Rottweiler Rescue by Ellen O'Connell

my voice. “Jack didn’t try to talk them out of it?” I asked.
    “I guess not. It was Jack who picked her up from the airport, and he took her straight to the vet. He brought her here then and expected us to deal with it. Long trip in the belly of a plane, strange place, trained in a different language, hurting like hell. The son of a bitch! I should have kicked him out then. If only I’d kicked him out then.”
    Like all docked breeds, Rottweiler puppies have their tails cut when they are mere days old and the tail is a soft bit of cartilage. Amputation on an adult dog with a thick tail is quite another thing.
    In spite of deep division and disagreement in the breed over the European versus American rules on docking, breed associations are trying hard to write rules that will keep people from doing exactly what Jack’s client had done, obviously with limited success.
    “But you didn’t kick him out,” I said quietly.
    “No. That poor damn dog. Maybe I deserved what I got. Jack sure deserved what he got, even if it took a while to catch up with him. After Maida — that was her name, Maida — was healed up enough, he started working with her. He’d come after hours to work with his dogs. That was part of our deal, that he wasn’t underfoot too much during business hours.
    “So he came one night and she got loose and got out on the road and was hit by a car, and Jack said he’d never been here and our kennel help must have been careless. The client sued us, and Jack testified against us. That’s how I know all about tails and imports, I heard all about it in court.”
    “They won,” I said.
    “They won, and they won big bucks. No puppy mill bitch ever produced the way they claimed Maida would have. Every puppy was going to be a certain Westminster winner, and they had people there saying how they’d have paid the earth for a puppy.”
    “Why are you so sure it was Jack who let her loose? Couldn’t it have been one of your people here late that took her out?”
    “No! For starters my people work here. They don’t sneak back after hours to mess with a dog by themselves. Anyway, one of the neighbors across the street saw Jack that night. Saw him try to catch the dog, and when he couldn’t, saw him give up and drive away. He just drove away, the bastard! The neighbor called Animal Control, but by the time they got here, she’d been hit. Animal Control got her to a vet.”
    “She didn’t die?”
    “Not then, but she had to have three or four surgeries. It cost thousands, and she had to be spayed. Supposedly she was going to get all kinds of therapy for years. I heard later that she died in the end. A blood clot or something.
    I was silent for a moment, sickened at the unnecessary suffering and death of a dog I’d never known. Finally I got myself back to the subject. “If a neighbor saw what Jack did, why didn’t you win in court?”
    “The neighbor didn’t get a license number or anything. He just said he saw a guy trying to catch her and the guy could have been Jack and the car could have been Jack’s car. Some other client said he was at her house that night. It didn’t matter how many locks we had or how many gates. There was Jack sitting there looking all preppy and his clients in their Gucci and Armani. It was easier to believe some low-wage kennel help did something stupid, and if not, what the hell, we were insured, right?”
    I thought of how the kennel worker had eased Dumpling’s owner’s mind and crooned to the little dog as he carried her away with her bag of goodies from home, and suddenly was almost as angry as Dorrie. Still, I felt compelled to ask, “You were insured, weren’t you?”
    “Sure. Insured with a big deductible. And the company dropped us like a hot potato as soon as the jury found against us. We had a hell of a time finding other insurance, and we’re still paying through the nose for a crummy policy.”
    We discussed her dealings with Jack for a while longer,