniel. She went missing after being terrified on bonfire night. Her owner, Codie Hutton went in search of her dog and found a badly damaged body near a road near Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK. The animal was so badly damaged she couldn’t identify her dog, so she consulted with her veterinarian.
They couldn’t help. They just said that if she believed that the animal was her dog, she should go with her heart rather than her head.
The family buried their dog the next day and had a phone call soon afterwards from a woman who told them that where they’d found the body of the ‘dog’ there was a fox and it’s been there for about a week. Comment: I’m surprised that they couldn’t distinguish the difference between a recently killed dog and a fox that had been killed on the road a week ago. Foxes killed on roads are commonplace in the UK and they are sadly a familiar sight.
Anyway, Codie posted her story on Facebook and thousands of people read about Maisie which led to a phone call from a man two days later who said that he had spotted a dog matching her description with his thermal scope camera!
The next day Maisie was found in a field behaving as if nothing had happened.
Police force has plenty of leads as collie hands herself in
This story is all over the news even the BBC News on television. It’s a popular story because it gives the impression that this border collie decided to give herself up at the police station. That was the way it was being portrayed.
But what happened was something far more banal and disturbing. Rosie, a border collie, had run away from her owner, Steve Harper, during a walk in Southfields Park, Loughborough, Leicestershire, UK. It was November 4 and she had been badly spooked by fireworks.
She sought somewhere to hide and feel safe and came across a police station nearby. The security camera in the police station records her walking through the automatic doors and sitting down next to the chairs at the entrance. No doubt she felt safer there.
The officers at the police station went over to greet her. Fortunately, she had a collar with her ID details on it and therefore the police were able to call her family to ask whether they had lost a dog.
In the meantime, Steve Harper was beside himself trying to find her. He was searching frantically but he had not told his wife Julie.
Steve, a retired research biochemist, said: “She’s very frightened of fireworks. She ran away and went under the hedge. I thought I’d find her cowering under it and be able to soothe her, but she was nowhere to be seen.”
After a good but unsuccessful search he was walking home with the family’s other dog when he received a phone call from his wife to tell him that Rosie was safe.
Julie said: “Steve was upset, he thought he had lost her. He was searching but couldn’t see her. The police phoned and asked if we had a black and white collie and that she had handed herself in! Steve was distraught when I phoned but I told him the police had her. It’s thunderstorms, fireworks and even the Mastermind music that has her diving behind the settee.”
The police remarked that Rosie is “a lovely, clever dog. Thankfully she was wearing a collar. Our staff fetched some water for Rosie and made fast friends.”
Comment
I think that it is time for the government to put an end to noisy fireworks and insist that they are silent. They’re just as much fun and it will help protect our companion animals from great emotional anguish. Either that or ban all impromptu fireworks and insist that all fireworks are set off in formal displays at a set time and for once only. Tough and it’ll never happen.
