But when he first stumbled into the lives of veterinarian Brenda Gough and her family, the dog looked like a swamp creature, his long white fur greyed and matted and packed with feces.
Now, after his unlikely rescue two weeks ago, Shrek is also an international celebrity — photos before and after Dr. Gough and colleagues shaved off half his body weight in fur are being widely distributed online. Dr. Gough spoke Monday with the Post’s Sarah Boesveld from her clinic in Brantford, Ont.:
Q: So how did this little guy cross paths with your family?
A: Pretty amazing, really, because we live on a 100-acre farm in the middle of nowhere. You don’t get to our place unless you’re hopelessly lost and you certainly don’t end up at the back of our property in a field near the pond unless something awful has happened to you. If you look at the property, it’s a beautiful view. But if you look down at the pond you think ‘How the hell did he get there?’
Q: It’s still a mystery?
A: Well, yes and no. We’re positive that he’s a puppy mill dog. There’s no question from his behaviour that he basically had little to no human contact for his entire life. He has dental disease, and was anemic and hypoproteinemic and had whipworm. But we fixed all of that.
Q: How long do you think he was in that shape?
A: Months to years, absolutely. This is not a dog who could survive on his own in the forest, though, so I don’t believe that based on his body condition that he would have been [wandering] more than a week or two at most.
Q: Have you been able to trace the steps?
A: An investigation is ongoing.
Q: So your husband spotted him first. What did he think when he found Shrek?
A: He thought it was honestly an old piece of carpet or maybe a dead coyote. He wasn’t sure. All he saw was this blob. He was driving out to the pond and Shrek wasn’t that far from the lane-way.
Q: What time of day?
A: This is the part that really breaks my heart. It was morning and it was after that horrible drenching, torrential downpour the night before. I think back to waking up at 2 a.m. thinking ‘Wow that sounds bad.’ And he was out there. He was scared when we found him, so he wasn’t easy to approach and we didn’t know if he had rabies or if he was injured, so we put a blanket over him and put him in a kennel. He tried to run away a little bit, but he couldn’t move. If you think about it, you’re in prison for the first six years of your life, and you finally escape with 50% of your body weight in fecal matted hair on your back and if you don’t know what to do when you get into the big outdoors, you just go until you can’t go anymore.
Q: And now, two weeks later, people were lined up outside the door of the Brantford SPCA’s open house Sunday to say hello.
A: He’s kind of a big deal.
Q: He’s kind of a miracle — coming out of the woods and surviving the way he did.
A: Yeah. To me that suggests that inside that terrified little body, there’s a whole lot of determination.
Q: How long did it take to shave all that fur off?
A: Three to four hours. We weren’t really timing. Hang on one second…there’s someone from New York on line one?
Q: You’re getting media calls from New York?
A: Yes we are. And we’re on Animal Planet today. The piece in Metro in the U.K. got shared 7,000 times. We’ve had reports from as far away as Brazil and Australia. MSN, Yahoo.
Q: He stumbled into the right backyard, didn’t he?
A: Yeah for sure!
(National Post - October 28, 2013 )
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